FirstEnergy announced today that it will shutter six coal-fired power plants by September 1 of this year, saying the closings are due to mercury and air toxics emission standards unveiled recently by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Among them is the Bay Shore Plant, located on Maumee Bay in Lake Erie (pictured above); closing this plant, dubbed the "Bass-O-Matic" by NRDC's Josh Mogerman, will save a stunning number of fish.
Bay Shore kills 46 million fish annually, or 2 billion if you include fish in their larval form. The animals are slammed into screens when water is pulled into the cooling intake systems, or pulled through the screens into the plant's internal equipment. Updated equipment and closed cooling systems could dramatically reduce those fish kills (NRDC, which publishes OnEarth, was part of a coalition that sued Ohio regulators in an effort to force those changes). But closing the plant and sparing the fish entirely is an even better alternative.
FirstEnergy will also close five other plants, accounting for almost 2,700 megawatts of generating capacity, presumably because the cost of upgrading to meet the new EPA emissions standards and reduce pollution is too high. The company says the plants have generally been in use as "peaking or intermediate" facilities, meaning they are not providing the standard, baseload power for their regions. But they have accounted for about 10 percent of the company's overall power production over the last three years.
The closures represent the first tangible effect of the new mercury emissions standards, and both fish and people will feel the results. According to the EPA, the new rules will avoid between 4,200 and 11,000 premature deaths in 2016, not to mention 130,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 4,700 heart attacks.
Predictably, there has been opposition to these rules and claims that the costs will be too high; the EPA guesses the annual cost of complying with the new rules will be $9.6 billion, compared to a total health benefit as high as $90 billion in 2016.
Cost-benefit analyses are rarely so straightforward.
Image: Lake Erie Waterkeeper
