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SWEPCO’s Turk project being appealed in Arkansas
Opponents of a $1.6 billion coal-fired power plant in southwest Arkansas say state regulators relied on flawed data when they approved an air permit for the project, the Associated Press reported.
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality heard opening statements Tuesday in an attempt by the Hempstead County Hunting Club to have Southwestern Electric Power Co.’s air quality permit for the Turk plant revoked. The plant is named after former SWEPCO president and Longview resident John Turk Jr.
Lawyer for the hunting club Rick Addison said the models regulators relied on to determine the plant’s impact on air quality didn’t accurately convey conditions in Hempstead County, the AP reported. Addison also said it was misleading for the company to refer to the technology it’ll use at the plant as “ultra-supercritical.”
“It is nothing more than the next step in a marginal group of improvements going back to London in the 1880s, where every 15 or 20 years the power industry decides to slap a new superlative on the name of their facility and market it to commissions such as this one,” Addison said. “The ultra-supercritical name is really nonsense and hokum.”
SWEPCO attorney Kelly McQueen defended the project, which she said would be the cleanest pulverized coal plant in the country. McQueen said opponents of the plant are trying to place unfair restrictions on the plant that other facilities have not had to meet.
“Essentially they’re asking you that the Turk plant should do what no other coal-fired unit has ever done and what no regulatory agency has ever required,” McQueen said.
The hearing is expected to last two weeks.
The appeal of the air permit is one of the hurdles facing SWEPCO, a subsidiary of American Electric Power, in constructing the power plant. An appeal of the permit issued by the Public Service Commission to build the plant is also pending before the Arkansas Court of Appeals.
The utility says it hopes to have the plant up and running by late fall of 2012 and that about 600 employees are working on the site’s construction. SWEPCO has also won approval from regulators in Texas and Louisiana to build the plant.
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