Community at odds over proposed power plant
19th December 2016 · 0 Comments
By Della Hasselle
Contributing Writer
A discussion over whether Entergy should be able to run a natural gas-powered, $216 million power plant at Michoud in coming years has resurfaced after the energy company released a new report saying the proposal is safe.
Not only is the plant clean for the environment, according to Charles Rice, Entergy’s president and chief executive officer, but it will be better for New Orleans customers in the long run.
Rice said the company “took it upon themselves” to conduct a study on the future power plant after neighbors and environmentalists questioned the safety of a 250-megawatt, combustion-turbine plant proposed in a predominately African-American and Vietnamese-American section of New Orleans East.
“For anyone to allege we’re engaged in environmental injustice is something I take very personally, because I live in this community,” Rice told an audience of more than two dozen people who had gathered in a local New Orleans East church for a series of public hearings on the issue. “I’m very concerned about the impacts to anyone and everyone in this community.”
Plans for the new plant have been scrutinized since the project was announced in June. Entergy officials have said they hope to have the new plant up and running by the end of 2019, but first the New Orleans City Council has to approve the proposal.
The city council had originally planned to vote on the issue in January, but later postponed the decision over the proposed plant — which would create 12 permanent jobs and an estimated 100 temporary ones during a three-year construction period — back to April.
Members of the public-interest law firm Advocates for Environmental Human Rights are among those who have questioned whether the new plant will hurt air quality, or cause subsidence on the land surrounding the plant in eastern New Orleans. Over the summer, they were instrumental in helping the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice analyze Entergy’s proposal.
Monique Harden, the co-director and attorney for the law firm, claimed that Entergy was unfairly planning the plant in an area predominately occupied by minorities, according to stories previously published in The Louisiana Weekly.
“It would be located close to homes, schools, churches and businesses in New Orleans East, where residents are predominantly African American and Vietnamese American,” Harden said, adding that the proposal fits a national pattern. “About 70 percent of power plants in the United States are disproportionately located near communities of color.”
She also said she worried toxins emitted from the power station would harm residents.
“The proposed plant would release air pollutants that include carcinogens—such as formaldehyde, benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, toluene, and xylene,” Harden said then. “It would emit nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds that form smog and can damage heart and lung functions.”
But on Tuesday night, Rice refuted those claims, pointing to studies Entergy had commissioned of their own.
The study showed the plant would actually emit less pollution and use less groundwater than the old Michoud units, which were decommissioned over the summer after Entergy said their maintenance and operation had become too costly.
Specifically, the study says that emissions on plant will be 96 percent lower than the standard for clean air.
“The emissions for this plant will evaporate before it even reaches the fence line,” Rice said.
And while some had suggested alternatives like solar and wind power, Rice said they were unreliable on cloudy days, and would be insufficient to power a city like New Orleans.
“Solar cannot help us meet our peaking resource needs,” Rice said Tuesday.
Also, the city needs a local facility able to “ramp up and ramp down” power as needed, particularly in the hottest months of summer and coldest of winter, he added. When the old units were decommissioned, Entergy lost about 781 megawatts of generating capacity.
That will be particularly important, he added, as New Orleans continues to grow.
“”We need to be able to provide power to this city,” Rice told the audience.
Rice said if completed, the New Orleans Power Station is expected to generate nearly $206 million in new business sales in Orleans Parish and pump nearly $983,000 in new sales taxes into the Orleans Parish treasury.
Finally, Rice brought up the issue of utility bills, saying the new plant would “minimize the increase” — to the tune of $5.84 a month — to the average customer’s electricity bill in its first year of operation. Otherwise, he said, he’d have to rely on the ever-fluctuating market power purchases.
Prior to Rice’s meetings, held Tuesday and Wednesday, New Orleans City Council’s Utilities Regulatory Office called a public hearing of their own, to again give community members a voice about the future of energy generation in the Crescent City.
That meeting saw a few who voiced support for Entergy’s project, including resident Alicia Plummer Clivens, who said Entergy had “always been a good corporate citizen” to eastern New Orleans.
Most residents, however, were in voracious opposition to the project, mainly because the plant would rely on fossil fuels and would continue to pump groundwater in an area that has steadily been sinking, according to a previously published NASA, LSU and UCLA study.
A parishioner at Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church, a center of worship not far from the proposed plant, was one of many who voiced objections to the plant during the two-hour meeting.
Fossil fuels in general are “gradually killing our own human race,” said the parishioner, Anthony Tran. “That’s the cost of what we are paying. It is insane.”
Others, like Logan Atkinson Burke, the regulatory affairs manager of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, complained about the lack of new jobs that Entergy would offer if the new plant came to fruition.
Burke had previously said that the company’s peak needs could be met without building a new plant. Instead, it could use distributed CHP or combined heat and power, residential rooftop solar, power purchase agreements with nearby generators that have excess capacity, and other tools.
“This decision sends a 40-year message to the communities,” Burke said.
This article originally published in the December 19, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
