200th Coal Plant Closure Vindicates CUB’s Pioneering Boardman Analysis

Last week, the Sierra Club made a big announcement: Alliant Energy in Iowa had committed to phasing out coal at six of its plants, marking the 200th modern baseload coal plant closure in the US. PGE’s Boardman was the very first, and CUB’s analysis played a decisive role in achieving what would become a national precedent for replacing coal with efficiency, natural gas, renewables, and other measures, ensuring a more affordable and environmentally friendly energy mix for customers.

In 2007, CUB was actively fighting a plan by Pacific Power to open three new coal plants. These represented a small portion of the 100 or so coal plants that were slated at that time to open across the country. At a cost of around $2 billion per facility, Pacific Power’s plans looked incredibly risky to CUB, given climate trends that were more and more urgently signaling the threat of greenhouse gas emissions. CUB successfully got the Oregon Public Utility Commission to reject the new coal investment.

In Boardman’s case, PGE projected a cost of $500 million to retrofit the plant to meet clean air standards and allow it to stay open through 2041. Initially, the idea of avoiding this cost by shutting the plant down early seemed like a fanciful pipe dream – no one had closed a modern coal plant. These were the backbone of the electric industry. In the words of Bob Jenks, “There was no precedent for what we were doing. It was a crazy idea, but we figured, why not just try it out?”

The resulting economic analysis convinced PGE to schedule Boardman for shutdown. CUB’s approach was successful in part because the language in the Clean Air Act allowed for a plant closure to occur over the course of a few years, rather than all at once. CUB’s analysis applied the Clean Air Act in an entirely new way, and dramatically changed the economics of coal plant closures as a result, allowing utilities to avoid retrofits of coal plants by phasing them out and saving customers money.

Since 2010, other developments have added incentives to close coal plants. The precipitous drop in prices for natural gas has made it very cost-effective as a coal replacement. And the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) regulation further encouraged shutdown by limiting power plants’ ability to emit mercury, acid gases, and other toxic airborne pollution. Even though the MATS rule was struck down by the Supreme Court in late June of this year, the coal plant closure decisions that resulted from it will likely stand and provide further precedent for more closures in the future.

Public opinion polling conducted in recent years has shown that the majority of Americans support reducing our reliance on coal. They see it as dirty and destructive, and they want their utilities to abandon it in favor of wind, solar, and other renewables. Public opinion is a powerful force, but it is not doing enough to make the changes we need. Many utilities are still moving slowly to adapt to coal’s new economically bleak reality. Pacific Power in particular has been more slow-moving than most other western utilities. They are making progress, promising in their current Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) to shut down three coal plants by 2029. Even with the two coal plants that were closed this year, this is still a small portion of their overall coal generation which includes more than two dozen coal plants.

National carbon regulation would certainly go a long way toward meeting the gap in momentum, and it’s a minor miracle that so much has been accomplished without it. Oregon has shown itself time and again to be capable of strong moral and practical leadership in a vacuum of guidance at the federal level. Nevertheless, it has been argued by many that Oregon should not take the initiative to eliminate coal from our energy mix, because we already have one of the smallest carbon footprints in the nation.

But as we saw with Boardman, what Oregon does matters. We showed how regional haze rules could be applied to shut down a modern baseload coal plant, how it could save money, and how it could be done through coalition and collaboration, without resulting in expensive, drawn-out litigation. And now that model is being replicated across the country. Leadership is needed, and there are many willing to follow. No matter what the future holds for federal carbon regulation, CUB stands ready to keep leading the way in making the case for an energy future beyond coal.

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