The U.S. Department of Energy is being sued by the Sierra Club for supporting a new coal-fired power plant and strip mine in Mississippi with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in incentives.

 

The 582-megawatt project, a pet project of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, is to be built by the Mississippi Power Co. in the small unincorporated community of Liberty in primarily African-American Kemper County. Mississippi Power will receive a $270 million grant from the Energy Department to help pay for the construction of the power plant, plus $133 million in investment tax credits from the IRS authorized by the National Energy Policy Act of 2005. Total cost of the project is estimated to be $2.4 billion. Mississippi Power is a subsidiary of Southern Company, the fourth largest utility in the United States. Louie Miller, director of the Mississippi chapter of the Sierra Club, asked, “Why are we subsidizing a Fortune 500 company?”

 

Sierra Club lawyers claim Energy officials failed to consider clean-energy alternatives as stipulated in the National Environmental Policy Act, and the department did not conduct an adequate environmental review of the project.

 

The environmental group insists the plant will release 5.7 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually, which is equal to the emissions of three million automobiles.

 

The proposed plant is a coal-fired integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) power plant that uses a technology known as Transport Reactor Integrated Gasifier (TRIG), developed by KBR. In January, Mississippi Power announced that the power plant will be named after David M. Ratcliffe, the former chairman, president and CEO of Southern Company.

-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Sierra Club Sues US Govt. Over Future Coal Plant (by Shelia Byrd, Associated Press)

Sierra Club Protests Gift to Dirty Coal (by Sonya Angelica Diehn, Courthouse News Service)

Sierra Club v. U.S. Department of Energy (U.S. District Court, District of Columbia) (pdf)

Touring a Coal Mine (by Jennifer Jacob, Meridian Star)