How New EPA Rules For Power Plants Affect Cooling Tower Maintenance – Part 2

Yesterday’s post discussed the winding path to new Clean Air Act greenhouse gas standards implementation being taken by the EPA’s updated rules for power plants. Now we want to firmly establish the tie-in to the cooling tower maintenance that you’re involved with every day. It’s important that we all understand the linkages between these ever-evolving regulations and our industry.

The cooling tower connection

What all of these new rules has to do with you, dear Just Venting reader, was already stated in Part 1’s introduction: cooling towers are vital to the power generation industry. They’re also near and dear to our hearts here at this blog. Their effective maintenance and efficient operation is crucial to the generation of ample and affordable power in this age of rising energy costs and impending energy scarcity. And anything that materially impacts the power generating industry, such as the EPA’s ongoing efforts to create and enforce new regulations on power plants, therefore materially impacts your business and ours. Energy efficiency and conservation in all areas is of paramount concern right now, including, somewhat ironically, in the power generation industry itself. More than ever, they have to make sure the equipment at their plants is running at maximum effectiveness.

What’s more, earlier this year the EPA made additional regulatory moves regarding the power industry that are distinct from the imminent regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, and that will directly affect the use of cooling towers at power plants. In March the agency unveiled a draft of a new rule under the Clean Water Act that’s intended to protect billions of fish, shellfish, and other aquatic organisms from being sucked into the cooling water systems of power plants across the U.S. (see “Power Plants Face EPA Cooling-Water Rules to Protect Fish,” Bloomberg, March 29).  This is in response to the fact that many power plants located near natural water sources such as rivers, lakes, or the ocean use “open cycle” cooling systems that draw in and make use of this water – and therefore draw in fish etc. in the process. The alternative is a closed cooling system — in other words, a traditional cooling tower. The expectation was that the proposed new rule might force a huge number of power plants to build new cooling towers. This would entail a massive cost, and so the rule came under the same massive preemptive fire as the not-yet-proposed CO2 rule.

As it turned out, when the proposal was unveiled it wasn’t as dramatic as some had feared and others had hoped:

Instead of mandating the construction of $700 million cooling towers at the nearly 60 U.S. nuclear plants that lack them, as EPA critics predicted, the agency has proposed a complex case-by-case assessment of how each plant should achieve protection standards for fish, shellfish and the small aquatic organisms that make up the bottom layers of the marine food chain.

The proposed regulations, which also affect large coal-fired power plants and factories covered by the rule, will be the subject of a 90-day public comment period before EPA’s court-set deadline for final action, on July 27, 2012. Lengthy investigations will follow into the interaction of specific water intake and cooling systems at each plant and the marine environment where its cooling water comes from, said Christine Tezak, a senior research analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc. (“EPA water intake rules fall short of the disaster scenario,” E & E Publishing, April 8th)

Need we point out the obvious conclusion to draw from all of this? Both the imminent water rule and the imminent GHG rule will inevitably affect the power industry in ways that impact the construction, use, and maintenance of cooling towers. We love observing this and pointing it out because it’s an object lesson in the importance of our industry, which, again, is commercial and industrial maintenance and cleaning. Since you’re reading these words, we know it’s important to you as well. Don’t ever let anybody tell you this is a rarefied field with a limited scope and impact. As illustrated by our current case in point, what we do affects all of us, every day. Nothing is more pervasively important to modern society than electricity, and we gladly call attention to the fact that the equipment we provide for cooling tower cleaning helps to keep the lights on.

Matt Cardin
Goodway Blogging Team