Trimble County Generating Station
{{#badges: CoalSwarm}} Trimble County Generating Station is a 1,274-megawatt (MW) coal-fired power station owned and operated by E.ON near Bedford, Kentucky. Unit 2 entered operation in 2011.
Contents
- 1 Location
- 2 Power station
- 3 Background on Unit 2
- 4 Plant Data
- 5 Emissions Data
- 6 Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from the Trimble County Generating Station
- 7 Trimble County ranked 49th on list of most polluting power plants in terms of coal waste
- 8 Citizen groups
- 9 Articles and Resources
Location
The undated satellite photo below shows the power station near Bedford, Kentucky.
Power station
The plant’s coal generating units consist of TC1 with a net rated capacity of 514 megawatts, and TC2 with a net rated capacity of 760 megawatts. TC1 entered operation in December 1990, and TC2 in January 2011.[1]
Background on Unit 2
Trimble County Generating Station 2 began operating in January 2011.
Louisville Gas and Electric (LG&E), a wholly-owned subsidiary of E.ON US proposed to build a 750 megawatt (MW) supercritical pulverized coal plant at Trimble County Generating Station, which already has a 514 MW coal fired plant (Unit 1) in operation.[2]
The new plant (Unit 2) would burn Illinois Basin high sulfur bituminous coal and would be built by Bechtel Power. It received a $125 million tax credit from the federal government’s 2005 EPACT Qualifying Advanced Coal Program. In Sept. 2007, the Sierra Club reported that the Trimble air permit had gone back to the draft stage. [3]
In Fall 2008, the Federal EPA supported the legal challenge that Kentucky violated the Clean Air Act in issuing state permits to the Trimble coal plant and now state officials in Kentucky must “correct” the permit to be more restrictive.[4]
In January 2009, the developer resubmitted an air permit application, according to Energy Justice Network.[5]
The permit was sent by the U.S. EPA to the Kentucky Division for Air Quality for analysis of Best Achievable Control Technologies (BACT) determination during startup and shutdown of equipment and for clarification of the applicability of regulation under Kentucky's Air Toxics regulations.[6]
On January 28, 2010, the Kentucky Division for Air Quality issued a final air permit for the facility, and on April 1, 2010, the Kentucky Division of Water issued a final wastewater discharge permit for the power station. The permits were challenged by the Sierra Club, but the power station entered operation in 2011.[7]
Plant Data
- Owner: Louisville Gas and Electric Company
- Parent Company: E.ON
- Units and In-Service Dates: 514 MW (1990); 760 MW (2011) (The second unit is registered as 834 MW with the EIA.[8])
- Location: 487 Corn Creek Rd., Bedford, KY 40006
- GPS Coordinates: 38.584722, -85.411944 (exact)
- Coal Consumption:
- Coal Source:
- Number of Employees:
Emissions Data
- 2006 CO2 Emissions: 4,107,397 tons
- 2006 SO2 Emissions: 830 tons
- 2006 SO2 Emissions per MWh:
- 2006 NOx Emissions: 3,981 tons
- 2005 Mercury Emissions: 203 lb.
Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from the Trimble County Generating Station
In 2010, Abt Associates issued a study commissioned by the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, quantifying the deaths and other health effects attributable to fine particle pollution from coal-fired power plants.[9] The study found that over 13,000 deaths and tens of thousands of cases of chronic bronchitis, acute bronchitis, asthma-related episodes and asthma-related emergency room visits, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, dysrhythmia, ischemic heart disease, chronic lung disease, peneumonia each year are attributable to fine particle pollution from U.S. coal-fired power plants. Fine particle pollution is formed from a combination of soot, acid droplets, and heavy metals formed from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and soot. Among those particles, the most dangerous are the smallest (smaller than 2.5 microns), which are so tiny that they can evade the lung's natural defenses, enter the bloodstream, and be transported to vital organs. Impacts are especially severe among the elderly, children, and those with respiratory disease. Low-income and minority populations are disproportionately impacted as well, due to the tendency of companies to avoid locating power plants upwind of affluent communities.
The table below estimates the death and illness attributable to the Trimble County Generating Station. Abt assigned a value of $7,300,000 to each 2010 mortality, based on a range of government and private studies. Valuations of illnesses ranged from $52 for an asthma episode to $440,000 for a case of chronic bronchitis.[10]
Table 1: Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from the Trimble County Generating Station
| Type of Impact | Annual Incidence | Valuation |
|---|---|---|
| Deaths | 5 | $38,000,000 |
| Heart attacks | 8 | $880,000 |
| Asthma attacks | 86 | $4,000 |
| Hospital admissions | 4 | $88,000 |
| Chronic bronchitis | 3 | $1,400,000 |
| Asthma ER visits | 5 | $2,000 |
Source: "Find Your Risk from Power Plant Pollution," Clean Air Task Force interactive table, accessed February 2011
Trimble County ranked 49th on list of most polluting power plants in terms of coal waste
In January 2009, Sue Sturgis of the Institute of Southern Studies compiled a list of the 100 most polluting coal plants in the United States in terms of coal combustion waste (CCW) stored in surface impoundments like the one involved in the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash spill.[11] The data came from the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) for 2006, the most recent year available.[12]
Trimble County Generating Station ranked number 49 on the list, with 637,434 pounds of coal combustion waste released to surface impoundments in 2006.[11]
Citizen groups
- Coal River Mountain Watch
- Kentuckians for the Commonwealth
- Kentucky Environmental Foundation
- Kentucky Riverkeeper
- New Power
- Kentucky Environmental Foundation, Berea, KY, phone: (859) 986-7565
- Sierra Club Cumberland Chapter
- Valley Watch, John Blair, contact [at] valleywatch.net
- Kentucky Sierra Club, staff [at] kentucky.sierraclub.org
- Appalachian Voices, outreatch [at] appvoices.org
- Save the Valley
Articles and Resources
References
- ↑ "Trimble County Generating Station," LG&E website, accessed Feb 2015
- ↑ “Tracking New Coal-Fired Power Plants,” National Energy Technology Lab, May 2007, page 14. (Pdf)
- ↑ "Stopping the Coal Rush", Sierra Club, accessed January 2008. (This is a Sierra Club list of new coal plant proposals.)
- ↑ "Fighting Pollution from Aging Coal Plants" Environmental Law and Policy Center, August 12, 2009
- ↑ "Trimble County 2" Energy Justice Network, accessed November 2011.
- ↑ "Stopping the Coal Rush", Sierra Club, accessed May 2009. (This is a Sierra Club list of new coal plant proposals.)
- ↑ "Trimble," Beyond Coal, accessed Feb 2015
- ↑ Form EIA-860, US Energy Information Administration, 2012
- ↑ "The Toll from Coal: An Updated Assessment of Death and Disease from America's Dirtiest Energy Source," Clean Air Task Force, September 2010.
- ↑ "Technical Support Document for the Powerplant Impact Estimator Software Tool," Prepared for the Clean Air Task Force by Abt Associates, July 2010
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Sue Sturgis, "Coal's ticking timebomb: Could disaster strike a coal ash dump near you?," Institute for Southern Studies, January 4, 2009.
- ↑ TRI Explorer, EPA, accessed January 2009.
External Sources
- Existing Electric Generating Units in the United States, 2005, Energy Information Administration, accessed Jan. 2009.
- Environmental Integrity Project, "Dirty Kilowatts: America’s Most Polluting Power Plants", July 2007.
- Facility Registry System, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accessed Jan. 2009.
- Carbon Monitoring for Action database, accessed Feb. 2009.
- Trimble County Station, Louisville Gas and Electric, undated, accessed December 2007.
- “New Technology to Flourish at Kentucky Plant,” Power Engineering, July 2007.
