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Planned Coal Plant Application Will Be up for New Hearing, Vote

By Desiree Parker Monday, December 26, 2011

After mulling over their options, Old Dominion Electric Cooperative’s board decided to re-apply for zoning and land use changes for its planned coal-fired power plant in Surry after a previous approval was voided by a local court last month.

ODEC plans to build a 1,500-megawatt power plant on about 1,600 acres in the town of Dendron. In 2010, the Dendron Town Council voted to approve zoning and land use changes that would allow the project to go forward, but four citizens argued that the public hearing on the vote wasn’t properly advertised. Their court challenge was upheld by Surry County’s Circuit Court judge, who ruled that the change wasn’t valid. Read a previous story on the challenge with a video of the meeting here.

ODEC’s Board of Directors met last week to decide how to proceed. After mulling over various options including everything from appealing the judge’s decision to choosing a new location, the board decided to put forward their application again for a vote, according to ODEC spokesman Bill Sherrod.

This time, Sherrod said, the wording will be clearer.

This hang-up didn’t affect the timeline for the plant, though, as the air permit had already been withdrawn and the project is still currently on hold. Sherrod said ODEC is waiting to see how new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on mercury emissions might affect the project.

“Cypress Creek is on hold, but that doesn’t mean we’re not still interested in going forward,” he said. “The demand for electricity increases every day, and we have to provide people with the power they need.”

ODEC is a generation-and-transmission cooperative that provides wholesale power to 11 member distribution cooperatives in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. ODEC and its member systems are not-for-profit electric cooperatives that are owned by consumers.

 

 

Comments  

 
+10 #7 Christine Llewellyn 2011-12-27 12:06
MaryK,
What is the downside to efficiency and conservation? We throw so much electricity away it's criminal. I reduced my personal electricity usage 24% with minor efficiency and conservation measures. Efficiency is the CHEAPEST form of electricity production.
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+10 #6 kbar 2011-12-27 09:47
Ref: Maryk,
We have three large power plants already in Hampton Roads - Surry Nuclear, Yorktown (coal,oil) and Chesapeake (coal). Granted that the Chesapeake plant is scheduled for shutdown, however Dominion will replace those megawatts with power generated in Wise County. The Wise Co. plant is conveniently located in coal country which eliminates a lot of transportation costs and closed strip mines provide a logical repository for the coal ash. That is about as clean as coal can get (which is not all that clean).
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+8 #5 Bob R. 2011-12-27 09:35
Hydro electric has its own problems.

People who know me (unlike MaryK) know I lobby for a win-win solution such as a biofuel plant instead of a coal plant. That way the environment and thus everyone who breaths wins and the local land owners win by generating the fuel for such a plant. The cooperative wins many ways too.

The reason they want coal as a fuel is it is cheap. The reason coal is cheap is we only pay for mining it, but pay little for the cradle to grave damage that it does.

Same argument applies to gasoline.

I minimize my use of both.
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+14 #4 kbar 2011-12-26 19:04
This plant will provide power for NoVa, MD and Delaware. It is being built in our airshed precisely because it would max out Federal air quality attainment standards in the Nova, MD airsheds. It will cause problems for the Hampton Roads Federal air quality compliance but provide no power.
If NoVa needs megawatts, they need to mitigate their airshed compliance problems and build it up there.
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-11 #3 maryk 2011-12-26 14:18
Apparently as long as the electric can be made elsewhere, folks like BobR are ok using electric. Just don't produce it near me. Every form of production, save hydroelectric, produces trouble. Until all those opposing the construction of powerplants of these kinds stop using electric or are self sustaining, your words ring hollow. Just like driling for oil. You are happy to drive away USING oil, as long as its made somewhere else, as if to say the 'harmful' effects of drilling are less damaging in other parts of the world...OR those people are less important. Either way I am fed up with such hypocracy.
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+14 #2 Christine Llewellyn 2011-12-26 11:56
In arguing for a planned huge new coal-fired power plant in Surry County, Old Dominion Electric Cooperative spokesman Bill Sherrod claims that "the demand for electricity increases every day." Yet ODEC postponed the proposed plant because growth in electricity demand fell well short of ODEC's predicitons.

What's more, forward thinking electric utilities across the nation have been investing heavily in energy efficiency as a way to reduce the need for new power plants and reduce their customers' electric bills. ODEC's efficiency efforts to date have been largely cosmetic. Similar rural electric cooperatives in South Carolina and Tennessee are moving forward on ambitious efficiency projects.

Before ODEC imposes a dirty coal plant on Hampton Roads, it should invest real resources in efficiency. It's certainly a much cheaper, cleaner and safer way to meet customers' electricity needs than putting a dirty coal plant in our area.
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+7 #1 Bob R. 2011-12-26 11:04
Unlike the particulate smoke from the Great Dismal Swamp fire that blanketed the proposed site for this CFPP, the chemical laden smoke from the plant will be mostly clear and undetectable by eye.

Never the less, the mercury, arsenic, NOx and SOx gases will travel on the winds just like the Dismal Swamp fire smoke did.
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