Old king coal shows its age

The owners of some of America’s oldest coal-fired power plants are finally starting to see the big, smudgy arcs of handwriting on the wall: It’s often more efficient to shut down aging burners than to try to make them clean.

One of North Carolina’s biggest utilities, Progress Energy, announced plans this month to mothball 11 coal-fired plants by 2017 and increase its use of natural gas, a cleaner-burning — but more expensive — fossil fuel. Officials said they view natural gas as a short-term bridge to nuclear power and renewable energy projects.

Others, including North Carolina’s Duke Energy and Pennsylvania’s Exelon, also are preparing to close older, dirtier coal plants.

Like Progress Energy, they’ve decided it’s a wiser course than trying to comply with stricter pollution controls and tougher limits on emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading contributor to global warming.

Last week, the EPA issued a long-anticipated final ruling that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health  and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The move comes two years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the clean-air law applied to greenhouse gases as well as pollutants.

Coal  plants generate more than one-third of America’s carbon-dioxide pollution, contribute to smog and acid rain and release toxins  — including mercury, harmful to brain development.

More than two-thirds of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants are from facilities built before 1980, according to a recent report by Environment America, a coalition of advocacy groups covering two dozen states.

Some of the nation’s oldest plants, which lack modern scrubbers , date back to 1938. Two of the 50 oldest  are in Virginia — American Electric Power’s Glen Lyn plant, built in 1944 in Giles County, and Mirant’s Potomac River plant, built in 1946 in Alexandria.

 The White House announced this month that AEP and two other utilities will receive nearly $1 billion in stimulus money to retrofit coal-fired plants to capture and store carbon dioxide, a method that’s touted as “clean coal” technology. The facilities are in West Virginia, Texas and Alabama.

Dominion Virginia Power, meanwhile, is proceeding with plans for a new coal-fired plant in Wise County, and Old Dominion Electric Cooperative is seeking  permits for a coal-fired facility in Surry County. Both projects include emission controls more modern than others operating in the region.

The debate will continue over whether those controls are sufficient, whether carbon capture is a sound  solution and whether coal is where taxpayers and utility companies should be investing  research and development money.

But one point of contention, at long last, should be settled: It’s time to end the chokehold that aging coal-fired plants have held on numerous U.S. communities. The decision by Progress Energy to shut down those units is progress that should be emulated.