Push to close last Nevada coal plant centers on money
RENO — Sierra Club lawyers who’ve preached against the environmental evils of coal-burning power plants for decades are trying to force the closure of the last significant one in renewable energy-rich Nevada with arguments based on a different sort of green: money.
“It used to be that we had to come in and say closing these plants might cost us a bit more, but it’s the right thing to do because of the social and environmental impacts — kids with asthma, dirty air and dirty water,” said Travis Ritchie, a lawyer for the club’s environmental law program in Oakland, California.
“And those things are all still true, but we don’t have to say that anymore,” he said. “We can say, ‘You will lose money if you keep using these coal plants.'”
Critics of the Valmy coal plant scored a key victory last month when state regulators formally ordered Nevada’s largest utility to reassess its economic efficiency after experts projected it will cost ratepayers $30 million or more under current plans to keep it open until 2025.
This past week, the power plant 250 miles east of Reno became the last utility-owned one still burning coal in Nevada when the Reid-Gardner Generating Station northeast of Las Vegas ended 50 years of operation.
The Public Utilities Commission said in a December directive it was surprised NV Energy had done only a “cursory review” of the need to re-examine Valmy’s costs under new plans to keep it idle all but a handful of days a year.
NV Energy maintains it needs Valmy to meet reliability concerns during peak demand, but intends to comply with the order to produce a new “lifespan analysis plan” for Valmy’s two coal-fired units by February 2018.
Leaders of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign say it means the utility will have to address arguments they’ve been making for years — that the plant burning the black stuff is increasingly putting NV Energy ratepayers in the red.
“NV Energy has been squandering customers’ money on an outdated power source at a time when Nevada is equipped to become a leader in the new clean energy economy,” said Sierra Club lawyer Gloria Smith, adding that today’s alternative sources — including natural gas — are much cheaper than coal.
In some ways, the Valmy plant east of Battle Mountain sits at a crossroads of the transition from fossil fuels to renewables — about a mile from the Southern Pacific railroad tracks where coal-powered locomotives first steamed across Nevada in the late 19th century.
Gov. Brian Sandoval boasted of Nevada’s No. 8 ranking nationally in renewable energy production during his state-of-the-state address in January, highlighting hundreds of millions of dollars in recent investments in solar and geothermal energy.
NV Energy didn’t publicize plans to operate Valmy only during peak demand until a Sierra Club consultant reviewed the utility’s resource plan filed last summer and the group successfully intervened in the case.
