Policy & Regulations

Bechtel drops plans for 1 GW power plant after air permit fight

The parties were asked to hold settlement talks, but those did not advance.

Bechtel drops plans for 1 GW power plant after air permit fight

Bechtel has dropped plans to build a roughly $800 million, 1,026 MW gas-fired power plant in rural Pennsylvania northeast of Pittsburgh.

Local news reports said that consultants working to develop the Renovo Energy Center first approached county officials in 2014 with a plan to develop the power plant. Two years ago, the Clean Air Council, Penn Future and the Center for Biological Diversity filed an appeal against the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the project’s developer over the air quality permit approved for the plant.

The Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board recently scheduled a hearing date on the matter that could have extended into October. The parties were asked to hold settlement talks, but those did not advance. Given the lack of progress, Bechtel scrapped the project in mid-April.

Last August, the environmental groups prevailed before the hearing board on some of their challenges to the air permit. The board granted partial summary judgment on issues related to sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds limits in the permits.

The environmental groups challenged DEP’s approval that they said erroneously modified an earlier one authorizing a 950 MW facility. The three environmental groups alleged that DEP improperly applied the best available control technology standard for greenhouse gases for the combustion turbines.

They also contended the plan approval contained erroneous emission limits for volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide from auxiliary boilers.

Renovo Energy reportedly disagreed, saying the plan included appropriate limits.

A judge writing for the hearing board ruled neither the DEP nor Renovo Energy Center could point to any evidence that explained how the higher limit for sulfur dioxide emissions appeared in the approved plan. Nor did they provide a satisfactory answer as to why the plan approval set the limit it did.

The judge said that DEP provided no basis for selecting a higher emissions limit for the Renovo Energy Center facility other than to say that it rounded up the number in Renovo’s plan approval.

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