“The big picture is there are thousands of jobs in Utah at stake. There are the rural communities of Utah at stake. And if we let this go, we’re letting all those folks down,” Orem-based entrepreneur Lane Livingston said.
The plan would require $5 billion program of upgrades, repurposing the plant to power proposed data centers.
“Most of the concerns can be addressed, either with time, money or study,” Livingston said at a Feb. 10 meeting of an oversight committee. “The big picture is there are thousands of jobs in Utah at stake. There’s millions and millions of dollars of tax revenue at stake, there are the rural communities of Utah at stake. And if we let this go, we’re letting all those folks down.”
On a party-line vote Friday, the Senate Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Committee advanced the bill, which has already cleared the House.Pursuant to a bill Owens sponsored last session, the so-called Project Entity Oversight Committee was established by the Utah Office of Energy Development to keep tabs on IPA, an independent political subdivision of Utah.
“We’re creating a nationwide [power] shortage based on a fictitious renewable [energy] portfolio,” Rep. Carl Albrecht, R-Richfield, fumed at the recent PEOC meeting. “We’re running the economy of the U.S. into the ground because we don’t have reliable power. And you’re going to shut your plant down and we’re going to bring on a plant that has half the capacity.”
But Enchant Energy’s CEO Cindy Crane argued her company has the technical and financial capacity to retrofit the Delta plant in ways that would greatly diminish its environmental footprint. For starters, it plans to install equipment that would separate the carbon dioxide from its emission stream and pump the greenhouse gas into geological formations, a process called carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. This system would cost between $3 and $3.
“The best thing about it is that it cleans it up, but it keeps the tax base, the jobs, creates massive amounts, more jobs, construction jobs, and additional tax base gets added. In rural America, we’ve been closing power plants, because, frankly it’s just easier than to fight the battle,” Crane said. “So we close them, and the communities of rural America are ultimately paying the price for that.”
Additionally, the new project’s construction area goes right up against the west side of the existing plant, so there would be no space to install the emission-control equipment Enchant has proposed.
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