Coal’s Days in Oregon are Numbered

By Johnny Kilroy on March 23, 2010 From Restoration campaign

Oregonians are often surprised when told that almost half of their electricity comes from a coal-fired power plant on the Columbia River, PGE Boardman.  However, the days of that facility are numbered.

Portland General Electric Company, owner and operator of the Boardman plant, published an Integrated Resource Plan in November 2009, enumerating several options for the continued operation of the plant, possibly to 2040.


(PGE Boardman facility.  Photo:  Sam Beebe via Flickr.)

The state Department of Environmental Quality last year required that the company must install the Best Available Retrofit Technologies (BART) for emissions controls on SO2 and mercury (not including CO2), which could cost $520 to $560 million. 
 
PGE says of the proposed air pollution controls,

These are some of the most stringent and ambitious targets for reduction
of mercury and haze-causing emissions in the nation.

On January 14, 2010, PGE tightened its own screws when it announced its plan to stop the burning of coal at Boardman by 2020, or shut it down. 

This unexpected bump on the deadline may sound pretty good to some conservation minded folks, but to others it’s not nearly settled. 

From a little one-floor brick office building in east Portland, volunteers and staff of Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign are battling daily for the most expedient closure of Oregon’s only coal plant.

“There is a broad base of support for an early shut down of Boardman,” said Cesia Kearns, a Regional Representative of Oregon’s Sierra Club.


(Banner from a Beyond Coal rally in Portland, Ore.  Photo:  Johnny Kilroy)

Physicians for Social Responsibility, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, Columbia Riverkeeper, and Oregon Environmental Council have all gotten behind Sierra Club in this endeavor. 

At PGE’s invitation, they are now engaging in collaborative discussions, trying to find the most agreeable approach to protect both the environment and the rate payers.  Sierra Club insisted that the utility look at more options, such as closure in 2015, or 2016 (they suspected that the 2014 date was devised in order to avoid the second round of mandatory pollution controls), to which PGE was less than enthused.

“PGE was putting three things on the table, and taking an ‘our way or the highway’ approach,” said Kearns, “We’re in a little bit of a holding pattern right now.”

The conservation camp is holding fast, though, determined to gain more information from PGE on their developing plans.

The Mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, has applauded Portland General Electric for its plan to move away from coal, in his 2010 State of the City address.  He said,

43% of all the energy we consume in Portland comes from the bowels of Wyoming…we need to kick our coal habit…


(Coal mine in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, Oregon’s source of coal.  Photo:  SierraClub.org)

PGE’s final resolution is yet to be determined.  With state and federal regulations mandating pollution controls already, and the possibility of stiffer ones on carbon, Boardman may be ushered to an early execution.

“We’re really charting the course for what OR’s energy future is going to be like,” said Kearns.  “It’s saving our community in health impacts, and in dollars, if you shut down that plant sooner.”

This was Coal’s Days in Oregon are Numbered, an entry in our Restoration Campaign from March 23, 2010. It was filed under Mining

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