State rejects proposal for new coal plant

By Lyn Jerde, Capital Newspapers

MADISON - With one commissioner calling it "the wrong project at the wrong time," the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin unanimously rejected an Alliant Energy proposal to build a coal-fired power plant in either Cassville or Portage on Nov. 11.

This is the first time in history that the commission has said no to a new coal-burning plant, noted Ryan Schryver of Clean Wisconsin, an environmental organization that strongly opposed the coal plant at either location from the time Alliant filed its proposal with the commission in February 2007.

Commissioner Mark Meyer echoed the conclusions of his two fellow commissioners, Lauren Azar and chairman Eric Callisto, in declaring that the plant - even if it were to generate 20 percent of its power from burning biomass, as proposed for the Cassville location - is not right for Wisconsin at a time when stronger federal regulations restricting greenhouse gas emissions are imminent.

"I don't want you to read my vote to say that I'll never support a coal plant," Meyer said. "I just think that this is the wrong project at the wrong time."

Wisconsin Power and Light, doing business as Alliant Energy, applied to build a coal-powered plant at Cassville, a Grant County community located along the Mississippi River in extreme southwest Wisconsin. The company was required to include in its application an alternative location, which was the Columbia Energy Center just south of Portage, where there already are two coal-fired power plants.

Alliant officials made no secret of their strong preference for the Cassville site - and, in June, amended their application to call for 20 percent of the energy from that plant to come from burning plant material such as switchgrass, corn stalks or waste wood products. At Portage, Alliant officials said, no more than 4 percent of the energy could have come from biomass.

Azar, however, said she questioned whether the company met the requirement for offering an alternative site, because the Portage proposal was not nearly as detailed as the proposal for Cassville, and the proposals for each location were not comparable.

The Portage proposal, Azar said, "clearly failed " because its use of coal as a primary source of energy would not comply with state energy priority rule, which placed coal as a last resort for future energy, well below sources such as wind, solar and natural gas.

"The technology proposed for each of the sites was very different," Azar said. "In other words, these were really two different projects."

Alliant spokesman Rob Crain said the company has no choice now but to "go back to the drawing board" and come up with a way for generating additional energy that the commission could approve.

"We have a legal obligation to meet the demands of our consumers," he said.

He said the company has long known of - and in fact, welcomes - future federal regulations that would almost certainly restrict the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted into the atmosphere.

"But where that all fits into the future, we don't know," he said.

Schryver said he was "really, really excited that the Public Service Commission has stood up against global warming."

This is a sign, he said, that the commission will look closely at any future proposals for coal-fired power plants in Wisconsin.