Energy in the News

A Chapel Hill-based environmental group wants a federal court to stop construction of Duke Energy Corp.'s Cliffside project, saying the utility needs to remove more mercury from the future plant's emissions.

The 800-megawatt power unit is under construction in Rutherford County and should be operating by 2012, Duke says.

The Southern Environmental Law Center, which has fought the project on behalf of five environmental groups, claims Duke is violating the federal Clean Air Act. The lawsuit was filed electronically Wednesday evening to the federal court in Asheville, the group said.

The group says a federal stop-work order is needed because the state could take up to six months to review whether Duke is using the best technology to remove mercury, said Gudrun Thompson, staff attorney for the law center.

“Every day that Duke proceeds with construction, it makes it that much harder for a court to turn the ship around. That's the purpose of the Clean Air Act, to do the analysis before there is iron in the ground.”

At issue is how much mercury the plant's smokestacks will send into the air. Duke says its technology would remove 90percent of the mercury. Environmentalists say Duke can do better.

Controls that capture pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and acidic gases also catch mercury, which has contaminated rivers and fish across Eastern North Carolina. Doctors caution pregnant women to control their intake of fish.

The Cliffside project had bypassed an early federal review of its mercury controls because the Bush administration had exempted coal-fired power plants from the Clean Air Act. But a federal appeals court ruling in February struck down the exemption. Cliffside already had received its state air quality permit, only days earlier, on Jan. 29.

In response to the ruling, the N.C. Division of Air Quality asked Duke to “voluntarily” study the best possible mercury-removal technologies. State officials received Duke's study July 3 and could spend months looking it over, Thompson said.

Duke received the lawsuit after work hours Wednesday and said it would comment today.

The law center says a “voluntary” mercury study is not enough and that Duke and the state should follow the letter of the Clean Air Act. That might include public hearings about the mercury output and other steps that could delay Cliffside and add cost to the project.

Several environmental groups already have challenged the Cliffside expansion in state administrative court. But a federal judge has the power to stop the project.