Sept. 1, 2006, 12:58AM
Voicing concern about air quality and global warming, Mayor Bill White and other top city officials in Texas announced Thursday that they will fight plans to build more than a dozen coal-burning power plants across the state.
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The Texas Cities for Clean Air Coalition, spearheaded by Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, hopes to encourage companies planning to build those plants to use cleaner technologies, such as natural gas, to run the plants and meet the state's power needs.
The Houston law firm Susman Godfrey, where White once worked as a lawyer, agreed to help the 17 cities in the group before the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and, if necessary, in court. The firm's founder, Stephen Susman, said the cities will pick up expenses but that otherwise the firm's help will be free.
But officials from one of the several companies vying to build plants in east and central Texas, Dallas-based TXU Corp., said coal is the best way to meet demand without increasing Texans' monthly power bills.
TXU also issued a statement Thursday noting that dozens of community leaders across the state favor the company's plan.
Gov. Rick Perry signed an executive order last fall to speed up the state permitting process for coal-fired power plants.
White said the city group believes that more affordable power must be generated to meet future demand and avoid blackouts like those experienced in California. But he said the group doesn't want "the skies to be blackened" by coal.
"We need to make sure that power plants built for today have minimal emissions and contributions to global warming, the greenhouse gases, where we will see increasing regulation in this country, and in other countries, in the future," he said.
The announcement follows an agreement Wednesday among California political leaders on a plan that would require a 25 percent cut in industrial greenhouse gases by 2020.
The cities in the Texas mayoral coalition are mostly in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which — like Houston — has struggled for years to meet federal air standards. El Paso also joined the coalition.
Miller said the group's mission is twofold: putting pressure on industry to reduce emissions and asking state officials to require reduced emissions.
She said the cities plan to spend as much as $500,000 fighting the permits that plant builders need from state regulators, who she said haven't studied the "cumulative impact" of all the plants opening around the same time.
TXU's vice president for generation development, Brad Jones, attended the morning news conference at City Hall.
He said the company wasn't investing in plants that generate electricity with natural gas because they are too expensive to operate in an era with high energy prices.
Asked whether consumers' bills would decrease after the proposed coal plants go online, Jones said, "Yes, in fact, they would."
Jones said at City Hall that TXU's new coal plants, which could go on line after 2010, would be cleaner, and that the company had made a "significant commitment" in technology to upgrade older facilities. He said the efforts, costing billions of dollars in investment, actually would decrease the company's overall emissions by 20 percent.
"I don't think that the mayors understand our full plan. We want to be able to continue to work with them so they understand," Jones said. "We've got a plan to add new generation while, at the same time, reduce overall emissions in the state of Texas. That's our goal."
Although it didn't come up at the meeting in Houston, TXU announced Thursday in Dallas that it plans to build nuclear reactors at up to three sites to meet growing energy demands, the Associated Press reported.
The company said it expects to submit applications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008 to build and operate the plants, which would likely begin operating between 2015 and 2020.