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Oct. 13, 2024 |  By: Allison Kite - Missouri Independent

Ameren Missouri’s Rush Island coal plant to close following years-long litigation

coal plant

By Allison Kite - Missouri Independent

One of Ameren Missouri’s largest coal plants will shut down Tuesday after more than 13 years of litigation over its failure to comply with federal clean air regulations. 

The St. Louis-based electric utility will retire the Rush Island Energy Center, a two-unit 1,178-megawatt coal plant on the banks of the Mississippi River in Jefferson County, which operated for years in violation of the Clean Air Act. 

Ameren, which serves 1.2 million customers in Missouri, announced in 2021 it would retire the plant 15 years early rather than install pollution controls ordered by a federal court.

Once the plant shuts down, the company will start disconnecting the plant from power, move equipment out to Ameren’s other coal plants and ready it for demolition, said Tim Lafser, Ameren’s vice president of power operations and engineering.

“We’re guessing three to six months of activity there before we would be to the point where we could turn it over to a demolition contractor to knock the plant down,” Lafser said.

But knocking down Rush Island doesn’t mark the end of the litigation over its clean air violations. Ameren is still negotiating with federal prosecutors and environmental advocates over how to make up for more than a decade of illegal sulfur dioxide pollution. 

Gretchen Waddell Barwick, director of the Missouri chapter of the environmental nonprofit Sierra Club, said simply retiring Rush Island doesn’t resolve the injustices suffered by communities downwind of the coal plant.

“I don’t think that justice has been served here,” Waddell Barwick said, “but I am pleased for the people in the community that will see their suffering (lessen).” 

Lafser declined to comment on the litigation, saying it would be inappropriate to comment on an ongoing case. 

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Rush Island, built in the mid-1970s, narrowly avoided a 1977 update to the Clean Air Act requiring pollution controls at newly-constructed coal plants. Older plants were grandfathered into the rule unless they made upgrades beyond routine maintenance.

Ameren updated Rush Island’s two units in 2007 and 2010 but didn’t install pollution controls, violating the 1977 Clean Air Act update and sparking a lawsuit by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

In 2019, U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of MIssouri Rodney Sippel ordered Ameren to obtain a permit, install scrubbers and lower its sulfur dioxide emissions. Sippel also ordered Ameren to install scrubbers to temporarily lower sulfur dioxide emissions at its larger Labadie Energy Center in Franklin County to make up for the excess emissions at Rush Island.

The 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in 2021 upheld Sippel’s order requiring Ameren to install scrubbers, but struck down the requirement at Labadie.

Later in 2021, Ameren announced it would retire Rush Island. It argued the retirement should mark the resolution of the lawsuit. But Sippel ordered Ameren and prosecutors to negotiate potential mitigation measures to make up for the sulfur dioxide emissions, which he said “harm public health and the environment, contribute to premature deaths, asthma attacks, acid rain and other adverse effects in downwind communities, including the St. Louis Metropolitan Area.”

Sippel’s order, issued in June, said over the 14 years since Rush Island’s second unit was updated without scrubbers installed, it has released 275,000 tons of sulfur dioxide. Ameren argues the figure is closer to 256,000 tons. 

According to Sippel’s order, Ameren has repeatedly resisted further mitigation beyond retiring Rush Island. It argued there was “no equitable remedy” to the unpermitted pollution and that retiring Rush Island mitigates the harm from its emissions.

“Ameren’s position that an equitable remedy is not available for its unlawful pollution has already been rejected three times,” Sippel wrote. “And, over the course of several hearings, I have informed Ameren that its retirement of Rush Island does not mitigate the massive pollution it released into the atmosphere.”