Power Struggle: Will Utility Deregulation Finally Unplug 'Dirty' Electricity?

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At United Illuminating Company's harborside Unit 3 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, built in 1969, Kentucky coal rides in on a conveyor belt to five huge blue silos that can each hold 700 tons. When pulverized to the consistency of talcum powder and burned in UI's huge boilers at 2,500 degrees, the product is steam, which turns a humming General Electric turbine at 3,600 revolutions per minute, generating 400 megawatts of electricity for county consumers.

In the plant's control room, a constantly moving printout takes note of the emissions from Unit 3's 500-foot smokestack. Power plants account for 36 percent of U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the most damaging greenhouse gas. Sulfur dioxide is also an environmentally damaging byproduct of burning coal (along with mercury, lead, cadmium, selenium and hydrochloric acid). Where do those emissions go? "It depends on which way the wind is blowing," says Wayne Barrett, Power Supply Support Engineer. Midwestern coal stack emissions end up as pollution in the Northeast, so the wind can carry particulate matter quite a long way. Unit 3 can also burn fuel oil, which produces far less fly ash, but prices for minimum-sulfur "compliance" coal are so low these days that UI has leased out its oil tanks.

Unit 3 is old technology, and it …