The future of the existing Big Stone I and proposed Big Stone II power plants in South Dakota just got a lot more complicated, thanks to two Supreme Court decisions Monday. For Minnesota, that is a good thing.
The Big Stone complex lies just across the Minnesota border; Minnesota utilities are big players in the operation of the existing plant, as well as the planning for a new one. Minnesota does get power from Big Stone. It's a bad bargain overall, however, because prevailing winds mean Minnesota also gets most of the Big Stone pollution but none of the regulatory oversight, nor any of the property taxes.
The existing Big Stone plant has been retrofitted several times, most significantly in 1995, without seeking new permits from the Environmental Protection Agency. The Sierra Club has served notice that it intends to sue the Big Stone operator for that failure, and the practicality of a suit gained ground Monday in the court's decision in Environmental Protection Agency vs. Duke Energy. Duke had argued, much as Big Stone has argued, that its retrofitting of existing coal-fired power plants was too "minor" to trigger a requirement for new permits. Numerous American utilities have used that subterfuge to avoid seeking permits obviously required under the Clean Air Act. In the Duke case, the Supreme Court finally slammed the door on that behavior.
The second Supreme Court decision, in Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency, will have global ramifications. In it, the court said the EPA has the power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the main culprit in global warming. For years, the EPA has declined to act against CO2 because it said it lacked authority under the Clean Air Act. The court, in effect, told the EPA to stop hiding behind the act; it has the authority required to classify CO2 a pollutant and to impose controls on its emission.
No one should expect the Bush EPA to make an aggressive foray into controlling CO2, but the decision is likely to energize Congress into enacting, perhaps yet this year, a "cap and trade" system that puts a limit on CO2 emissions while allowing industry to trade pollution credits or allowances.
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The court decision also should energize the Minnesota Legislature, which appears to have lost the environmental steam it showed earlier this session. It still needs to pass, this year, the Global Warming Mitigation Act, which would begin preparing the state for imposing its own cap and trade system. The act also would prohibit utilities from importing power from new CO2-emitting power plants, such as Big Stone II, until the cap and trade system is in place.
The utilities that propose to build Big Stone II refused to include the cost of advanced CO2 controls and "emissions allowances" that are part of a cap and trade system in estimating the price of the plant, which has grown from $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion anyway. The court decision in the Massachusetts case, and the federal and state legislation that should result, make that refusal much less defensible, and suggest the actual cost of building and operating the plant would be much higher, perhaps too high to justify.
Or perhaps not -- but nothing bad can result from testing the need for Big Stone II against that cost standard. What's clear now is that the two court decisions Monday will go a long way toward ensuring that economic activity in this nation and this state -- including coal-fired electrical generation -- more fully account for the environmental costs they impose. And that, finally, will allow for a serious effort to deal with the harmful effects of global warming.
-- Minneapolis Star Tribune
