Just north of the Willard Ice Building, blocks away from Memorial Medical Center and Douglas School, and just a few feet from homes, sits a little coal power plant that most people probably don’t know exists.

One of the main reasons the plant at Madison and Rutledge goes unnoticed is because, unlike the City Water, Light and Power electricity-generating station out on Lake Springfield, this plant doesn’t emit dense plumes of smoke from its lone smokestack. The toxins it emits – sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury – are invisible.

But in the case of coal power plants, size doesn’t matter. As a rule of thumb, the older, the dirtier. And the smaller the aged plant, the fewer environmental protections that are in place. In fact, adding pollution controls on old plants is cost inefficient, leaving them without controls and thus dirtier than their larger counterparts.

Environmental groups argue that the Capitol power plant is one example of the hundreds of other small coal boilers across the country at Capitol complexes — including the U.S. Capitol. The plants are also at state-run universities, hospitals and prisons across the nation. They go overlooked by citizens, regulators and the media while large coal-burning utility companies capture all of the attention.

Using momentum from the national clean energy movement, from the debate over the American Clean Energy and Security Act now working its way through Congress, and the recent passing of an Illinois capital spending plan, local environmentalists are calling for the Capitol power plant to be shut down and replaced with a cleaner plant.

Will Reynolds, vice-chair of the Sangamon Valley Group of the Sierra Club and board member of the Illinois chapter, is spearheading that effort.

“I grew up here and I always saw this random smokestack and never thought much about it,” Reynolds says. While doing some digging around, he says he became alarmed on learning that the Capitol plant’s air permit from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency expired in 2007, how few emission controls the plant has on it, and that mounds of coal sit on the site a few feet away from the sidewalk uncovered and largely unprotected.

Reynolds notes that the General Assembly appropriated $250 million from the state construction bill to replace the aging and woefully inefficient Stratton Building, where steam from the Capitol power plant is converted to chill water for air conditioning. He figures now is the best time to press for a new plant.

The organization will begin by asking the IEPA to start the re-permitting process to bring the plant into compliance and, as part of those discussions, to hold a series of public hearings.

“Sierra Club can’t force them to shut down this coal plant but it’s an opportunity for the people of Springfield to say whether we want an aging coal plant with almost no pollution controls in our downtown or whether we want something different,” Reynolds says. “The whole country and the state are moving towards clean energy — and we should

continued on page 14