Plans for Power Plant Condemned

at Public Hearing in Raleigh
   

October 23, 2007
At a public hearing sponsored by community and environmental organizations on Tuesday in Raleigh, speaker after speaker told the NC Division of Air Quality to scrap Duke Energy's permit application to build an 800 megawatt coal-burning power plant at Cliffside. 

NC Representative Pricey Harrison was among those who attended although she did not speak. Citing emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and other toxins, dozens of people testified to the health and environmental hazards posed by burning more coal to meet future energy demands. Global warming, asthma, acid rain, threats to wildlife habitat, damage to nervous systems, heart and lung disease were some of the manifestations of coal-burning emissions mentioned at the hearing. There were also deep concerns expressed about the use of large volumes of water by the proposed power plant for cooling purposes. The new plant at Cliffside would evaporate more than two million gallons of water each day, according to Duke Energy's own webpage, at a time when fresh water is becoming a more scarce commodity.

The hearing in Raleigh was the third organized by citizen groups within the past eight days in North Carolina on the permit application for the Cliffside plant. Last Tuesday more than 200 people attended a hearing in Charlotte as forty-six testified, all in opposition to the expansion of the coal fleet. On Thursday a sizeable crowd in Asheville voiced their opposition to the new power plant in an emotional hearing at which thirty-one people testified. The citizen-initiated hearings were all held in major urban areas after public notices were posted in major newspapers for an entire week. These hearings were also publicized through press releases, flyers, internet postings and word of mouth.

in contrast, the lone official hearing by the Division of Air Quality was held in remote Forest City, NC. There was only one small public notice published in a rural weekly newspaper. Although there were numerous requests by many organizations and individuals for multiple hearings on Cliffside throughout the state, the DAQ refused. So, a number of groups decided to coordinate hearings themselves. All the citizen hearings were videotaped. DVD copies of the proceedings will be sent to the DAQ along with written comments, prior to the October 31 deadline.

The Cliffside controversy comes on the heels of a court decision in Kansas in which, for the first time, a judge blocked the construction of a new coal plant based on the danger posed by its CO2 emissions in contributing to global warming. The Cliffside plant would emit six million tons of C02 annually.