PRECIP 
NEWSLETTER 

December 2009
No. 407

Akron’s FirstEnergy Corp. faced a federal court mandate to clean up or shut down the R.E. Burger Power Plant, reports Bob Downing at Ohio.com. Last April the company chose to switch the plant to biomass, perhaps with some coal burned, too.

The utility had faced a $330-million bill to install scrubbers at the Burger plant to comply with a consent decree with the U.S. Justice Dept. In 2005, FirstEnergy had agreed to spend $1.1 billion to install scrubbers at its W.E. Sammis Power Plant. It also committed to cleaning, repowering or closing Burger and two other coal-burning plants to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions. The new consent decree on the Burger fuel switch was finalized in August 2009 in U.S. District Court in Columbus, OH.

That order affects Burger Units 4 and 5, which were built in 1944. They do not have scrubbers but do have electrostatic precipitators. The decree does not cover the other units at Burger:  a coal-fired peaking plant and three oil-fired peaking units. The consent decree makes the Burger plant the first coal-fired utility power plant in the U.S. to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions under a Clean Air Act consent decree, the U.S. Justice Dept. said. Burning mostly biomass, Burger will produce lower emissions overall than if the plant were retrofitted with a scrubber. After its first year, the plant’s air emissions are expected to drop by 14,000 tons a year for SO₂, by as much as 14,000 tons for NO_x and by as much as 700 tons for soot. The plant’s carbon dioxide emissions are expected to drop from 1.7 million tons a year to 400,000 tons, a decline of 76 percent.

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