575
1 BEFORE THE ILLINOIS POLLUTION CONTROL BOARD
OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS
2
3 IN THE MATTER OF: )
)
4 NATURAL GAS-FIRED, PEAK-LOAD ) R01-10
ELECTRIC POWER GENERATING )
5 FACILITIES (PEAKER PLANTS.) )
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7 VOLUME IV
8
9
10 The following is a transcript of
11 proceedings from the hearing in the above-entitled
12 matter, taken stenographically by TERRY A. STRONER,
13 CSR before AMY JACKSON, Hearing Officer at 1215
14 Houbolt in Joliet, Illinois on the 14th day of
15 September, A.D., 2000, scheduled to commence at 3:00
16 o'clock p.m., commencing at 3:10 o'clock p.m.
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1 A P P E A R A N C E S:
2 ILLINOIS POLLUTION CONTROL BOARD,
100 West Randolph Street
3 Chicago, Illinois 60601
(312) 814-3629
4 BY: MS. AMY JACKSON, HEARING OFFICER
5
6 ILLINOIS POLLUTION CONTROL BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT:
7 Ms. Claire Manning
Mr. G. Tanner Girard
8 Mr. Nicholas Melas
Ms. Elena Kezelis
9 Dr. Ronald Flemal
Ms. Marili McFawn
10 Mr. Samuel Lawton, Jr.
Mr. Anand Rao
11
12
MEMBERS OF THE ILLINOIS ENVIRONMENTAL AGENCY AS WELL
13 AS OTHER INTERESTED ENTITIES AND AUDIENCE MEMBERS
WERE PRESENT AT THE HEARING, BUT NOT LISTED ON THIS
14 APPEARANCE PAGE.
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1 I N D E X
2 THE WITNESSES: PAGE
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4 DR. THOMAS OVERBYE 589
5 ALAN JIRIK 630
6 CAROL STARK 644
7 SUSAN ZINGLE 659
8 KEITH HARLEY 682
9 BUD NESVIG 697
10 MICHAEL SHAY 707
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1 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Good afternoon. On
2 behalf of the Illinois Pollution Control Board, let
3 me welcome you to this public hearing that the Board
4 is holding in order to examine the potential
5 environmental impact of natural gas-fired peak-load
6 electrical power generating facilities, commonly
7 referred to as peaker plants.
8 My name is Amy Jackson. I am the attorney
9 assistant to Board Member, Elena Kezelis and of the
10 request of Board Chairman, Claire Manning, I am
11 serving as the hearing officer for these
12 proceedings.
13 We are very pleased today to have the
14 entire Board present for this hearing. Let me take
15 a moment to introduce the Board members to you.
16 To my immediate left is Board Chairman,
17 Claire Manning.
18 MS. MANNING: Good afternoon.
19 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Dr. Tanner Girard.
20 MR. GIRARD: Good afternoon.
21 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Marili McFawn.
22 MS. McFAWN: Hello.
23 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: And Samuel Lawton,
24 Junior. To my right is Board Member, Elena Kezelis.
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1 MS. KEZELIS: Hello.
2 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Dr. Ronald Flemal.
3 DR. FLEMAL: Hello.
4 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Nicholas Melas.
5 MR. MELAS: Good afternoon.
6 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: And then Anand Rao,
7 who is head of the Board's technical unit, is also
8 joining the Board at this head table.
9 MR. RAO: Hello.
10 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Before I continue
11 with some procedural matters, Chairman Manning has a
12 few opening remarks that she would like to make. So
13 I would turn the microphone over to her. Chairman
14 Manning.
15 MS. MANNING: Good afternoon everyone. On
16 behalf of the Illinois Pollution Control Board, I,
17 too, would like to welcome you to these public
18 proceedings that we're holding to examine the
19 potential environmental impacts of the peaker
20 plants.
21 For those of you who are unaware of the
22 Pollution Control Board, allow me just a short
23 explanation.
24 We are an independent seven-member board
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1 created pursuant to the Illinois Environmental
2 Protection Act. Generally, we've been created for
3 the purpose of promulgating all of the state's
4 environmental regulations and also deciding
5 environmental cases.
6 Each of the seven members that you see
7 here today has an extensive background in either law
8 or science or technical backgrounds and backgrounds
9 in government as well.
10 We have a staff of 40 people, many of whom
11 also have degrees in law or science. For more
12 information about the Board generally, we have a
13 very friendly -- user-friendly website found at
14 www.ipcb.state.il.us. I invite you to look at that
15 website. The very proceedings that you will hear
16 today with us will be transcribed and put on the
17 website within about five days of this particular
18 proceeding.
19 The hearing we are conducting today is
20 known as an inquiry hearing. The purpose of an
21 inquiry hearing is for us to gather sufficient
22 information about a particular subject -- in this
23 case, of course, peaker plants -- so that we can
24 determine whether further state environmental
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1 regulation or legislation is necessary to adequately
2 protect the environment for the citizens of the
3 state of Illinois.
4 Governor Ryan specifically requested that
5 we hold these inquiry hearings to address five
6 specific issues and the five specific issues the
7 governor entrusted us to look at and examine for him
8 and for the Illinois state legislature are the
9 following:
10 Number one, do peaker plants need to be
11 regulated more strictly than Illinois current air
12 quality statutes and regulations provide?
13 Number two, do peaker plants pose a unique
14 threat or a greater threat than other types of state
15 regulated facilities with respect to air pollution,
16 noise pollution, or groundwater and surface water
17 pollution?
18 Number three, should new or expanding
19 peaker plants be subject to citing requirements
20 beyond applicable local zoning requirements?
21 Number four, if the Board determines that
22 peaker plants should be more strictly regulated or
23 restricted, should additional regulations or
24 restrictions apply to currently permitted facilities
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1 or only to new facilities and expansions?
2 And lastly, number five, how do other
3 states regulate or restrict peaker plants?
4 We can assure you that we will do the very
5 best job we can in providing answers to these very
6 important questions.
7 At the conclusion of this process, we will
8 issue what we call a written informational order.
9 The order will analyze all the information presented
10 in light of the issue areas outlined by the governor
11 and those presented to us at the hearing.
12 Very importantly, as Governor Ryan
13 requested, the order will also set forth the Board's
14 recommendations to the Governor and to the Illinois
15 General Assembly on whether further state
16 environmental regulation or legislation is necessary
17 to adequately protect the environment for the
18 citizens of the state of Illinois.
19 Many of you I notice in the audience have
20 been with us at our prior proceedings. You know
21 kind of the drill. Our hearing officer right here,
22 Amy Jackson, has done a very fine job, I believe,
23 already in conducting a fair opportunity for
24 everyone to be heard.
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1 And at this point, I'm going to turn the
2 hearing over to the very capable hands of Hearing
3 Officer Jackson so that we can assure you that
4 anyone that wants to speak to the Board today has an
5 opportunity to do so. Thank you.
6 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you, Chairman
7 Manning.
8 Before I continue with my prepared
9 remarks, I do want to acknowledge and welcome
10 members of the Illinois Environmental Protection
11 Agency to today's hearing and also I understand we
12 have a representative from Senator Larry Walsh's
13 office and I want to welcome you as well.
14 One other thing I want to mention, we do
15 have a couple video cameras going. If any of the
16 witnesses or presenters testifying today do not feel
17 comfortable having their presentation videotaped,
18 please let me know in advance and we will turn the
19 videotapes off during the presentation.
20 For those of you who have been following
21 this process, you are aware that we have already
22 conducted two days of hearings in downtown Chicago
23 and one day of hearings in Naperville wherein
24 Naperville received a variety of comments from area
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1 legislatures, elected officials and citizens who are
2 concerned about the peaker issue.
3 To assist you in keeping track of this
4 process, we are putting all information related to
5 the peaker proceedings on our website. All prefiled
6 testimony, public comments, hearing transcripts,
7 Board opinions and orders, and hearing officer
8 orders are and will be available on the Board's
9 website and Chairman Manning gave you that address
10 earlier.
11 Hard copies of any documents filed with
12 the Board may also be obtained by contacting the
13 Board's clerk's office in Chicago.
14 The Board's clerk may be reached at area
15 code 312-814-3620.
16 In order for the Board to gather the
17 information it needs to respond to the Governor's
18 questions just set forth by Chairman Manning, the
19 Board has, in addition to the three previous days of
20 hearings, scheduled two additional hearings in the
21 collar counties surrounding Chicago. One such
22 hearing is being held today in Joliet. The second
23 such hearing will be held next week on Thursday,
24 September 21st in Lake County at the College of Lake
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1 County in Grayslake.
2 While there is no requirement for those
3 wishing to speak at either today's or next week's
4 hearing, you are encouraged to contact me in advance
5 and as a result, we have about eight names on a list
6 of people who have pre-registered to speak today.
7 That list is available at the table by the entrance
8 and we will proceed in the order that those names
9 are listed.
10 If you are on the list to speak today,
11 please keep track of where we are in the proceeding
12 and be prepared to step forward when it's your turn.
13 There is also a sign-in sheet located at
14 the table by the entrance for those persons who have
15 just come today and do want to address the Board,
16 but did not pre-register to speak. You will also be
17 given an opportunity to address the Board. You will
18 just need to wait until we get through our list of
19 eight persons who have pre-registered.
20 When your name is called, please step
21 forward and bring with you any documents that you
22 have that you would like to file with the Board in
23 this matter.
24 We will introduce those documents into the
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1 record by handing them to the court reporter and
2 having her mark them as an exhibit. Once you've
3 made your statement to the Board, any of the Board
4 members or Anand Rao of the Board's technical unit
5 may ask you questions regarding your presentation.
6 You should not infer any preconceived
7 conclusions or opinions on the part of the Board by
8 the types or number of questions they might ask.
9 The Board members will only ask questions
10 in an attempt to build a complete and concise record
11 for it to refer to in its deliberations in this
12 matter.
13 The Board has made no conclusions at this
14 time and will not begin its deliberations until all
15 testimony is received and the record is closed.
16 Because the purpose of these inquiry
17 hearings is to provide the Board with a forum for
18 receiving as much relevant information as possible
19 regarding the peaker plant issues, only the board
20 members and the Board's technical unit will be
21 actually questioning the speakers.
22 This is an information gathering process
23 as opposed to a debate on the pros and cons of
24 peaker plants. Therefore, no cross-examination or
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1 cross-questioning of the witnesses will be
2 permitted.
3 Having said that, let me assure you that
4 the Board is interested in what you have to say. If
5 any statements are made today or have been made at
6 previous hearings that you feel need to be expanded
7 upon, clarified or even questioned, we invite you to
8 do so in one of two ways:
9 First, you may appear before us on the
10 record either today or at some later hearing or you
11 may submit your comments or questions to the Board
12 in the form of a written comment.
13 The Board will be accepting written public
14 comments until November 6th of this year. The
15 public comment process is an easy one and is
16 explained on a public information sheet that is
17 available on the table by the entrance.
18 As you can see, we do have a court
19 reporter present today. She will be transcribing
20 everything that is said. In order to keep the
21 record clear and easily understandable, I must ask
22 that only one person speak at a time and when you're
23 speaking, please do your best to keep your voice
24 loud and speak slowly. It's very difficult for the
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1 court reporter to take down presentations when the
2 presenter is speaking quickly. If you are reading
3 from a prepared statement, please be aware of this
4 and watch the speed of your voice.
5 We have requested an expedited transcript
6 of this proceeding. That means the transcript will
7 be available within three to five business days and
8 will be on our website within that time as well.
9 One other thing I want to mention is that
10 we do have a notice list for this proceeding. Those
11 persons on the notice list will receive copies of
12 all Board opinions and orders and hearing officer
13 orders. There is no obligation for those on the
14 notice list to serve anyone else on the notice list.
15 If you wish to file any document in this matter, you
16 need only file it with the Board's clerk. If you
17 are not part of the notice list at this time, but
18 would like to be added, please contact the following
19 person, Kim Schroedk. She is in our Springfield
20 office. Her telephone number is area code
21 217-782-2633 or you may e-mail her at Schroedk,
22 S-c-h-r-o-e-d-k, @ipcb.state.il.us.
23 As I stated earlier, we have another
24 hearing next week, next Thursday, in Grayslake and
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1 then our final two days of hearings will be on
2 October 5th and 6th in Springfield.
3 Before we get started, I do want to also
4 note for the record that earlier this morning the
5 Board members and some members of the Board staff
6 toured a peaker facility in Elwood, Illinois, just
7 south of Joliet. That facility is known as the
8 Elwood Energy Plant and it is owned jointly by
9 Dominion and People's Energy.
10 Let me assure you that this tour was
11 conducted at the Board's own expense and the Board
12 members did not conduct any deliberations or hold
13 any discussions between themselves during this tour.
14 It was simply an informative process for the Board
15 members to visit and see an actual peaker plant.
16 At this point, we're prepared to start
17 with our presenters for today. The first presenter
18 on the list is Dr. Thomas Overbye. He is with the
19 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
20 the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I
21 believe Dr. Overbye will be addressing the topic of
22 need for the electrical generated capacity in the
23 state of Illinois. Dr. Overbye?
24 DR. OVERBYE: As was mentioned, I'm an
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1 associate professor at the University of Illinois.
2 Hopefully, we'll have a good football team this
3 year, but in addition to that, we've got quite a few
4 very highly ranked academic departments. I'm with
5 one of those departments, the Department of
6 Electrical and Computer Engineering. We are
7 consistently ranked as one of the top electrical
8 engineering departments in the country.
9 My area of specialization is power
10 systems. So this is right up my alley. I've been
11 at the university now for nine years working in the
12 power system area. I teach the senior level power
13 system analysis class. It's a class I'm teaching
14 this semester. I've worked quite a bit in this
15 area. I've worked for a utility in Wisconsin, have
16 published a number of papers in this area. Also,
17 last, year I was one of the members of the
18 Department of Energy. The Secretary of Energy
19 appointed a team to investigate some of the power
20 outages from last year including the ones we have
21 here in Illinois. I was one of the team members on
22 that.
23 Also, I have developed a power system
24 software tool that's used to simulate power systems
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1 that's used by quite a few different entities such
2 as the Illinois Commerce Commission, the U.S.
3 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Commonwealth
4 Edison, Illinois Power, Wisconsin Electric and about
5 160 others. So it's quite well-known and well-used
6 hopefully.
7 What I wanted to do today is just address
8 the issue of need for peakers and to do that, I just
9 need to take a couple of seconds --a couple of
10 minutes and explain how a power grid operates.
11 Peakers, of course, are there to supply
12 electric power. In an electric power system, to get
13 the electric -- to get electricity to the wall
14 outlets, there's four major components.
15 We have the generators and with
16 generators, you have to have enough to meet the
17 load, total electric demand on your system, plus you
18 always have losses and you also have to have
19 reserves. So we need that much generation.
20 The problem is the generators are not
21 located where the load is so you need an electrical
22 grid to move the power from the generators to the
23 load. The grid, we break into two components. One
24 is a transmission system. These are the high
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1 voltage and the big power lines that you see.
2 Usually, they're connected in a grid. That means
3 there's a lot of different feeds into each point in
4 the system and they operate at relatively high
5 voltages, 100,000 volts and up.
6 The second part is the distribution
7 system. This is the lower voltage portion of the
8 grid. That's the wires that you see in your
9 neighborhood. In a lot of places, they're buried
10 under ground.
11 The distribution system is the source of
12 practically all of the outages that we experience.
13 When the lights go out, 95 percent of the time it is
14 a problem in the distribution system, the local
15 wires. Peakers aren't going to affect that at all.
16 The last part is the load and they consume
17 electricity and the problem you run into on an
18 electrical system is the load is constantly
19 changing; low during the nighttime hours, high
20 during the day, low in the spring and fall, high in
21 the summer here in Illinois.
22 To explain real quickly how these pieces
23 fit together, let me show you a simulation that I've
24 developed using this program that I talked about
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1 earlier known as Power World Simulator.
2 What I'm showing here is a very -- an
3 overview of a very simple diagram. The round
4 devices here are the generators producing power
5 expressed in an MW, which stands for megawatts, a
6 million watts. The arrows show how the power moves
7 through the system. The loads here on the bottom
8 are represented by arrows. That's where the power
9 is going to. Now, in a real system, of course,
10 you've got millions of different loads. In the
11 simulation, I just represent them in aggregates. So
12 50 megawatts might represent the load of 20-, 30,000
13 different people.
14 Okay. While we have the generators, then
15 the lines here, the green lights are showing the
16 high voltage transmission system, that's stepped
17 down through the transformers to a lower voltage
18 that is then distributed.
19 Okay. If there's a break anywhere in the
20 distribution system, if I open one of these red
21 boxes here, if that happens, those customers would
22 see their lights go off and they call up the power
23 company. The grid itself is still fine. There's
24 still plenty of generation. So that would be a very
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1 local outage and it's the source of most outages in
2 the system.
3 The circles here represent the percentage
4 loading of each one of the transmission system
5 elements. It's a pie chart. As it gets more
6 heavily loaded, that pie would fill in.
7 Okay. Now, the way that grid -- the
8 transmission grid is designed is if you lose one
9 line, the power instantaneously redistributes on the
10 system. So if I opened up the transmission line on
11 top, perhaps it was struck by lighting, immediately
12 the power flow in the system redistributes, takes
13 place very fast, you would never even notice it. At
14 most, you might see a little blink in your lights,
15 put it back in and it goes back. The size and speed
16 of the arrows is proportional to the amount of power
17 flowing on a line.
18 Now, what can happen is if I open this
19 line up, the power redistributes and we're close
20 here to overloading that line. What we can do is we
21 can't directly control the amount of power flowing
22 on a line. It's not like a gas system or a water
23 system where you've got a valve. Rather, we can
24 only indirectly control it by changing the output of
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1 the generators and here if I increase this
2 generator, I can decrease the loading on that line.
3 If that generator were not there, if I
4 click this breaker, we would have a line overload
5 and that would be a problem. So in this small
6 system, the way to keep the system operating is
7 either you build a new transmission line here or you
8 build a generator. So in power systems, you're
9 always trading off generation location versus
10 transmission. You can either build more
11 transmission or locate generators at particular
12 locations.
13 Okay. I'll come back to this in a little
14 bit to show you the Illinois grid. Okay. So as I
15 mentioned, the peaker plants have no impact on
16 distribution system reliability. They're connected
17 at the high voltage level. The distribution system
18 is lower voltage. That's the source of most of your
19 outages. So peakers will not impact the number of
20 outages that we have.
21 In the outages we investigated last summer
22 in Illinois, it was not a problem of the
23 transmission system. It was not a problem of not
24 having enough generation. It was all very low
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1 voltage -- well, relatively low voltage distribution
2 problems. So having more peakers would not have
3 helped that. And usually, they won't
4 help -- they'll never help distribution problems.
5 Okay. So peaker plants, as I indicated in
6 this small demonstration, do have an impact on
7 transmission system flows. The transmission system
8 is used to move the power from the plant to the
9 load. It's quite a marvel. It crisscrosses the
10 country at very high voltage. The whole eastern
11 part of North America is one big electrical circuit
12 and that allows the utilities to buy and sell power
13 within that. Power moves quite fast. You could be
14 -- we could be generating some of our electricity in
15 Tennessee. It takes milliseconds to get up here.
16 You'd never know the difference.
17 We in the power area are pretty proud of
18 this. The National Academy of Engineering voted
19 electrification as the most important engineering
20 technology of the 20th century. So we are very
21 proud of that. We beat out airplanes, safe and
22 abundant water, electronics and everything else.
23 So the electric grid, starting with the
24 humble wall outlet, is -- was voted by the National
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1 Academy of Engineering as the top technology of the
2 last century. So it's -- I think it's quite a
3 marvel.
4 You can't see that, but that's the
5 transmission grid in our part of the world. The
6 point of this slide is just to show you it's all
7 interconnected. It's a big mess. But it's a well
8 designed mess.
9 Okay. You've probably heard this before.
10 This shaded region, including practically all of
11 Illinois, eastern Wisconsin, part of Missouri, part
12 of the UP, is know as MAIN. That's one of the
13 reliability regions in the country. I'll be talking
14 about MAIN later on. That's the region I'm talking
15 about. Okay. If I zoom into the Chicago or
16 northern Illinois area, this shows you a little bit
17 more of the details of how the grid looks in our
18 portion of the country.
19 Now, as I mentioned earlier, strategically
20 placed generation can avoid the need for new
21 transmission. So in power system design, you're
22 constantly trading off generation versus
23 transmission.
24 The load we have traditionally thought of
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1 as being something that the utilities don't control,
2 customers are in control of the outlet. So if you
3 want to turn on your air conditioner, turn on your
4 hair dryer, what have you, you can do that. The
5 utility has to supply the power. So the load is
6 something that hasn't been controlled. The grid has
7 to supply that power.
8 So locating generation close to the load
9 can result in decreased need for new transmission or
10 alternatively, you can use transmission to bring
11 power in from more distant locations, but you really
12 need to make detailed studies to figure out what the
13 capacity of the grid is.
14 Something that most people don't realize
15 is that there's a very large market for power.
16 Power generated in Illinois can easily be sold to
17 Wisconsin, Indiana, down to Tennessee, basically
18 anywhere in the eastern part of the country and
19 that's not unusual at all nor is it unusual for us
20 to get power from elsewhere.
21 The transmission system in this part of
22 the country does have a major bottleneck. That's a
23 lineup in northwest Wisconsin. It's known as the
24 Eau Claire Arpin line. It limits a lot of the time
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1 how much power we, as Wisconsin, Illinois, can
2 import from Minnesota and further north into
3 Manitoba. So that is a bottleneck. There's a lot
4 of power available there. Particularly, when we're
5 having a hot summer down here and they've got cool
6 weather up there, we can bring in a lot of power if
7 we had a new line there or alternatively, we have to
8 generate it more locally.
9 Before I get to this, let me show you the
10 power grid in this part of the country and show what
11 the flow of power on that grid is. So with this
12 simulation what I'm going to do is take that map
13 earlier and make it come to life with animation.
14 So what I'm showing here is a map of the
15 transmission grid except I'm only showing the high
16 voltage lines. There's lines at all different
17 voltage levels. The highest voltage level is a line
18 that comes in from Indiana that's at 765,000 volts.
19 Most of the high voltage grid in northern Illinois
20 and central Illinois is 345KV or thousand volts or
21 138. The arrows show you how power is flowing in
22 this grid and if I zoom out and go down a little,
23 what you see in Illinois is a predominant flow of
24 power into the Chicago area. It's kind of amazing.
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1 We have a generator down in central Illinois. It's
2 the Clinton Nuclear Power Plant right here. If you
3 look at how power is flowing out of that plant, even
4 though it's very close to us at the University of
5 Illinois, a lot of it is heading north into the
6 Chicago area. A lot of the power generated in the
7 Chicago area, a good percentage, is actually
8 generated south of Chicago in central Illinois.
9 Here's a big plant by Peoria. There's a
10 big plant south of -- I guess southeast of
11 Springfield where the power flow is predominately to
12 the north here, but what a utility engineer would do
13 is they would look at this system and here, if we
14 look at the northern Illinois area, no surprise is
15 that most of the powering -- a good chunk of it is
16 heading into downtown Chicago. That's the purpose
17 for the transmission system, to take power from
18 outlying areas and to bring it into the heavy load
19 areas. And the power engineers know this system
20 very well and they do studies looking at things like
21 what would happen if we opened up a particular line?
22 And let me just quick do a demo and then I'll move
23 on.
24 We're here by Joliet. There's the Joliet
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1 plant, which some of you may have seen coming in.
2 In this case, it's producing a lot of power. Here's
3 a line coming into it. If I click on that circuit
4 breaker, I open up that line. For example, if it
5 got hit by lightning, power redistributes
6 instantaneously through the grid. It takes the
7 computer a couple of seconds to calculate that, but
8 the actual grid itself would respond instantaneously
9 and you can see that causes a change in loading
10 throughout the system.
11 So the transmission grid is used to supply
12 power to the system from the generators that may be
13 located quite distant from the load to the load.
14 Now, what I wanted to do on this slide is
15 show the impact that an overload on a particular
16 line could have on the power markets.
17 In June of 1998, we had a price spike here
18 in the midwest. The price of electricity on the
19 spot market went from a typical value of two or
20 three cents a kilowatt hour up to $7.50 a kilowatt
21 hour. If you're a utility selling power at ten
22 cents and it costs you $7.50 cents to buy it, you
23 lose money fast and that's what happened to some of
24 our utilities in the state.
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1 The reason for this price spike, there
2 were a number of reasons, but one of the causes was
3 there was an overloaded transmission line in
4 northwest Wisconsin and there was an overloaded
5 transformer in southeast Ohio. What happened is
6 when this line in northwest Wisconsin overloaded,
7 any of the shaded regions here could no longer
8 supply electricity to Illinois.
9 So one little line wiped out the entire
10 west for a market that we could get energy from.
11 One transformer in Ohio wiped out the entire east.
12 So during this time period, there was a need for
13 more generation, but anywhere -- that extra
14 generation could have been located anywhere in this
15 white region.
16 The point of this slide is that power
17 markets can be quite large. You're not talking
18 about a market for a particular city or even a large
19 area like Chicago. It could be much larger.
20 Locating generation in central Illinois could
21 have -- would definitely have helped the problems
22 that you saw in northern Illinois or generation in
23 Ohio would have helped as well. So it's a very --
24 power markets are very large. Okay. So that's
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1 transmission system.
2 In the last part of my presentation, I
3 just wanted to talk about the need for generation
4 and this gets to the heart of the peaker issue. How
5 much generation are we going to need in the future?
6 Well, that's hard to estimate. It's even harder to
7 estimate how much generation we're going to need
8 tomorrow, maybe not tomorrow, but next week because
9 electric load is very weather-dependant. Okay. So
10 you never know how much load you're going to have
11 because you can't predict the weather.
12 Now, what we do in designing a power
13 system is we look at -- we say, well, what is going
14 to be the worst type of condition we're going to
15 experience? On a typical -- in a typical year --
16 that's -- in Illinois, it's on the hottest day that
17 you would expect in the summer and then you look at
18 how much demand you would get on that day, look at
19 trends and try to figure out how you're -- how the
20 load's going to grow. The MAIN region does this.
21 They provide annual load forecast. Actually, as you
22 heard from MAIN, they don't do that. They compile
23 if from the member utilities and then they send it
24 in.
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1 What I did is I plotted out how this value
2 is changing. Ninety-eight and '99 are actual data.
3 The actual demand in MAIN, it was -- last summer, it
4 was quite hot. It got up almost to 52,000
5 megawatts. Two thousand and beyond is what they
6 estimated based in April. I don't think it was this
7 high because we had a bit cooler of a summer.
8 The point here is the slope -- this curve
9 tells us how much generation we need to meet the new
10 demand. The slope of the curve is about 1,000
11 megawatts a year. So how much new generation do we
12 need in the Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri region?
13 If it were just to meet the new load, you would need
14 about 1,000 megawatts a year. That's how the load
15 demand has been going up over time and that's from
16 MAIN's data which is provided by the utilities.
17 Now, for Commonwealth Edison, I did the
18 same thing except I used more actual data and I'll
19 plot this out here in a second. That's how ComEd's
20 load has been changing over time. This is actual
21 data. I think this year -- I'm not sure what it was,
22 but I think was between 19- and 20,000 megawatts.
23 So if I added that on, the last point would be
24 something like that. Their increase in load is
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1 about 338 megawatts per year. So I said on the
2 bottom let's round up 350 megawatts average growth
3 and demand.
4 So if you look over time, in '99, we had a
5 very hot summer so the demand went up quite a bit.
6 If you just look at '98 and '99 data, you'd think,
7 wow, it's really gone up fast, but prior to 1999,
8 their last peak was set in 1995.
9 So I think Commonwealth Edison said that
10 their load growth was 1.5 percent, which is about
11 350 megawatts per year. So that's how much new
12 generation is needed to meet their increase in load.
13 Real briefly, I wanted to get -- talk
14 about this idea of capacity margins. When you're
15 planning a power system, you have to plan for the
16 unexpected. To do that, we always have a reserve or
17 we like to have a reserve. That's known as the
18 capacity margin. It's just the -- one equation,
19 I've got in here. Being a professor of engineering,
20 I like equations. I tried not to make it look like
21 an equation. It's just the net capacity resources
22 minus your internal demand divided by your capacity
23 resources. Capacity resources is basically how much
24 generation you have in a region, but it can also
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1 include imports of power that are guaranteed from
2 other regions.
3 The net internal demand is how much power
4 people are using or are planning, how much we
5 estimate they're going to use, except it's reduced
6 by the fact that some load has contracted with their
7 utility that at the utility's discretion, they can
8 turn them off. This is known as interruptible
9 demand. So in calculating your capacity margin, you
10 take that into account. You subtract it off.
11 MAIN has said they want between 17 and 20
12 percent for capacity margin. Last year, they
13 forecasted at 13 percent. This year, they
14 forecasted it at 18 percent. So we're getting to
15 the point where we'd like to be.
16 Just real briefly, the purpose for the
17 capacity margin is to provide you with insurance
18 because you never know whether you're going to have
19 a very hot summer. If it's a hot summer, the
20 capacity margin gives you extra generation to meet
21 the higher demand. Also, sometimes generators fail.
22 The generator goes out of service, we have to make
23 it up and that's where you want to have extra
24 generation available and that's what the capacity
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1 margin provides you.
2 Okay. I did some quick math based upon
3 what MAIN had on their website and they predicted
4 generation resources for 2000 of almost 56,000
5 megawatts. I calculated a reserve margin of 15.5
6 percent. I saw in the testimony from MAIN they said
7 18 percent. So I wouldn't dispute their number.
8 Let's say that by 2003, we wanted to get a
9 reserve margin in MAIN of 20 percent. That would
10 require us to get up to 62,000 megawatts of
11 additional resources -- or 62,000 total, that means
12 we have to add in MAIN's 6,000 new megawatts of
13 generation.
14 What MAIN reported as being proposed for
15 new generation is about 14,000. So I think that
16 we're getting the new generation, we're getting
17 quite a bit more proposed than is needed to meet the
18 minimum requirements, the 17 to 20 percent capacity
19 margins.
20 So in conclusion, I think there's
21 certainly a need for new generation in the MAIN
22 area. However, I think this need is relatively
23 modest. I would not view where we're at as being a
24 crisis situation at all. Our reserve margins are
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1 adequate and I think we have a modest need.
2 When we -- when plants come in and want a
3 site, you do have to consider the impact on the
4 transmission system and this is something that has
5 to be done on a case-by-case basis. The fact that
6 we have new merchant plants siting has been good for
7 engineers who do power systems studies because
8 there's a lot more work to and so...
9 In siting, you have to consider whether
10 the transmission system can carry power from
11 distant -- from the distant generation to the load
12 centers and that could be the case, but if you put
13 up too much generation too far away from the loads
14 without new -- without new transmission, you can
15 overload the grid. So that's my presentation.
16 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Mr. Overbye will take
17 questions from the board members.
18 MS. MANNING: First of all, thank you for
19 coming, professor. That was a very interesting and
20 informative presentation.
21 You mentioned at the outset that you
22 worked with the Illinois Commerce Commission. Would
23 you explain a little bit your interface with ICC?
24 DR. OVERBYE: What I said is that the software
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1 I developed, the Power World Simulation software,
2 has been purchased by the Illinois Commerce
3 Commission. So a couple of years ago, we did
4 training for them and I believe some of their
5 engineers still use it. So that's been the
6 interface. I don't -- I haven't done any studies
7 for them, but they do use the software.
8 MS. KEZELIS: I have a question. Can we turn
9 back to the 1998 price spikes.
10 DR. OVERBYE: The slide on it?
11 MS. KEZELIS: Yes, please.
12 Is the white area roughly equivalent to
13 MAIN or no?
14 DR. OVERBYE: The northern part of it is MAIN.
15 This is MAIN right there. So that portion of it is
16 MAIN. So new generation is pretty much anywhere in
17 MAIN. The constraint there was on the boundary
18 between MAIN and this region over here.
19 MS. KEZELIS: And that was attributable to an
20 incident in Wisconsin and one in Ohio?
21 Have the utilities responsible for those
22 transmission lines taken any steps to help assure
23 similar recurrences will not occur that you're aware
24 of?
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1 DR. OVERBYE: I can't speak about Ohio. The
2 main -- the one in Wisconsin is a well-known problem
3 and, you know, building a new line is not easy. The
4 solution to this problem is to build a new line.
5 There is a line that's proposed to go from -- I
6 believe it's up here down to the other side of this
7 and would solve that constraint problem, but that
8 involves convincing people in northern Wisconsin to
9 build a line to help supply electric needs in
10 eastern Wisconsin and Chicago. Growing up in
11 Wisconsin, I know that they don't always like to
12 build lines to meet the needs of Chicago.
13 MS. McFAWN: So was that the bottleneck you
14 described and that was the one that went down?
15 DR. OVERBYE: This is a very common bottleneck.
16 It didn't go down. What happens is when the line
17 gets loaded to its maximum ability, we can't bring
18 in any more generation from this region up here. So
19 let's say there's a lot of generation available in
20 Minnesota, we want to buy it in Illinois. If that
21 line is overloaded, we can't. Minnesota could say,
22 we've got a lot of generation, it's cheap, you need
23 it, here, we'll sell it to you. The Illinois
24 utilities could say, great, we want to buy it.
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1 Somebody would step in and say sorry, the system is
2 loaded to the max and that would be -- that line
3 causes the problem.
4 MS. McFAWN: What was the name?
5 DR. OVERBYE: Of the line?
6 MS. McFAWN: Yeah.
7 DR. OVERBYE: It's Eau Claire Arpin. It's a
8 345KV --345,000 kilovolt transmission line. It's
9 very well-known. It's certainly well-known in
10 Wisconsin because there are proposals to build new
11 lines. That new line can avoid that bottleneck.
12 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Could you spell that
13 line for us, please, for the court reporter?
14 DR. OVERBYE: Gosh, Eau Clair, E-a-u,
15 C-l-a-i-r-e is Eau Claire and Arpin is easier. It's
16 A-r-p-i-n.
17 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you.
18 DR. OVERBYE: Eau Claire -- those are the names
19 of electrical substations. The line is by the city
20 of Eau Claire.
21 MS. MANNING: You referred to MAIN in your
22 presentation as reliability region. Would you
23 explain that exactly?
24 DR. OVERBYE: Right. I didn't bring in the
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1 map, but in the United States there's a -- well,
2 actually it's in North America. There's a group
3 called the North American Electric Reliability
4 Council. It stands for NAERC. NAERC is charged
5 with ensuring that the North America electric grid
6 is operating reliably. NAERC is divided into ten
7 regions. MAIN is one of those regions. MAIN stands
8 for Mid America Interconnected Network and they're
9 headquartered here in -- well, in Lombard, Illinois.
10 MS. MANNING: We heard from them earlier.
11 DR. OVERBYE: Okay. So they're one of ten
12 regions.
13 MR. MELAS: Earlier, in your testimony, you
14 mentioned that when you were talking about the power
15 grid, we need power -- it could be imported from
16 Tennessee.
17 DR. OVERBYE: Right.
18 MR. MELAS: And obviously it can go the other
19 way too.
20 What is the incremental charge that has to
21 be -- economic charge that has to be paid as you go
22 from one system to another? So if we had to go from
23 here to Tennessee, it would go across, I don't know
24 how many dozens of utilities? Doesn't each one of
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1 those utilities add a cost to the -- for
2 transmitting?
3 DR. OVERBYE: That's exactly right. On this
4 diagram, how it's set up right now is that here's
5 the utility in Tennessee. It's TVA.
6 MR. MELAS: Okay.
7 DR. OVERBYE: And they cover the Tennessee
8 Valley, which is most of Tennessee. Let's say it
9 was northern Illinois, the little ovals, which I
10 know are hard to see, are different utility areas
11 and the lines show who's tied to who. If
12 Commonwealth Edison wanted to sell to Tennessee, I
13 believe they could send that power through Illinois
14 Power and then they have a direct connection to TVA.
15 So it would only be one step. The problem with that
16 is that the electrons do not know anything about
17 this map.
18 This map is showing ownership of
19 transmission lines. Electrons take the path of
20 least resistance and a diagram that I often show,
21 but I didn't bring this time, is that that power
22 transfer would spread through a large chunk of the
23 system.
24 Surprisingly, if Illinois sells power --
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1 northern Illinois sells power to Tennessee, a good
2 chunk of it is down here in northern Georgia.
3 Another chunk of it is over here in the Entergy
4 region. A third of that power actually comes into
5 TVA from the south. This is what's known as loop
6 flow. Power loops around throughout the entire
7 grid.
8 The problem with the way the setup right
9 now is that the only person who gets compensated
10 would be Illinois Power or perhaps there might be
11 one other, but other utilities would be impacted by
12 that transfer.
13 MR. MELAS: Using another example, maybe not
14 quite as simple, from northern Illinois, say, out of
15 MAIN out to the east somewhere, Pennsylvania, for
16 example?
17 DR. OVERBYE: Are you asking how much -- the
18 utilities put a charge --
19 MR. MELAS: Is it economically feasible to do
20 that?
21 DR. OVERBYE: Yes, it is. It would be --
22 probably a ballpark figure would be an increment of
23 ten or 20 percent on the power. So if it cost $20
24 here in northern Illinois, Tennessee might pay 22 or
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1 23. Illinois Power would get the difference, the
2 extra. All these numbers are proximate. The
3 utilities have to provide this transport and it's --
4 they have their rates available online. I don't
5 know what they are exactly. I think ten percent is
6 a ballpark figure, but, yes, it is economically
7 feasible.
8 MR. MELAS: So the bottom line question I'm
9 asking, is it economically feasible for power to be
10 generated in Illinois and transported hundreds or
11 maybe even thousands of miles away?
12 DR. OVERBYE: Oh, sure, sure. That's very
13 common. It's very common to move power long
14 distances. On the West Coast, there's a lot of
15 power from the Pacific Northwest that flows down to
16 southern California. So that's very common and it
17 is economically feasible.
18 MR. RAO: I have a question. Regarding the
19 numbers here presented about proposed new
20 generation, are these numbers, you know, referred to
21 base load or are they referred to peak load in the
22 region?
23 DR. OVERBYE: Okay. The numbers that I gave
24 you for proposed generation are -- I got those off
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1 of the MAIN website. I know there are lots of
2 different numbers floating around. I don't know if
3 you -- if your board publishes numbers or who in
4 Illinois -- is it the Environmental Protection
5 Agency? I know somebody has -- they do permits for
6 new generation.
7 AUDIENCE MEMBERS: IEPA.
8 MS. KEZELIS: IEPA.
9 DR. OVERBYE: Okay. I know that I looked at
10 theirs one time. It was much higher than this
11 number, but that's new generation. It could be
12 peakers or it could be combined cycle plants. For
13 example, in Champaign County, there's a proposal to
14 build a 500 megawatt combined cycle plant. That
15 would be included in that number. Whether it's a
16 peaker or a combined cycle, it's generation that's
17 available to meet the maximum demand. We don't
18 really need a lot of generation when the demand is
19 low. So you just worry about having enough to meet
20 the maximum.
21 MR. RAO: Since we are trying to gather
22 information regarding peaker plants, which generally
23 serve during the peak-load command, do you have any
24 information or comments as to the need for peakers
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1 plants that serve the grid during the peek-load
2 demand?
3 DR. OVERBYE: As opposed to total new
4 generation?
5 MR. RAO: Yeah.
6 DR. OVERBYE: No. I really don't differentiate
7 it that way. I haven't looked at whether we have
8 enough mid-load capacity. My guess is in Illinois,
9 we probably do because Commonwealth Edison has such
10 a good size nuclear fleet. I don't remember what
11 the number was, but I thought it was on the order of
12 10,000 megawatts of nuclear power plant that those
13 plants are usually online all the time, so they
14 provide a good base. The load -- the electric load
15 goes up and down in cycles. I think we're fine on
16 the base and on the mid-point. It's the max that's
17 the concern.
18 If a plant is a peaker or a combined
19 cycle, they can both meet the maximum, but I can't
20 tell you whether of that 6,000 I mentioned, how much
21 must be peaker and how much must be combined cycle.
22 Combined cycle is cheaper to operate, but much more
23 expensive to build.
24 MR. RAO: Thank you.
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1 MS. KEZELIS: So that our record is clear, a
2 transformer takes the high voltage of electricity
3 and transforms it down to the lower voltage of
4 electricity?
5 DR. OVERBYE: Right. A transformer changes the
6 voltage level. Electric power can flow either way
7 in a transformer. Usually, it flows from the higher
8 level to the lower level, but it doesn't have to.
9 For example, on a generator, a lot of times you
10 generate at a low voltage, step it up through a
11 transformer, and make it very high. So a
12 transformer just changes the voltage level.
13 MS. KEZELIS: Thank you.
14 MS. MANNING: Could you speak to what areas of
15 the state there might be an increased need for
16 electricity than others? Do you actually look at
17 the need -- the energy need in Illinois?
18 DR. OVERBYE: What I would say is that requires
19 a detailed simulation of the electrical system and
20 I haven't done that for the -- for much of the state
21 at all. So if somebody came to me and said, does
22 this area of the state need more generation, it
23 would take studies to do that. So I can't say in
24 general without looking at -- I wouldn't want to
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1 speak off the top of my head to say, you know,
2 whether or not a new plant is needed in location X
3 other than to say it needs studies.
4 The general comment is it's always best to
5 locate generation -- best is the wrong word. From
6 an electrical point of view, you minimize
7 transmission flow by locating generation right by
8 the load. So if you could get a generator to flow
9 in Lake Michigan, that would be good, right by the
10 loop.
11 MS. MANNING: In addition to the obvious need
12 of increased energy resources because of people
13 growth, is there also an increased need for
14 electrical generation as a result of new technology?
15 DR. OVERBYE: Oh, whether -- there's certainly
16 a change in the amount of kilowatts used per person
17 as a result of new technology. I don't know those
18 numbers off the top of my head. I don't know -- and
19 in fact, I wouldn't know if the new -- the increase
20 in electric demand, whether it's up outstripping the
21 growth in population or not. I don't know. I know
22 that for MAIN, what MAIN is predicting is for the
23 MAIN region of growth of about 1,000 megawatts per
24 year. Whether that's because of new people or
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1 immigration in the area, I don't know.
2 MS. McFAWN: I have a couple questions.
3 DR. OVERBYE: Okay.
4 MS. McFAWN: I'm trying to phrase them right.
5 Going back to the load area and the location of
6 generation, it seems like we're talking in a really
7 large scale here and yet everything is focused on
8 Chicago.
9 Does it make a difference if we put a
10 peaker south of Chicago north of Chicago or west of
11 Chicago? Does that make a difference on your
12 transmission and the need to build transmission?
13 DR. OVERBYE: The location where you locate a
14 peaker does make a difference.
15 MS. McFAWN: In that small of a scale?
16 DR. OVERBYE: It depends on the transmission
17 system capacity. So yes, it would make a
18 difference, whether it's on the west side or the
19 south side or the north side or in Champaign County.
20 You have to do the studies to look at,
21 one, are there existing problems or do we think
22 there will be problems with overloading the
23 transmission system? If there are, let's say I, as
24 a power planner, would look at the grid a few years
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1 in the future, I'd anticipate how the load would
2 increase and then I would say, oh, there's going to
3 be an overload on this transmission line. Usually,
4 it's not with everything in service, but you need to
5 study your grid not only with everything in service,
6 but also with each individual device out because you
7 never know when you might lose a line.
8 So I would do that study and if I see
9 there's an overload, as a utility planner, you would
10 either say I need to locate some generation on the
11 right side of that problem or I need to build new
12 transmission or you need to decrease loads somehow.
13 MS. McFAWN: But the load is controlled by the
14 customer or the consumer, right?
15 DR. OVERBYE: Right. If you talk to the
16 economists, which we talk to the economists a lot,
17 they like the idea of providing cost feedback to the
18 customers because when your electric rates go
19 sky-high in realtime then you'll naturally conserve.
20 That wouldn't be something that would make sense for
21 residential consumers. Nobody wants to have to look
22 at is electricity too expensive now, so I can't
23 watch the football game.
24 But as an industry, you might -- you know,
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1 if you're a large industry, you might be able to
2 shut down some things when the price of electricity
3 gets too high. In return, you would get much lower
4 rates most of the time.
5 So that's one idea that we in the power
6 area have talked about quite a bit is this providing
7 more feedback to the consumers of electricity to
8 help them make economic decisions. It costs a
9 utility much more to generate on a hot summer day to
10 buy the power because there's -- more people are
11 wanting it.
12 So if that information could be passed on,
13 the economists think that's good. I don't know if
14 you followed what happened -- what has happened in
15 California, but in California, they are passing it
16 on to consumers and they are in a state of riot
17 almost because people in San Diego saw their power
18 bills last summer triple because electricity prices
19 just went sky-high because California has a shortage
20 of generation.
21 MS. McFAWN: Back to the transmission lines.
22 DR. OVERBYE: Uh-huh.
23 MS. McFAWN: You mentioned in your conclusion
24 that you have considered the impact on the
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1 transmission lines. I guess that means in locating
2 generation?
3 DR. OVERBYE: You would certainly -- you would
4 certainly -- you certainly need to consider when
5 you -- if a peaker plant comes into an area and
6 wants to build, they have to do the studies or
7 the -- have the utility do them -- do the studies
8 for them saying this will not cause more problems on
9 the grid. So there has to be capacity to take the
10 power from that plant and ship it into the grid.
11 MS. McFAWN: So it's the owner of the
12 transmission lines that studies that impact?
13 DR. OVERBYE: Well, I don't know the details,
14 but I believe it's the merchant plant owner that
15 would pay for the studies. So when a plant comes
16 into the town of Sidney in Champaign County and
17 wants to locate 500 megawatts of generation
18 there, that's going to change the power flow in
19 Champaign County. They would have to make sure that
20 that doesn't cause any overloads and I'm sure
21 they've done that.
22 So that's -- when you're siting a
23 generator, you have to make sure it doesn't cause
24 any new overloads.
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1 Okay. What the utility would like is to
2 site generation where it will not -- where it will
3 help eliminate overloads so they don't have to build
4 new transmissions.
5 In the past, what the utility did is
6 they -- when they needed new generators, they
7 figured out the best place to build it with the best
8 being whatever they thought was the cost function
9 they wanted to minimize. It might have been
10 locating a plant and generator in a very dense urban
11 area and paying the social consequences. Usually,
12 it wasn't. Usually, it was locating further away
13 and building transmission to move the power from the
14 plant to the load pockets.
15 MS. McFAWN: Thank you.
16 DR. FLEMAL: Down here. I want to first join
17 in the earlier comments and extend my appreciation
18 as well for your joining us today. I found this
19 really enormously impressing and informative.
20 Could you, for the record, tell us whether
21 you are here in representation of any group or
22 organization?
23 DR. OVERBYE: I'm here -- I was invited by
24 the --
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1 MS. ZINGLE: The Lake County Conservation
2 Alliance.
3 DR. OVERBYE: -- Lake County Conservation
4 Alliance and they provided me a stipend for being
5 here.
6 DR. FLEMAL: The academic institution has
7 told -- is so often a great source of information
8 for the kind of decisions that we often have to make
9 and this has been a good time for us to get the
10 academic people to share that expertise with us. So
11 if we could send a kind word back to your dean as
12 well or wherever it helps you in the normal
13 things --
14 DR. OVERBYE: That would be great. I mean, I
15 knew about these hearings and I thought, you know,
16 we've got a great power program at the University of
17 Illinois and we know a lot about the grid. I don't
18 know much about air pollution, so I didn't talk to
19 anything about that. So I thought I'd come and give
20 you a presentation to tell you about what I know
21 about the grid and that's hopefully germane to this
22 issue.
23 DR. FLEMAL: Thank you. We appreciate that.
24 MS. MANNING: Your maps that you showed us
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1 would have included all sources of generation of
2 power in the state and the rest of the country,
3 whether they be fossil plants or nuclear plants or
4 whatever, correct?
5 DR. OVERBYE: Uh-huh, right.
6 MS. MANNING: And if there is an alternative
7 source of energy generated, it also would still have
8 to get on the grid. It would have to go through the
9 same grid network and power source and things like
10 that, right?
11 DR. OVERBYE: Right. In the power flow studies
12 that we do, the studies of how the power flows in
13 the electric grid, we do not differentiate whether
14 it's nuclear, hydro, gas, turbine, coal. From the
15 electric grid point of view, it's pushing power into
16 the system.
17 So when I look at a power system study
18 like the one I did here, and on this, I got this
19 case from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
20 because they investigated this, they used the
21 software I developed to do that investigation. So I
22 worked with their engineer and we came up with these
23 visualizations for doing that, but often, I don't
24 know what type of generator it is and it doesn't
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 matter from my point of view in studying power flow.
2 MS. MANNING: Thank you.
3 MS. McFAWN: So now you were saying on an
4 economic side that it's not that important for the
5 economics to go to the residential consumer, but
6 then when you talked about California, it's making a
7 huge impact.
8 DR. OVERBYE: Right. What I meant was that you
9 would not want to provide -- this is my personal
10 opinion. I don't think residential customers want
11 to get realtime feedback on electric prices. What's
12 happening is in electric markets, the price of
13 electricity on the spot market is being posted now
14 every five minutes in some market. Like, in the
15 east, they do that.
16 Just imagine if you're bill changed
17 every -- how much it cost you to use electricity
18 that changed every five minutes. I would not want
19 to see that personally, but that's what the
20 utilities are dealing with, spot market variations.
21 Usually, it's quite low. Sometimes the price of
22 electricity is zero. It's free. Use as much as you
23 want. It's even gone negative where somebody pays
24 you to use it.
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1 Now, usually when it's negative is when
2 you don't want to use it, but sometimes it goes very
3 high and that's the risk that you run if you buy
4 electricity on the spot market. I don't think
5 that -- a lot of that volatility, I don't think
6 should be passed on to consumers. It's nice to have
7 as a consumer to know that it cost however many
8 cents a kilowatt per hour, that's what I like. I'd
9 like that personally, but I think some businesses,
10 large industries, if you say to them, okay,
11 electricity prices vary quite a bit and you have
12 some ability to curtail your loads at certain times,
13 they would like to see that realtime pricing because
14 most of the time, it will be much lower than they
15 can get it elsewhere.
16 Some industrial users can go for days
17 without using electricity and then they use a whole
18 bunch. Those are the best type of loads to have
19 from a utility point of view because when it gets
20 hot, you say to them, turn off and they'll say fine.
21 Well, I would say assume they'd say fine because in
22 return, they're getting electricity at a very low
23 price during the rest of the year.
24 MS. McFAWN: Thank you.
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Any other questions?
2 Okay. Thank you, Dr. Overbye.
3 DR. OVERBYE: Thank you.
4 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: We will go off the
5 record for a few minutes while we get situated back
6 around. If you want to take a short five-minute
7 break, we'll come back with the next one.
8 (Whereupon, after a short
9 break was had, the
10 following proceedings
11 were held accordingly.)
12 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: We will go back on
13 the record now and before we start with Mr. Jirik's
14 presentation, I do want to note that Dr. Overbye
15 provided a hard copy of his PowerPoint presentation
16 to the Board entitled, "Need for New Peaker
17 Generation in Illinois."
18 Dr. Overbye, would you like to introduce
19 that into the record as an exhibit?
20 DR. OVERBYE: Yes.
21 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Okay. Thank you. We
22 will mark that then as Overbye Exhibit 1. Okay?
23
24
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1 (Document marked as
2 Overbye Exhibit No. 1
3 for identification, 9/14/00.)
4 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you.
5 Mr. Jirik, whenever you're ready.
6 MR. JIRIK: Thank you.
7 Good afternoon. My name is Alan Jirik. I
8 am the Director of Environmental Affairs for Corn
9 Products International, Inc.
10 Corn Products operates a corn wet milling
11 plant in Bedford Park, Cook County, Illinois. Corn
12 Products understands that while these hearings
13 concern simple cycle turbine units designed to
14 operate during periods of peak electrical demand,
15 questions have been raised during the public
16 hearings regarding combined cycle units.
17 Our testimony is being presented to help
18 to more clearly characterize the differences between
19 peakers, which are the subject of today's hearings,
20 and industrial cogeneration units, which to the best
21 of our understanding, are not the subject of these
22 hearings or the Governor's request.
23 Industrial cogeneration plants differ from
24 peakers in many ways. Cogens generate steam and
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 electricity and both of these energy products are
2 put to productive use in adjacent industrial process
3 units. Consisting of a turbine -- combustion
4 turbine and heat recovery boiler and sited at an
5 industrial facility, industrial cogeneration units
6 are considered more energy efficient than simple
7 cycle peaker units. This is because the heat
8 energy, which is not used by a simple cycle unit, is
9 converted to steam and put to productive use by the
10 industrial processes that are tied into the
11 cogeneration unit. This translates into an
12 additional environmental benefit, as a cogen
13 eliminates the need for additional fuel combustion
14 that would otherwise be required to create steam for
15 the industrial process. This eliminates a source of
16 air pollution.
17 Industrial cogeneration units are
18 typically base loaded as industrial processes demand
19 a relatively constant supply of steam and
20 electricity. This constant demand essentially
21 precludes peak-only operation. Higher utilization
22 of an industrial cogen also results in a more
23 cost-effective capital investment.
24 I would like to speak now about a specific
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 project at Corn Products. Corn Products currently
2 uses coal and natural gas-fired boilers to supply
3 steam to its industrial operations. In a joint
4 venture with Alliant Energy, we plan to shut down
5 the coal boilers and replace them with combined
6 cycle natural gas-fired cogeneration units. These
7 units will provide steam and electricity to the
8 manufacturing operations and by virtue of their
9 capacity, also provide electricity to the grid. We
10 expect to maximize our sales to the grid during
11 times of peak pricing, which usually occurs during
12 periods of peak demand.
13 However, these industrial cogen units
14 differ from the peakers that are the subject of
15 today's hearing. The cogen units we plan to
16 construct will be base loaded to supply the
17 manufacturing operations relatively constant and
18 substantial steam demand. Steam demand is
19 relatively constant as we run the manufacturing
20 operation every day of the year. The units are
21 anticipated to supply electricity to the grid
22 year-round, although the amount may vary subject to
23 demand and raw material costs.
24 Besides the energy efficient
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1 considerations already discussed, industrial
2 cogeneration units provide additional environmental
3 benefits. The Corn Products' project will install
4 clean burning modern technology, which will reduce
5 air pollution. When compared to our current power
6 generating activities, we anticipate approximately a
7 90 percent reduction in air emissions, which
8 constitutes a reduction of several thousand tons per
9 year. This reduction will be significant for both
10 local and regional air quality.
11 The new cogen will also eliminate coal
12 ash. Eliminating coal ash reduces solid waste
13 generated at the plant site by over 95 percent or by
14 six million pounds per month. This also eliminates
15 truck hauling traffic and the consumption of
16 valuable landfill space. Finally, over a half a
17 million pounds of substances reported under TRI SARA
18 313 Form R will be eliminated.
19 With regards to concerns over siting, our
20 project is located at the extreme rear of our
21 property, deep within an existing industrial zone
22 and well within an industrial land use. Nearby
23 neighboring land uses include a car crushing
24 operation, an asphalt plant and the MWRD sludge
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 drying beds.
2 With regards to cooling water consumption,
3 our plant currently takes water from the Sanitary
4 and Ship Canal. The water is used for non-contact
5 cooling purposes for the corn wet milling operation
6 and then returned to the canal. In a clever and
7 environmentally friendly approach, we plan to use
8 the existing cooling water flow to supply cooling
9 water to the new cogeneration operation. We
10 accomplish this by routing an additional loop from
11 our existing cooling water line to serve the cooling
12 needs of the cogen. After servicing the cogen, the
13 water will return to our existing line and be
14 discharged the same as it is today. Thus, the
15 project will not increase our current water
16 withdrawal and will not result in any new water
17 discharges, any new intake or outfall structures, or
18 cause any other disruptions to water bodies, water
19 tables, groundwater, aquifers or burden the
20 community drinking water supply.
21 We might expect similar environmentally
22 beneficial cogeneration projects in the coming years
23 as other industrial facilities replace their aging
24 infrastructure.
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1 Previous commentaries have raised the
2 issue of aircraft safety. We would note that the
3 pilots using Midway Airport have been flying over
4 our 250-foot tall boiler stacks for over 50 years
5 and we have not heard of any difficulties and we
6 have not heard of any complaints.
7 To the contrary, we understand that the
8 boiler stacks once served as an important
9 navigational tool for the early pilots using Midway
10 Airport. It has been reported that Charles
11 Lindbergh utilized our stacks to help him find
12 Midway when he was employed in the service of
13 airmail transport.
14 Combined cycle industrial cogeneration
15 projects benefit both industry and the environment.
16 If we are correct in our understanding that cogen
17 units are not the subject of the Governor's order,
18 it would indeed be unfortunate to inadvertently
19 entangle these highly beneficial projects within the
20 peaker proceedings.
21 In either case, we ask that the Board
22 carefully and clearly craft any recommendations it
23 may make to avoid unintended impacts on industrial
24 cogeneration projects.
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 This concludes my prepared remarks. I
2 would like to thank the Board for this opportunity
3 to speak today. I will now entertain any questions
4 that you may have.
5 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you, Mr. Jirik.
6 Any questions?
7 MS. KEZELIS: Just for the record, what is the
8 nature of the material you manufacture at your
9 facility? What is it that you make?
10 MR. JIRIK: Our primary product is sweetener
11 for soda pop.
12 MS. KEZELIS: Thank you.
13 MR. JIRIK: But we also make starches. The
14 materials that come from corn wet milling are
15 approximately 60 percent of the things you buy in
16 the grocery store.
17 MS. KEZELIS: Thank you very much.
18 MR. MELAS: One quick question. On the second
19 paragraph, full paragraph on your second page,
20 there's a sentence, when compared to our current
21 power generating activities, do you generate power
22 to produce steam that is actually used in the
23 processing of the corn or do you use it to
24 manufacture or to generate your own electricity?
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 MR. JIRIK: We currently use cogen. We have
2 the boilers, as I mentioned, steam for the
3 processing. We also have the ability to generate
4 electricity. It's sized to meet the plant's needs
5 so we are not selling out to the grid at this time.
6 MR. MELAS: Do you buy a portion of your
7 electricity from ComEd, I presume?
8 MR. JIRIK: Yes. I'm told that depending on
9 the time of day, there are times --
10 MR. MELAS: Oh, okay.
11 MR. JIRIK: -- where it is very positive to
12 generate. There are times you cannot buy the fuel
13 to make -- to run the unit to make the electricity.
14 So depending on the time of day, we may be
15 self-sufficient, we may be purchasing.
16 MR. MELAS: But primarily, the steam is
17 necessary for your actual process of manufacturing
18 the product out of the raw corn?
19 MR. JIRIK: A very large quantity of steam,
20 yes.
21 MR. MELAS: Thank you.
22 MS. MANNING: Later on in that paragraph,
23 Mr. Jirik, you indicate the units are anticipated to
24 supply electricity to the grid year-round.
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1 Do you anticipate actually selling
2 electricity on the grid?
3 MR. JIRIK: Yes.
4 MS. MANNING: Thank you.
5 DR. FLEMAL: Do you know how common that is at
6 present? How many facilities are cogens that are
7 actually participants in the grid supply as well?
8 MR. JIRIK: I do not, but just in dealings with
9 chamber, it seems that there are indications that
10 this may be something that one would see more in the
11 future. By way of an example, when you build these
12 particular units, it would be foolish to size it
13 exactly to meet your steam needs. If you throw a
14 turbine blade, you're plant goes down because you
15 don't have enough steam. So typically, you would
16 build sufficient backups so if you have an overhaul,
17 if you have maintenance, if you have a malfunction,
18 turbine blades would fail, that you would have some
19 additional ability to put those units online while
20 you're doing your repair.
21 So it provides an interesting opportunity.
22 The redundancy necessary to provide the steam supply
23 to the plant gives you an ability when the electric
24 demand is there to produce additional electricity
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 and that could then beneficially serve too.
2 MR. GIRARD: I have a question. Did you say
3 that you currently supply electricity to the grid?
4 MR. JIRIK: No.
5 MR. GIRARD: No?
6 MR. JIRIK: No.
7 MR. GIRARD: You put the new units online. How
8 much electricity would you be supplying to the grid,
9 say an average figure, megawatts?
10 MR. JIRIK: The engineering is not final. The
11 size of the units we're talking about is 600 to
12 maybe 900 megawatts. Of that, a large portion could
13 go to the grid.
14 MR. GIRARD: Okay.
15 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Anyone else?
16 MR. RAO: I have a question over here. I think
17 in the first paragraph on page two, you mention that
18 you may maximize your sales of power to the grid
19 during peak demand. So normally, do the units -- do
20 they operate on full loads or are you generally
21 going to operate it at a lower level and increase
22 the capacity during peak hours for that? How are
23 you planning to operate your units?
24 MR. JIRIK: Well, understanding that this is
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1 somewhat theoretical because we're still working on
2 the engineering and we're working on the permitting,
3 the units will be able to provide the base load
4 steam to the plant, but the way they will be sized
5 and because of their redundancy, they will also have
6 the ability to put considerable electricity, you
7 know, 600 megawatts out to the grid. We don't need
8 anywhere near that much electricity. We're not a
9 huge electric post. We're a very huge steam post.
10 But for example, if the price was very positive, I
11 would speculate, as businesspeople, seeing that we
12 have, you know, additional turbines, duct firing,
13 those things available, redundant equipment to
14 supply the steam demand, it would be foolish not to
15 turn that on and put that additional out to the
16 grid. So you have an assemblance of ability to
17 supply during peak time because the need for
18 redundancy to serve industrial operation. Is
19 that -- I don't know if that's answering your
20 question.
21 MR. RAO: Actually, I was focusing more on how
22 you will operate your plant during normal demand and
23 peak demand. Will you conserve or, you know, not
24 operate at your maximum capacity during normal
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 conditions and sell electricity only during peak
2 demand or --
3 MR. JIRIK: Our corn wet milling requires steam
4 and some electricity every hour of the day. We run
5 it around the clock all year. So there is a minimum
6 base load below which we cannot go to supply the
7 industrial processing facilities that we have and
8 they're a pretty substantial steam post. So there's
9 some all year long presence of base loading. From
10 there, it depends on the economics and what is going
11 on in the grid of where you will be on that in terms
12 of what you would do in the other direction.
13 MR. RAO: Have you gone through the permitting
14 process for these replacement units?
15 MR. JIRIK: We are just commencing the
16 permitting process as we speak.
17 MR. RAO: And do you envision these plants to
18 be permitted as base load plants or will there be
19 limitations on the number of hours that you can
20 operate or -- I was just trying to distinguish how,
21 you know, how different they are from peaker
22 facilities.
23 MR. JIRIK: No. These would have to have the
24 ability to operate at any time. As the current coal
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 boilers, natural gas boilers are permitted to supply
2 energy and steam to the plant. So they would be
3 more characteristic of a base loaded unit, but
4 you've got some upside ability to turn them off when
5 there's opportunities on the grid.
6 MR. RAO: Thank you.
7 MR. JIRIK: I do believe also, and this is
8 subject to the final business plan, that there could
9 be a continuous stream going to grid. That was my
10 testimony earlier. The quantity of that, however,
11 would be expected to vary depending on price,
12 natural gas pricing, that type of thing.
13 MR. RAO: Thanks.
14 MS. McFAWN: So are you saying that when
15 electricity off the grid is cheaper, you might turn
16 off your units and buy electricity versus running
17 the cogen?
18 MR. JIRIK: If you had the absolute worst case
19 where the natural gas cost more than the price of
20 electricity, we would retain some natural gas-fired
21 boilers and in all likelihood, we would do it then
22 because it's costing you more to produce it than
23 it's worth on the grid. We're not required to -- I
24 don't I think the EPA has --
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 MS. McFAWN: No, I said I thought you would
2 turn them off.
3 MR. JIRIK: Yes.
4 MS. McFAWN: How many units are you
5 anticipating putting in?
6 MR. JIRIK: Three turbines with three heat
7 recovery boilers, each equipped with duct firing and
8 four additional backup, one natural gas boiler just
9 so we have all the contingencies covered to get us
10 the steam we need to run our plant regardless of
11 pricing or whatever else is going on in the world at
12 large.
13 MS. McFAWN: Thank you.
14 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Anyone else? Okay.
15 Mr. Jirik, you did provide a copy of your testimony
16 to the board members and also to the court reporter.
17 Would you like to enter this into the record?
18 MR. JIRIK: Yes, I would.
19 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Okay. We will mark
20 this then as Corn Products Exhibit 1. Thank you
21 very much.
22 MR. JIRIK: Thank you.
23
24
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1 (Document marked as
2 Corn Products Exhibit No. 1
3 for identification, 9/14/00.)
4 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: I am told that Carol
5 Stark did make it. She is next on our list of
6 presenters. So if you would like to step forward,
7 Ms. Stark, whenever you're ready.
8 MS. STARK: Ms. Jackson and Illinois Pollution
9 Control Board members --
10 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Please speak into the
11 microphone, if you would.
12 MS. STARK: My name is Carol Stark. I am one
13 of the directors of CARE in Lockport, Citizens
14 Against Ruining the Environment. Our group has been
15 in existence for almost six years. We are a local
16 grassroots environmental group who have become very
17 concerned with the supposed clean-up at the closed
18 Texaco Refinery in Lockport.
19 Our focus has recently been redirected and
20 now includes the proposed peaker plant, which is
21 planned for a ten-acre parcel at the Texaco site.
22 Because we have a unique situation in Lockport, I
23 feel some history on this site is in order.
24 The Texaco Refinery was built in 1911
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 along the banks of the I & M Canal. When the
2 facility closed in 1981, many people that had worked
3 there felt used and abandoned. To make matters
4 worse, Texaco left the site as is. The tanks
5 remained there to rust and decay and become an
6 eyesore to the community. This went on for nearly
7 15 years until CARE decided to focus on the
8 deplorable condition of the plant and started
9 researching and asking questions. We discovered
10 that Texaco was in an interim status and were
11 appealing a Part B Postclosure Permit because of
12 objections they had to groundwater classification.
13 One of the parcels that Texaco has been
14 speedily remediating is where Rolls Royce Power
15 Ventures, now calling themselves Lockport Power
16 Generating Limited Liability Corporation, intends to
17 build this peaker plant. This parcel, as well as
18 the rest of the site, is a RCRA site, which is
19 similar to Superfund in many ways.
20 The entire area, originally 580 acres, was
21 once in a flood plain. I believe it is still part
22 of the enterprise zone. We were told the six creeks
23 running in, around and through the refinery were
24 redirected by Texaco. We also have information that
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1 states the aquifers located on this site are joined
2 together. This is the first of our concerns. The
3 fact that the aquifers, our water supply, could be
4 affected by this peaker using thousands of gallons a
5 day is not a comforting thought.
6 Number two, the NOX and VOM emissions
7 during the hottest days of the year, mixed with
8 light, will create ground level ozone. Because we
9 are in a non-attainment area and already surrounded
10 by some of the major polluters in the state, to be
11 faced with yet another questionable facility is
12 unacceptable.
13 Three, the siting of these plants is being
14 handled by local municipalities who are ill-equipped
15 to take on the technical aspects associated with
16 these facilities. They don't even know what type of
17 questions to ask and it appears that in order to
18 save face they are approving siting based on
19 information supplied by the peaker representatives
20 alone.
21 Because most of the towns and villages
22 that have been approached have no funding available
23 to investigate this issue fully, they are making
24 decisions based on limited or erroneous information
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1 that is one-sided.
2 Four, virtually no rules or regulations
3 exist because these plants are so new. IEPA will
4 have little or no control and I've been told once
5 the hearing is closed, if any modifications to the
6 permit are wanted, the power company can make those
7 modifications without reopening the hearing to the
8 public.
9 Five, these peakers are basically turnkey
10 heat operations and involve only a handful of jobs.
11 The fact that these turbines are portable and no
12 buildings are on-site, hence, no property tax, makes
13 them even less enticing.
14 Six, I recently was informed that the
15 turbines are encased in hydrogen and that hydrogen
16 tanks are stored on-site.
17 Three weeks ago, there was an explosion at
18 a St. Louis peaker due to a leak. If all peakers
19 have hydrogen stored, how safe will they be?
20 Seven, this plant is within a stone's
21 throw of residences and within 1,000 feet of an
22 elementary school. No one seems to have taken those
23 children's health into consideration, especially
24 those with asthma or other respiratory conditions.
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
648
1 Eight, these power companies are not
2 forthcoming with information. One of our councilmen
3 asked to see and hear one of these facilities in
4 operation. He was told Rolls Royce has none up and
5 running in this country. The councilmen then asked
6 about other countries and requested a videotape.
7 He's still waiting. That was approximately three
8 months ago.
9 Nine, we just looked through some of the
10 permit information this week and found out the plant
11 in Lockport will emit 55 parts per million NOX,
12 which will make it the dirtiest power generation
13 peaker in the state of Illinois.
14 You would think that our legislators and
15 community leaders would have learned their lesson
16 from the 1995 Wood & Tire Incinerator battles.
17 Those companies also called themselves power
18 generating facilities and claimed they were offering
19 economic development, jobs and tax revenue.
20 But the wolf in sheep's clothing
21 was soon exposed by the citizens and grassroots
22 organizations who devoted their own time and sweat
23 equity into proving that they were not what they
24 pretended to be.
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
649
1 CARE would respectfully request that a
2 moratorium of not less than ten months be called and
3 that USEPA get involved by providing guidelines
4 specifically formulated for the siting process.
5 Actual testing should be done when the
6 temperature is between 90 to 100 degrees, not the
7 current optimum temperature of 50 to 60.
8 Modeling is not accurate or reliable since
9 no plants are currently in operation. Perhaps a
10 pilot program in a remote area for a period of one
11 year should be considered before any of these
12 facilities go online. Alternatives to natural gas
13 should not only be investigated, but any wind or
14 solar facilities within a 100- to 200-mile radius
15 should be toured by these municipalities that are so
16 quick to approve anyone that approaches them with
17 the promise of a job and revenue as the dangling
18 carrot. Desperation does not breed clear thinkers.
19 Thank you.
20 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you,
21 Ms. Stark.
22 DR. FLEMAL: Could you describe for us the
23 local review process that did go on in the Lockport
24 siting?
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
650
1 MS. STARK: The plan commission had a hearing.
2 There was a discrepancy as to how that was handled
3 also. They had originally put signs up near the
4 facility and the day they were supposed to have the
5 hearing, the signs came down. Then later that
6 night, the signs were put back up again.
7 So we think that what they were originally
8 thinking was that this was going to be a done deal
9 and they were pre-determined and they had signs put
10 up and then they realized, oh, we better not do that
11 because we've got to make it look like this is
12 something that we're just hearing tonight.
13 DR. FLEMAL: So the developer -- the proponent
14 of the peaker plant originally came to the planning
15 board?
16 MS. STARK: I don't --
17 DR. FLEMAL: That's the municipal --
18 MS. STARK: We were never told. We think that
19 Texaco and Rolls Royce were working together behind
20 the scenes and they perhaps approached our mayor.
21 The mayor seems to have a long outstanding
22 relationship with Texaco so...
23 DR. FLEMAL: I'm just trying to get some sense
24 of what kind of local review was available? What
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1 sort of steps occurred?
2 MS. STARK: It was very limited.
3 DR. FLEMAL: You're obviously critical of the
4 kind of local input and whether or not even the
5 locals are in a position to make the kind of
6 decision you would like to see made.
7 MS. STARK: Yeah, because there are no
8 engineers or geologists or hydrogeologists that were
9 involved and that's what you really have to have
10 with this type of location. I mean, the site is
11 very unique. The aquifers and geology on the site
12 are such that you need experts and there is no
13 expert in our city and certainly not on our city
14 council.
15 Dr. FLEMAL: It did go to the city council
16 after coming through the planning commission?
17 MS. STARK: Right.
18 DR. FLEMAL: Did the planning commission make a
19 recommendation to the city council?
20 MS. STARK: They recommended that they go
21 forward because their job, as they stated, was
22 strictly to let the council know if they wanted this
23 as an economic --
24 DR. FLEMAL: And the city council then, I
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
652
1 assume, also supported the --
2 MS. STARK: Right. Because they're desperate
3 for jobs and this is a blue color community and
4 that area has always been an industrial area since
5 1911 and I'm not saying it shouldn't remain that
6 way. Personally, I feel that it should be put back
7 to the way it was and I understand that restoration
8 of wetland areas is possible now. The technical
9 expertise exists so perhaps they should put it back
10 the way it was and then maybe we wouldn't have as
11 many floods.
12 DR. FLEMAL: Allowing for your belief that
13 that -- there is a threshold upon which the locals
14 may not be able to bring to bare the necessary
15 technical expertise, I take it you would still
16 believe, however, that there should be some local
17 sign-off of some sort? There should be a local
18 review and a local approval or should that be
19 entirely in the hands of --
20 MS. STARK: I think there should be a local
21 review and a local approval, but they need to hire
22 experts or they need to have experts provided. You
23 cannot make this type of decision, especially in the
24 area where this facility is going to be put.
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1 There's residences around there. There's a school
2 within 1,000 feet. I mean, none of that is taken
3 into consideration. The fact that we're in a
4 non-attainment area and we shouldn't even allow
5 another polluting facility in there has not been
6 taken into consideration.
7 MS. MANNING: How long has the school been
8 there?
9 MS. STARK: I would say at least 20 years.
10 MS. MANNING: So even when Texaco was
11 operating, the school was there?
12 MS. STARK: Yeah, but Texaco hasn't been
13 operating since '81. I mean, it's been closed since
14 1981.
15 MR. GIRARD: I'd like to follow up on the
16 citizen involvement in this process mostly coming
17 long after Board Member Flemal's questions, but were
18 the citizens allowed to address the city council
19 before they made their decision on approving the
20 permit?
21 MS. STARK: Yes, they were. We tried to get
22 the word out to as many people as we could and
23 there was a good turn out, but most of the people
24 that were there live right next to the Texaco plant
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1 and they are blue color people and I think they
2 perceive this as a situation where the writing was
3 already on the wall and there's nothing they can do.
4 I think that there are alternatives so we do not
5 intend to stop fighting because I believe that
6 alternatives do exist and that they should be looked
7 at.
8 MR. GIRARD: Thank you.
9 MS. KEZELIS: Ms. Stark, do you know what the
10 source of your public water supply is in Lockport?
11 MS. STARK: We do --
12 MS. KEZELIS: Is it the aquifer?
13 MS. STARK: Yeah. We do have -- and then there
14 are some people that are on wells, but yes, it's the
15 aquifer. We have never tied into Lake Michigan
16 water.
17 MS. KEZELIS: Thank you.
18 MR. MELAS: You mentioned about the school
19 being 1,000 feet away. First, you said this is an
20 industrial zone and it was industrial and is the
21 school in an industrial zone or is it in the -- is
22 the -- really what I'm asking is the residential
23 zone so close to the industrial zone?
24 MS. STARK: Yes, it is. That's the way it's
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1 always been. I mean, 90 years ago, no one thought
2 anything of putting an industrial zone in the middle
3 of a town. Back then, we all know there weren't
4 that many residences. There were always people on
5 the west side that lived directly next to the
6 facility.
7 MR. MELAS: The Texaco facility?
8 MS. STARK: Right. But the school is up on a
9 hill and it's kind of up on a ridge. It's still a
10 residential area. I mean, there's residences all
11 around the school, but it's a little bit up on a
12 ridge from the facility.
13 MR. MELAS: Is it an elementary school?
14 MS. STARK: It is an elementary school.
15 MS. McFAWN: Kind of along the similar question
16 about the process, the hearing process, you
17 mentioned the air permits. Are those under review
18 or have they been issued by the Agency?
19 MS. STARK: The constriction permit is the only
20 one I'm aware of that was issued.
21 MS. McFAWN: It was issued? And did they hold
22 public hearings? "They" meaning the Illinois EPA.
23 MS. STARK: We called for one and we're -- got
24 a public hearing scheduled on the peaker for October
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1 11th. We asked the IEPA.
2 Ms. McFAWN: All right. And that is on the
3 construction permit, is it?
4 MS. STARK: Yes.
5 MS. McFAWN: Okay. And you mentioned that you
6 had reviewed their permits?
7 MS. STARK: We just started skimming through
8 it.
9 MS. McFAWN: Their permit application?
10 MS. STARK: Correct.
11 MS. McFAWN: And it is the air permit
12 application?
13 MS. STARK: I don't think so. I think it was
14 just for the construction permit.
15 MS. McFAWN: Oh, okay, for the -- but it was
16 through the Bureau of Air?
17 MS. STARK: I'm not sure. I know that it's in
18 the repository in the Lockport library and we were
19 looking through a lot of other Texaco material and
20 we just happened upon that and started looking
21 through it.
22 MS. McFAWN: Okay. Thank you. Just so I can
23 try to understand the location as well, you said
24 it's on the Texaco Refinery property?
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1 MS. STARK: Correct.
2 MS. McFAWN: And that's a ten-acre site?
3 MS. STARK: Correct.
4 MS. McFAWN: So it's a subset of that property?
5 MS. STARK: They're cleaning it up and
6 remediating in parcels. So this particular parcel
7 is the one that they're focusing on right now
8 because they want to build there. So that's how
9 they're going to be remediating. They're going to
10 do it parcel by parcel.
11 MS. McFAWN: Okay.
12 MS. STARK: And I believe it's divided up into
13 13 parcels.
14 MS. McFAWN: I see. Are they doing cleanup, do
15 you know, if you know, under RCRA or under some --
16 MS. STARK: It is under RCRA. And the reason
17 it is is because there's an owner. Normally
18 Superfund is when there is no owner available or a
19 company has gone bankrupt then they usually go under
20 Superfund.
21 MS. McFAWN: Thank you.
22 MS. STARK: Uh-huh.
23 MS. MANNING: Just to clarify for the purposes
24 of the record, you were talking about a hearing
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1 process and you were, I think, being critical of the
2 idea that an amendment could be made to the permit
3 after the hearing without public notice.
4 You were referring to the IEPA
5 permitting -- the hearing on permits, right?
6 MS. STARK: Right.
7 MS. MANNING: Just so I know what hearing
8 process you're talking about.
9 MS. STARK: Uh-huh.
10 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Anyone else? Thank
11 you, Ms. Stark.
12 MS. MANNING: Thank you.
13 MS. STARK: And this is for the record.
14 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Oh, you'd like to
15 introduce your statement?
16 MS. STARK: Yes.
17 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Okay.
18 MS. STARK: And I also have a newspaper article
19 about the explosion that I discussed.
20 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Okay. We will
21 introduce your statement as Stark Exhibit 1 and then
22 the newspaper article as Stark Exhibit 2 and if you
23 would, just hand those to the court reporter.
24
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1 (Documents marked as
2 Stark Exhibit Nos. 1-2
3 for identification, 9/14/00.)
4 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you very much.
5 Mark Sargis is our next speaker. I'm not
6 sure that he's here yet. Okay. Why don't we move
7 on then, Susan Zingle.
8 MS. ZINGLE: Good afternoon. I can't tell you
9 how much I appreciate your patience in going through
10 all these hearings. I've just found this whole
11 process fascinating.
12 Protecting the environment and economic
13 development are frequently seen as at odds with one
14 another. There is always a trade-off given in terms
15 of what you get in terms of air and environmental
16 quality and what you get in terms of taxes, jobs and
17 other benefits.
18 With the peakers, we know fairly well what
19 we have to tolerate from air emissions, noise and
20 water usage. There are ramifications of this to
21 economic development beyond the immediate
22 environmental harm.
23 As we discussed briefly last week, the
24 proposed NOX trading program lost, I believe, 30,000
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1 tons of NOX to electric generating units and already
2 10,000 of that is being taken by the peaker plants.
3 Similarly, the overall NOX budget in the
4 SIP plan will be significantly reduced from current
5 levels. Existing businesses will have to find ways
6 to reduce NOX or curtail their operation at their
7 own expense, expense that is increased by the
8 additional reductions necessary to accommodate entry
9 of the peakers into this mix.
10 A third element that needs to be
11 considered are the prevention of significant
12 deterioration permits and Chris Romaine or Kathy
13 Bassi could do a far better job than I can, but each
14 new polluter erodes at increments that are available
15 for future development. At some point, new permits
16 will be denied.
17 The cumulative effect of 55 and counting
18 electrical generating plants has the potential to
19 curtail or a least make more difficult future
20 business development. It has ramifications beyond
21 the village making the zoning decision to admit the
22 plan. Regional economic development is not a local
23 issue.
24 And you can see it happening. I didn't
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1 have time to get this prepared, but in today's
2 Chicago Tribune, Chicago and the EPA are working on
3 clean air law trade-offs. They want to bring more
4 development into Chicago, which is a good thing, but
5 they can't do it without their air laws, but we
6 don't want to breathe dirty air either. So the
7 peakers are not helping the situation at all.
8 By having identified the difficulties,
9 what benefits do we get from a peaker plant? Well,
10 not jobs. Most of the peakers could be turned on
11 and off from a remote location and the plants
12 require only seasonal maintenance jobs when they're
13 operating. There are, of course, construction jobs
14 created by the building of the plant, but I don't
15 know that these are any more or of any longer
16 duration than construction jobs for any facility.
17 Property taxes are usually sited as a
18 benefit, but as frequently, the turbines are
19 considered personal property, the property taxes are
20 minimal as turbines are the bulk of the value.
21 For the Carlton plant in Zion, fully
22 loaded property taxes would be about $2.8 million a
23 year. Carlton is actually anticipating paying only
24 about 200,000 a year.
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1 Attached to my testimony that I will
2 submit is a letter from the Lake County State's
3 Attorney's Office to the County Chief Assessor
4 describing how the decisions are made on a
5 case-by-case basis.
6 The power companies have recognized this
7 disadvantage and are now beginning to increase their
8 attractiveness through offering special agreements.
9 Indeck offered Libertyville payments of
10 $400,000 a year to a conservation fund designed to
11 pay for repairs to the water system in the city.
12 Zion has not yet released the details, but the mayor
13 acknowledges negotiating what he calls a host
14 agreement that may include building a $19.5 million
15 water treatment plant for the city.
16 According to the paper, a plant proposed
17 for Elgin will pay as much as $500,000 to $1 million
18 over several years. Not all the towns get the same
19 proposal or ask for the same thing. However, Summit
20 is permitting a peaker plant in a TIF district. Go
21 figure.
22 Although this negotiation process has some
23 advantages, I think it needs oversight. Now, it is
24 almost a bribe. The companies couldn't even offer
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1 this money up front without prodding.
2 Since most plants need some zoning
3 approval or variance, it begins to smack contract
4 zoning. As the villages get smarter, I believe
5 bidding wars will emerge and also the power
6 companies would begin extortion.
7 Furthermore, recouping some of the lost
8 property taxes is a good thing, this is not a
9 perfect mechanism. Payments to the city don't
10 necessarily address all the lost taxes and the
11 schools, the libraries, the park districts, the
12 townships and the counties get left out of the
13 equation. This is a payment to the city for their
14 use.
15 Neighboring communities who feel the
16 effects get no benefits at all. I'm not really
17 suggesting we reopen the personal property issue
18 because it goes far beyond the scope of peakers, and
19 I don't want to go there, but I am suggesting that
20 whatever siting program may ultimately be adopted
21 includes some provision for host agreements that
22 affect all affected taxing bodies. So the peakers
23 don't get a free ride on the taxes, but the city
24 doesn't get to grab the loot and shortchange the
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1 schools and the libraries that would benefit from
2 the manufacturing plant that could possibly go in
3 the same site.
4 Other issues confronting the financial
5 side of peakers include the never ending quest by
6 the industry for additional advantages. Hiding
7 behind the claims of need for electrical generating
8 capacity benefits economic development and threats
9 of competition from other states, House Bill 1268
10 and counterpart Senate Bill 50 were proposed in '99
11 and both are pleased to say are now residing in
12 committee, but I've been told that there are plans
13 to resurrect these in the fall season and I would
14 like to make people aware of what they do.
15 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Ms. Zingle, could you
16 slow down just a bit?
17 MS. ZINGLE: Oh, I'm sorry.
18 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you.
19 MS. ZINGLE: The bills originally were a
20 somewhat innocuous attempt to exempt automatic
21 vending machines from the use tax, the service tax,
22 the service occupation tax and the retailers'
23 occupation tax.
24 During their course through the House and
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1 the Senate, they were amended to exempt from these
2 taxes production-related tangible personal property
3 certified by the purchaser to be essential to and be
4 used in the process of production of electricity by
5 an eligible facility owned by an exempt wholesale
6 generator.
7 So not only do the power companies not
8 provide jobs and not pay significant property taxes,
9 they were looking to avoid the sales and use taxes
10 on the turbines when they purchase them. The
11 promotional material that was circulating with this
12 bill showed that it's not a small consideration.
13 The taxes total 6.25 percent of the
14 purchase price of the turbines. Of that, five
15 percent is kept by the state and 1.25 percent is
16 given back to the local governments.
17 Additionally, home rule communities can
18 add their own tax on to that and for some its as
19 much as an additional 1.25 percent. If the state
20 tax gets removed, so does the local tax and the cost
21 to both the state and local governments is
22 substantial.
23 Their justification for their proposal
24 estimated the cost. It assumed that by the year
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1 2010, five additional combustion turbine facilities,
2 peakers, and four combined cycle facilities would be
3 constructed. So they were estimating nine
4 production facilities. The lost taxes from that
5 scenario for the state were over $100 million and
6 the add on the home rule communities was not
7 included. Multiplied by the 55 plants, this was a
8 very expensive proposition. I do say again, it is
9 right now in committee and I promise you I am going
10 to work to make sure it doesn't come back.
11 On other fronts, yesterday, the city of
12 Elgin heard a presentation from Ameren to build a
13 400 megawatt facility within the city. It is
14 located approximately one-half mile from the
15 proposed ABB facility in Bartlett.
16 Last week, you heard from Bev DeJovine of
17 Bartlett CARE describe how her group is exhausted
18 and in debt and now she is faced with a second plant
19 whose emissions will drift over her town, not Elgin.
20 If one is a problem, two is worse. What mechanism
21 is there to bring all these towns to the table
22 together?
23 Similarly, in Zion, varying with weather,
24 he is talking to the Chamber of Commerce or to us,
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1 the mayor alternatively supports or opposes Kinder
2 Morgan's proposal to build a combined facility --
3 combined cycle facility in Zion and he may have
4 left, the gentleman from Corn Products, that he was
5 just beginning the permitting process.
6 So last week, we talked about 55
7 applications. But now, 56, 57 and 58 are in the
8 works. How do we get this under control?
9 And frankly, just conversationally, I did
10 attend the planning commission hearing for the
11 Lockport plant that Ms. Stark was talking about.
12 They had to -- first of all, the land was
13 unincorporated. So at that hearing, they were
14 making a decision to annex, to rezone, and to do a
15 special use permit for the peaker plant. They were
16 very gracious. They let me speak. They let
17 citizens speak. I told them to wait because the
18 Governor was looking at this whole issue. I told
19 them they did not yet have their application filed
20 with the IEPA so there was no detail really on what
21 they would permit. The council was concerned. They
22 asked some of the right questions. One of the
23 members had been on the internet. They had a copy
24 about the air facts brochure that was on the IEPA
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1 website. There's some newspaper articles about all
2 the hoopla in other cities. This is the plant that
3 does not emit ozone was the answer they got to the
4 question about air policy. We couldn't persuade
5 them to slow down and wait for the air hearing. So
6 now they're granting the facility. They're granting
7 the special use permit. Even if they go to the IEPA
8 air hearing, they can't take it back and maybe they
9 wouldn't have any way, but they did, in fact, make a
10 decision with no accurate information whatsoever as
11 well intentioned, as nice as they were. So with
12 that, I'll open with questions.
13 MR. LAWTON: Can you hear me? I know you
14 attended the hearing in Naperville. I wondered if
15 you had given any thought to what seemed to be the
16 principle area of one of them was the proliferation
17 of peakers and -- did you hear the last part?
18 MS. ZINGLE: Yes.
19 MR. LAWTON: Whether you have given any thought
20 to what kind of mechanism might be employed either
21 on the state level or county level to meet that
22 concern and I think we at least understand? I know
23 in your capacity as a member of the zoning board,
24 this is obviously something you've given thought to.
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1 If you have, you can share that with us.
2 MS. ZINGLE: Yes. And we will be making a
3 formal recommendation before the conclusion of these
4 hearings. The best model I think that I can find so
5 far is Public Act 90-217. That was done for
6 incinerators and it requires -- the host community
7 still makes the decision, but it requires them to
8 have a hearing or a series, if necessary, that would
9 involve the community, neighboring communities
10 within a mile and a half, the company that's looking
11 to site the plant and it allows cross-examination.
12 It starts to spell out the standards under which the
13 decision will be made so you can't have a sham
14 hearing, we'll just have the hearing and vote to do
15 it anyway regardless of the effects, which would
16 give the neighboring communities the right to sue
17 if, in fact, a decision is not made appropriately.
18 It still needs local control, but, in fact, if I
19 understand it right, but that starts the
20 participation of other groups. I would like to see
21 that hearing take place at about the same time as
22 the IEPA air hearing because there's information in
23 those permits that is invaluable to the city.
24 The point of maximum impact is where does
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1 the plume actually touch the ground? How high are
2 the stacks? How high is the building? How many
3 hours are they going to run? How many parts per
4 million of NOX is this going to emit? The people
5 need to know and neither one should be making the
6 decision independently of the other.
7 I know Chris Romaine finds out stuff at
8 the public hearings that he has no way of knowing.
9 The power companies have sometimes applied for a 500
10 megawatt air permit. This whole village has a 1500
11 megawatt plant. All that stuff needs to come out in
12 one common forum. And I think if, in fact, they go
13 forward with water regulations and any of
14 Mr. Zak's suggestions for noise, that all ought to
15 be done at the same time with the experts from the
16 appropriate agencies there to guide the
17 conversation.
18 MR. LAWTON: Thank you.
19 MS. ZINGLE: How do you get that done? I don't
20 know.
21 MS. MANNING: Ms. Zingle, I'd like to also
22 offer our appreciation for your appearing at these
23 hearings and giving us very informed and very
24 thoughtful testimony in each of them.
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1 You mentioned, though, that -- I thought
2 you said that 90-217 was a law that you thought
3 applied to the incinerators and hearings.
4 MS. ZINGLE: Yes.
5 MS. MANNING: Could you maybe be referring to
6 Senate Bill 172, which is a hearing process for
7 landfills and incinerators as well as pollution
8 control facilities or is there a separate
9 incinerator --
10 MS. ZINGLE: There's a separate incinerator
11 one. That starts at -- that brings in the
12 surrounding communities. I didn't bring it with,
13 but I can get you a copy of it. It was -- itself
14 was drawn from SB 172. So it's heavy on groundwater
15 concerns, which for the peakers, pollution of the
16 groundwater really isn't an issue. Use of the
17 groundwater is, but runoff and pollution is not. So
18 it can't be used exactly as the --
19 MS. MANNING: The Board, as you know, sits in
20 review of 172 plan hearings, which we don't call
21 landfill hearings anymore. We call them pollution
22 control siting hearings. They are applicable to
23 landfills, the building of new landfills, and the
24 extension of a landfill or incinerators as well
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1 because it's a pollution control facility and they
2 have a local hearing and after that local hearing,
3 any participants in the hearing can bring an appeal
4 to the Board.
5 MS. ZINGLE: And I like that. I am impressed
6 with how this Board works. You ask good questions.
7 You're interested. You're paying attention. You
8 don't seem to be skewed one way or another.
9 I'm a little concerned sometimes about
10 taking the control away from the local community.
11 It's their community. They're going to have to live
12 with it, but they have to have good information.
13 They have to have a means of interpreting it.
14 I've learned about air permits in this
15 last year more than I ever wanted to know and I know
16 just enough now to be really dangerous and get
17 myself in all kinds of trouble. You can't -- a
18 layperson really can't do a meaningful job on it.
19 They can only do one or two.
20 DR. FLEMAL: We've heard from various people
21 small bits of the role of taxing structure and a
22 reaction to the presence of units like peaker power
23 plants. I want you to appreciate my appreciation
24 for you having taken us a little further down that
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1 road and will confess that I'm very much down on the
2 learning curve on this and I need to understand a
3 good deal more about it. So if I could just focus a
4 question maybe even in anticipation of a response
5 that you might want to make at a later time as
6 opposed to now.
7 First off, are you planning to make any
8 suggestions or have you entered the possibility of
9 making any suggestions for modifications of the tax
10 structure as an aspect of peaker plant overview?
11 MS. ZINGLE: I wasn't going to only because it
12 affects so much other than peaker plants and to get
13 into that just -- we've got an environmental
14 attorney and a municipal attorney working with us.
15 We don't have people familiar with the tax laws. So
16 I was intending to go more towards the host
17 agreement and some provisions in the schools and
18 libraries and other taxing bodies. I am open to
19 suggestions. If somebody knows a better way to get
20 that done, I'm happy to recommend and follow up and
21 support it.
22 DR. FLEMAL: Since you don't have anything on
23 the books to tell us next week, and let's just try
24 looking at a couple of these or helping me along
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1 with a couple of these questions, we've heard both
2 the prospective that it's good to have peaker power
3 plants because it helps your tax base and I
4 understand there's even a couple of communities who
5 are on record as having approved peaker power plants
6 and that's one of the major reasons why they agreed
7 to act as hosts. We hear other perspectives -- and
8 I think it's a perspective that would be that one
9 that you share that that's a bit of a specter, there
10 isn't really much to be gained for local taxes.
11 Can you -- would that be the sort of
12 bounds, can you expand on that? Do I have the right
13 perspective to begin with? Is that --
14 MS. ZINGLE: Yes. I think you probably still
15 think I'm more negative towards peaker plants than I
16 actually am, but given what's been in the newspapers
17 and the extremes that citizens go to to get
18 attention, I can see where that perception comes
19 from. Depending on the economic base of the city.
20 Libertyville is a very affluent community. Upper
21 and middle class well-established community, good
22 industrial base, good tax base. The peaker doesn't
23 hold any attraction for them and they have
24 citizens -- most of the people who testified at
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1 Libertyville were themselves engineers and Ph.D.s,
2 so they weren't -- and that's where I meet
3 Dr. Overbye, by the way. He was hired by the people
4 fighting the plant in Libertyville and I thought he
5 did a very good job.
6 In Zion, the unemployment rate is
7 enormous. It is largely blue collar. There is an
8 attitude that ComEd left us, we're broke, and if you
9 don't replace that tax money, we're desperate and
10 even getting people to come out to meetings, let
11 alone people don't have computers at home, getting
12 them on the Internet, getting messages out to get
13 them involved is just 100 times more difficult and
14 Carol had the same thing in Lockport, people did
15 come to the meetings and then they just sat there.
16 They wouldn't speak. It's not -- you get into
17 environmental justice issues and economic justice
18 issues very quickly. They go -- the power plants
19 will go where they can go regardless of the benefit
20 to the community.
21 Zion really does not need a peaker plant
22 on its Wadsworth Court. It's not going to get
23 enough back to justify the loss of property values.
24 What's it going to do to adjacent communities? They
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1 need something better, but there's nothing better
2 coming along and I suspect they're going to take it.
3 DR. FLEMAL: Well, taking you even back a step
4 forward, what is taxable in a typical peaker power
5 plant and what is not? What constitutes the tax
6 base focus?
7 MS. ZINGLE: I am not an expert. They
8 generally pour, I believe, a concrete foundation to
9 put the turbs on. I believe that is taxable. There
10 may be -- in the case of the Zion plant, there's an
11 oil storage tank, a water storage tank, a building
12 which would house some control panels and supplies
13 and equipment and so forth, a shed, more than a
14 shed, but less than a building, all of that is
15 taxable.
16 So there is some increase to the assessed
17 evaluation of the property, just not what you would
18 get, of course, pound for pound, pollution for
19 pollution. If that were a manufacturing facility,
20 it would be making something. You would have jobs,
21 and building, a lot of benefits.
22 DR. FLEMAL: What of the facility is not
23 taxable?
24 MS. ZINGLE: The turbines --
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1 DR. FLEMAL: The turbines.
2 MS. ZINGLE: -- are generally not taxable. I'm
3 not sure, but attached to the turbines is generally
4 a muffler unit that leads into the exhaust stack and
5 I don't know that that muffler unit is taxable or
6 not since it's as mobile or not as the turbine, I
7 suspect it is not taxable. I'm not the person to
8 ask those questions.
9 DR. FLEMAL: That sort of helps me along a bit
10 on understanding this, but if there is more that you
11 think is appropriate to bring to our attention
12 regarding how the current tax structures interplay
13 here, that, I think, might be useful information for
14 us or anybody else who wishes to address that topic.
15 MS. INGLE: Thank you.
16 MS. MANNING: Ms. Zingle, were you at all
17 encouraged by the testimony from Alan Jirik from
18 Corn Products --
19 MS. ZINGLE: Yes.
20 MS. MANNING: -- International that they're
21 actually taking away one of their coal fired boilers
22 and attempting to generate -- actually, they're
23 going to be generating electricity not only for
24 their process in using the steam generating it
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1 allegedly lowering their NOX in doing so?
2 So are you encouraged -- would you
3 encourage more businesses to do that?
4 MS. ZINGLE: Yes. And I've been -- there's
5 newspaper clippings on that and I've been following
6 that to some extent, but you can see there is no
7 citizens group fighting this plant. They're not
8 marching out with signs. They're not storming
9 village hall. It's fine. The site is in an
10 industrial area. It reduces NOX. It has a benefit
11 for manufacturing. It's a good thing. I was
12 surprised, though, he was obviously concerned that
13 out of all this, we're going to come up with these
14 draconian regulations on this cycle plant. This
15 combined cycle plant uses steam. It's one of the 28
16 sections of the ordinance. He's already more
17 strictly regulated than the peakers are and yet he
18 is doing more good. I object to that. I don't want
19 his regulations loosened. I'd like to bring the
20 peakers up to that level.
21 MR. MELAS: I have just a question. Help me
22 understand the functioning of these peaker plants.
23 One of the things you have mentioned is groundwater
24 pollution. They would actually return water -- I
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1 don't know where they -- from what I've heard, I
2 don't know that they actually put water back into
3 the ground. Is this spilled water?
4 MS. ZINGLE: They don't. I'm sorry for the
5 misunderstanding. We were talking about Senate Bill
6 172, which governs the landfills and that bill has a
7 great concern for groundwater because of the huge
8 amount of the landfills that pollute the
9 groundwater.
10 MR. MELAS: Correct.
11 MS. ZINGLE: That really doesn't apply to
12 peakers. So that whole emphasis in that bill has no
13 significant bearing on peakers.
14 MR. MELAS: Thank you.
15 MS. McFAWN: I had a question about the
16 proceedings, I believe, up in Libertyville.
17 MS. ZINGLE: Yes.
18 MS. McFAWN: In the past, you talked about the
19 lack of expertise that the local zoning commission
20 might have. Did -- were any fees assessed for the
21 zoning application up in Libertyville by the
22 commission?
23 MS. ZINGLE: I don't know. I know that Indeck
24 was required to pay the village costs for the
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1 consulting of the attorneys that they hired to run
2 the proceedings and at last count in the paper, that
3 was at $342,000. In addition, Indeck had their own
4 attorneys and consultants all doing the same work,
5 as did the opponents.
6 So in total, it was close to -- I'd
7 suspect a million dollars spent on that peaker plant
8 siting. It can't be that extravagant everywhere.
9 We have to get this down to some kind of process.
10 MS. McFAWN: You have been attending other
11 public hearings having to do with zoning and siting.
12 Any other communities, did they collect fees that
13 you might know of from the applicant?
14 MS. ZINGLE: I don't know. I don't know.
15 MS. McFAWN: Thank you.
16 MS. MANNING: Just for purposes of the record,
17 I'm not sure we have in the record what the
18 status -- the current status of the Libertyville
19 Indeck site is.
20 Could you explain that for purpose of the
21 record to your knowledge?
22 MS. ZINGLE: The plan commission on July 26th,
23 I believe it was, voted six to one against
24 recommending the siting of the plant. They
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1 submitted their report to the village board about
2 two weeks ago and the village board is due to vote
3 September 26th. They are not taking any additional
4 testimony. They will have deliberations among
5 themselves and take the vote at that time and their
6 air permit -- their first air permit expired in
7 February of this year. They reapplied, went through
8 a public hearing air permit, and that permit has not
9 yet been issued.
10 MS. MANNING: Thank you.
11 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Anything else for
12 Ms. Zingle? Thank you very much.
13 I would note for the record discussing the
14 Libertyville plant, our hearing next week is in Lake
15 County and we do have speakers currently planned
16 from the city of Libertyville, representatives from
17 Lake County, and I was also contacted this week by
18 Gerald Erjavec from Indeck and he may also be
19 attending that hearing as well.
20 So I say that just for your own knowledge
21 if you are interested in attending that hearing and
22 possibly hearing more about the Libertyville
23 situation.
24 We missed Mark Sargis before, has he
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1 joined us? No?
2 Okay. Keith Harley is our next listed
3 speaker with the Chicago Legal Clinic.
4 MR. HARLEY: For the record, I am Keith Harley
5 of the Chicago Legal Clinic. I wanted to start off
6 by picking up on something Sue Zingle said, which is
7 thank you for the time that you're taking to look at
8 this issue. I know you had to come from all over
9 the state in order to attend these different
10 meetings. I know that this is a duty that has
11 imposed you in addition to all of your ordinary
12 responsibilities as the Pollution Control Board and
13 I am very grateful for the level of detail and
14 attention that you all are personally paying to this
15 issue.
16 I'm testifying today on behalf of ten
17 organizations and I'm going to read off those
18 organizations so you get a sense of the difference
19 in scale and purpose of these organizations. Four
20 of them are regional organizations; the American
21 Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago, Citizens
22 for a Better Environment, the Illinois Environmental
23 Council and Illinois Citizen Action. Four of them
24 are Lake County organizations; the Lake County
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1 Autobon Society, the Lake County Conservation
2 Alliance, the Liberty Prairie Crossing and the
3 Prairie Crossing Homeowners Association. One of
4 them is CARE, a Will County group, Citizens Against
5 Ruining the Environment and one is an Aurora-based
6 group that straddles Kane and DuPage Counties,
7 Citizens Against Power Plants in Residential Areas.
8 And what I'm going to be testifying about
9 today is what could possibly bring together groups,
10 large, well-organized membership organizations like
11 the Lung Association, umbrella organizations like
12 Illinois Environmental Council, right down to very
13 small grassroots groups like CARE.
14 The thing that brings them together, and
15 what I would like to testify about today, is the
16 issue of NOX and the way in which peaker plants
17 contribute -- will contribute, will become permanent
18 forever contributors of NOX in this area.
19 Peaker plants are new sources of NOX, an
20 ozone precursor. The Chicago metropolitan area is
21 a non-attainment area for ozone. Generally, a new
22 source of NOX in this type of ozone non-attainment
23 area would be regarded as a major source if it had
24 the potential to emit up to 25 tons per year of NOX.
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1 Twenty-five tons per year.
2 And generally, as a major source, a 25
3 tons per year NOX source would be subject to the
4 most stringent pollution control measures called
5 LAER, Lowest Achievable Emission Rates, and also
6 very importantly would be required to acquire NOX
7 offsets in a ratio of 1.3 to one.
8 Under this Clean Air Act system, called
9 New Source Review, peaker plants would be required
10 to meet the most stringent pollution control
11 measures.
12 In addition, the peakers would actually be
13 helping to reduce NOX because they would be required
14 to acquire offsets in the ratio of 1.3 to one as a
15 precondition of acquiring a permit of 25 tons per
16 year, but these protections are not in place. These
17 protections are not in place because of the decision
18 that was made by the state of Illinois in the
19 mid-1990s.
20 In the mid-1990s, Illinois petitioned
21 USEPA to be relieved of the New Source Review and
22 other requirements for NOX. The basis for Illinois'
23 petition was some preliminary information suggesting
24 that when it came to ozone formation, there was good
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1 NOX and bad NOX.
2 Preliminary information suggesting that
3 some NOX emissions actually had a protective local
4 effect when it came to NOX -- came to ozone
5 formation.
6 Based on this preliminary data, USEPA
7 granted the NOX waiver on a conditional basis and
8 over the objections of many environmental groups and
9 some eastern states which actually sued USEPA for
10 its decision. The granting of the NOX waiver, which
11 is kind of a context issue for the whole peaker
12 plant debate that we're having now, was conditional
13 because new research that was pending at that time
14 could discredit the good NOX/bad NOX theory.
15 So because of the NOX waiver, a peaker
16 plant is not regarded as a major source unless it
17 has the potential to emit 250 tons per year of NOX,
18 a factor of ten times. No longer are we dealing
19 with the 25-ton per year standard for a major
20 source, we're dealing with the 250-ton per year
21 standard for a major source of NOX. And if it's not
22 a major source, there is no LAER requirement, no
23 lowest achievable emission rate requirement. There
24 is no offset requirement.
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1 Not coincidentally, the peakers are all
2 being permitted as less than 250-ton per year
3 sources. Many just so. The Aurora facility that
4 CAPPRA possesses has a potential to emit in its
5 permit of 247.5 tons per year. The Lockport
6 facility has a potential to emit 245 tons per year.
7 All of them are coming in just under the major
8 source trigger.
9 The irony in all of this is that the good
10 NOX/bad NOX theory that underscored Illinois'
11 petition to be relieved of the new source
12 requirements has been discredited. It hasn't been
13 discredited by the environmentalists. It was
14 discredited by the USEPA appointed Ozone Transport
15 Assessment Group.
16 In 1997, the Ozone Transport Assessment
17 Group completed a comprehensive study demonstrating
18 that all NOX reductions are good reductions, locally
19 and regionally. USEPA responded to the OTAG study
20 by imposing NOX SIP call through which NOX would be
21 curtailed through strict budgets in many states,
22 including Illinois.
23 Unfortunately, no one has gone back and
24 reconsidered the Illinois NOX waiver. In the
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1 meantime, this NOX waiver is functioning to create a
2 loophole which is enabling the proliferation of
3 peaker plants. These new NOX sources, in turn, are
4 and will continue to create havoc with Illinois'
5 efforts to meet tightening NOX standards.
6 Illinois could act today to end this
7 loophole. Illinois could voluntarily request
8 USEPA to rescind the NOX waiver for New Source
9 Review. In the decision in which USEPA granted the
10 NOX waiver in the first place, there is language
11 suggesting that it could even be rescinded for
12 specific sources. It does not make sense for
13 Illinois officials to claim they are powerless to
14 act when they have the power to change this simply
15 by ending a NOX waiver that shouldn't even be there
16 anymore.
17 Simply, the NOX waiver is bad science that
18 is creating an artificial incentive for peaker
19 plants to locate in Illinois.
20 I wanted to just give you the bullet
21 points on what the Ozone Transport Assessment Group
22 said on the issue of NOX reductions.
23 They made eight basic conclusions.
24 Regional NOX reductions are effective in producing
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1 ozone benefits; two, the more NOX reduced, the
2 greater the benefit; three, ozone benefits are
3 greatest in the subregions where emission reductions
4 are made; four, although decreased with distance,
5 there are also ozone benefits outside of the
6 subregions where emission reductions are made; five,
7 both tall stack and low stack NOX reductions are
8 effective; six, air quality data indicates that
9 ozone is pervasive, is transported an once aloft, is
10 carried over and transported from one day to the
11 next; seven, the range of ozone transport is
12 generally longer in northern states; and eight, NOX
13 controls on utilities are recommended for states in
14 the OTAG region. It's a 22-state region which
15 includes Illinois.
16 To help Illinois come to the decision that
17 the NOX waiver should no longer be in place on
18 August 22nd, 2000, I submitted a petition to Carol
19 Browner, an USEPA administrator, on behalf of the
20 ten organizations I mentioned earlier.
21 A copy of this petition, which was
22 prepared pursuant to the procedures laid out in
23 Section 182(f)(3) of the Clean Air Act, is now being
24 provided to the Illinois Pollution Control Board.
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1 May I approach?
2 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Yes. We will mark
3 that as Chicago Legal Clinic Exhibit 1.
4 (Document marked as
5 Chicago Legal Clinic
6 Exhibit No. 1
7 for identification, 9/14/00.)
8 MR. HARLEY: The petition asks USEPA to revoke
9 the NOX waiver for New Source Review in Illinois.
10 The ten groups that I mentioned, large
11 policy groups, that have been active for decades in
12 pursuing environmental protection in Illinois, local
13 groups that are fighting for the future of their
14 communities, urge Illinois to support this petition
15 to end the NOX waiver for New Source Review.
16 The NOX waiver no longer makes sense, yet
17 it is creating an artificial market for peakers in
18 the state. These peakers should be regarded as
19 major sources if they have the potential to emit 25
20 tons per year or more in the non-attainment area.
21 They should be required to demonstrate
22 lowest achievable emission rates. They should be
23 required to help us solve our NOX problem by
24 acquiring offsets. That's the conclusion of my
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1 testimony.
2 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you,
3 Mr. Harley. Are there any questions?
4 MR. RAO: I have a clarification.
5 Mr. Harley, just for the purpose of the --
6 to clarify the record, can you describe in what
7 region of the state the NOX waiver applies?
8 MR. HARLEY: The NOX waiver applies to the
9 Chicago metro area. I believe it also applies in
10 the East St. Louis metro area as well, although I
11 have no clients from the East St. Louis area.
12 MR. RAO: So this 25 tons per year trigger that
13 you mentioned, that would apply only within the
14 non-attainment area?
15 MR. HARLEY: Yes, that's correct.
16 MR. RAO: And for the rest of the state, it's
17 still the 250 tons per year?
18 MR. HARLEY: That's right. You would reason
19 back from the air quality in the region which the
20 construction was proposed.
21 MR. RAO: Thank you.
22 DR. FLEMAL: Mr. Harley, I gather you're aware
23 that the Board currently has before it a set of
24 proposed regulations that would address the NOX SIP
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1 call for the state of Illinois?
2 MR. HARLEY: Yes, I understand that that's
3 underway.
4 DR. FLEMAL: To your understanding, would
5 adoption of those regulations in any way address the
6 concerns that you raised with us today?
7 MR. HARLEY: It's difficult to know. I've
8 spoken to several of the groups that I have
9 mentioned and I -- no one has seen the actual NOX --
10 Illinois response to the NOX SIP call.
11 The way that I see the NOX SIP call
12 functioning is that the NOX SIP call will create a
13 budget which will impact every one of the already
14 permitted peaker facilities in the non-attainment
15 areas. There will be a budget of NOX credit which
16 are allocated to different sources and the peaker
17 plants will be left to curtail their emissions and
18 divide that budget as best they can.
19 In the Aurora facility permit, for the
20 first time, I saw that the Illinois Environmental
21 Protection Agency had inserted cautionary language
22 for this permitted facility indicating that don't be
23 surprised when the NOX SIP call comes into effect.
24 So I think that the NOX SIP call will go
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1 back and capture the facilities that are already --
2 that have already received permits from the Agency.
3 The NOX waiver addresses a somewhat
4 different issue. The NOX waiver addresses the
5 facilities that have not yet received a permit. It
6 addresses the issue of proliferation of new NOX
7 generating peaker plants. It's a different emphasis
8 than what I think will be addressed in the NOX SIP
9 call.
10 DR. FLEMAL: Do you anticipate that the cap
11 that the NOX SIP call would impose or its adoption
12 would impose, would, in fact, be a disincentive
13 towards further peaker power plant sitings in
14 Illinois?
15 MR. HARLEY: I think it will create a more
16 accurate cost for the peaker facilities than
17 presently exists. I don't know if it would
18 prevent -- there's so many other factors that would
19 go into that.
20 DR. FLEMAL: The specific language that you say
21 you noted in the Aurora petition, I forget just how
22 you characterized it, but your understanding is is
23 that although they may be permitted for
24 247-and-a-half tons of NOX, they may not, in fact,
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1 end up being able to make that emission because of
2 the position of the cap under the NOX SIP call?
3 MR. HARLEY: There -- that's correct, yes.
4 MS. MANNING: Mr. Harley, is it your
5 understanding that Illinois is the only state that
6 got a NOX waiver?
7 MR. HARLEY: No. Illinois is not the only
8 state that got a NOX waiver. At the time of the
9 granting of the NOX waiver, Illinois was joined with
10 some other states in the petition process. In
11 addition, there were NOX waivers granted for some
12 other places around the country.
13 My understanding is that there was a NOX
14 waiver granting, for example, in some -- for a
15 region in Texas that was also non-attainment.
16 Unlike the NOX waiver that was granted for Illinois
17 and other Midwestern states, that one had an
18 automatic provision built into it. When the review
19 was conducted, the NOX waiver was rescinded, but
20 there is -- there's nothing in the conditional NOX
21 waiver that was granted to Illinois, I believe it
22 was also Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, that would
23 ever create a review of that waiver apart from a
24 petition like the one that I've described.
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1 MS. MANNING: So is it your understanding that
2 our neighboring states, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio,
3 the rest of the regional five states, that major
4 source review is triggered at 25 tons per year?
5 MR. HARLEY: I don't know the answer to that
6 question.
7 MR. MELAS: I have a question on that.
8 Initially, you said that when the EPA
9 granted the waiver it was conditional?
10 MR. HARLEY: Yes.
11 MR. MELAS: Even though there was no automatic
12 review provided?
13 MR. HARLEY: That's correct.
14 MR. MELAS: Can or -- can the USEPA
15 unilaterally revoke it?
16 MR. HARLEY: Yes.
17 MR. MELAS: It doesn't have to be requested?
18 MR. HARLEY: It doesn't have to be requested,
19 but it has been requested. The section of the Clean
20 Air Act I referred to which is 182(f)(3) allows any
21 person to petition the administrator for a
22 determination on a NOX waiver. It's not limited to
23 simply requesting a NOX waiver. It's also big
24 enough to allow for a petition to be filed
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1 subsequent to the granting of the NOX waiver whether
2 or not that's still a good idea.
3 In addition, in the decision in the code
4 of -- in the federal register in which the USEPA
5 granted the NOX waiver, they said it was conditional
6 and they said they would reopen or consider
7 reopening based on the OTAG determinations, but that
8 has never been done.
9 MR. GIRARD: Mr. Harley, what process would the
10 USEPA follow in reviewing your petition to rescind
11 the NOX waiver?
12 MR. HARLEY: The administrator of the USEPA has
13 a non-discretionary duty to complete her review and
14 to issue a decision on our petition within six
15 months from its date of submission. The green card
16 I received back from the USEPA indicated they
17 received it on August 28th.
18 MR. GIRARD: Thank you.
19 MS. McFAWN: The OTAG report that you read the
20 eight conclusions from, what -- could you give us a
21 cite to that or --
22 MR. HARLEY: Yes. It's actually contained in
23 the petition that I provided as an exhibit for the
24 record. It was issued in 1997, Ozone Transport
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1 Assessment Group, final report, 1997, November of
2 1997.
3 MS. McFAWN: Thank you. Is the entire report
4 attached to your petition?
5 MR. HARLEY: No. It's a voluminous report.
6 MS. McFAWN: That's what I thought.
7 MR. HARLEY: It's available online. That's
8 where I got it.
9 MS. McFAWN: Maybe you could tell us whether
10 you -- did you develop any conclusions of the
11 summary that you read off or was that in the final
12 report?
13 MR. HARLEY: It was contained in the executive
14 summary of the introduction of the report.
15 MS. McFAWN: Thank you.
16 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Is that all for
17 Mr. Harley? Thank you very much.
18 MS. McFAWN: Thank you.
19 MR. HARLEY: Thank you.
20 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: At this point, we're
21 going to take a short five-minute break and we will
22 come back and hopefully be able to conclude our
23 hearing for the day. Thank you. We'll go off the
24 record.
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1 (Whereupon, after a short
2 break was had, the
3 following proceedings
4 were held accordingly.)
5 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Okay. We'll go back
6 on the record. We have two more speakers listed on
7 our list of pre-registered speakers. They are Jim
8 Musial and his daughter, Valerie. Are the Musial's
9 here? No. Okay. We have then -- I don't believe
10 Mark Sargis has joined us. I'll announce that once
11 again.
12 All right. We'll move on then. We have
13 two individuals who have signed in to speak today.
14 Mr. Nesvig, you are first on the list. Are you
15 ready to go?
16 MR. NESVIG: Of course.
17 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Okay. I'd just
18 remind you to please state your name and spell it
19 for the court reporter and let her know who you are
20 here on behalf of if you are speaking on behalf of
21 an organization. Thank you.
22 MR. NESVIG: Thank you for allowing me to talk.
23 My name is Bud Nesvig, N-e-s-v-i-g. I have a
24 professional license as an electrical engineer. I
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1 am quite knowledgeable about operations of electric
2 power plants, including peaker plants. I am
3 retired. I am interested in this primarily due to
4 the fact that I have been involved with the energy
5 commission for the city of Evanston for some eight
6 to nine years and I am not speaking on their behalf,
7 but I am interested primarily from the viewpoint
8 that it's very difficult to obtain the reason why
9 these peaker plants are even going in.
10 They are going in, as far as I know, on
11 Commonwealth Edison sites, which makes it -- and
12 these sites are all such that is quite convenient to
13 connect into the overall transmission system, but to
14 go to Commonwealth Edison to find out exactly what
15 their game plan is in doing this or among the people
16 that are involved in investing in the peaker plants,
17 we have, for example, a gentleman in Wilmette where
18 I live who spoke on behalf of the -- one of the Zion
19 plants and he was there on behalf of the owners of
20 the equipment that's going in to the site when that
21 is permitted.
22 So basically my interest, I guess you
23 would call it, part curiosity and part to try to
24 find out exactly what the blazes is going on here
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1 because after all, I do live in the area. I live in
2 the area that could be very well polluted by all
3 these plants.
4 I was particularly interested this evening
5 with Dr. Overbye's discussion and he brought up a
6 subject which I hadn't -- it hadn't even occurred to
7 for some time and that is that there is available
8 electric power in Minnesota. There is obviously
9 additional electric power available in Canada. In
10 fact, some of the eastern, northern states obtain
11 their electric power from Canada. They buy it from
12 Canada.
13 For over 25 years, I chaired a committee
14 for the Canadian Standards Association and I can
15 assure you that the people, or at least the
16 officials in Canada, are interested in doing all
17 kinds of things to increase the amount of commerce
18 that they have with the United states and it is a
19 little surprising to me that somebody hasn't gone to
20 Canada and talked to the people in Canada about the
21 idea that why not build a transmission line?
22 Afterall, for the gas pipelines, there is
23 no problem with the people that are selling gas, for
24 example, that -- they have turned out to be quite
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1 interested in actually financing pipelines. There
2 will have to be more pipelines in Illinois to take
3 care of the peaker plants. Somebody's going to
4 build that. But why hasn't Commonwealth Edison, for
5 example, gone to the people up in Canada that are --
6 the utilities and see if they would like to, for
7 example, fund and put in a transmission line coming
8 to Chicago or the Chicago area? I would think about
9 it.
10 And just as a -- I was very interested in
11 what Dr. Overbye explained, particularly his
12 graphical ability to explain what is going on here
13 as far as power plants. I thought he did an
14 excellent job of it, but for lack of being able to
15 find out exactly what's going on as far as the
16 peaker plant, it's my understanding that each peaker
17 plant contains or will contain more than one turbine
18 generator. The present 20 sites may contain a total
19 of 400 turbine generators.
20 I haven't found anybody that would dispute
21 that, that each plant that's permitted could have up
22 to five turbine generators and 400 sounds to me --
23 if this is all permitted, if all the 20 sites, they
24 could have just -- as you were at Elwood this
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1 morning or today, you should have seen a plant that
2 could be operating, maybe it was operating, you saw
3 a plant also under construction and they have two
4 more permits that are pending. There could be a
5 total of four plants if not more, on that one site.
6 Each of them could hold up to five turbine
7 generators. That's 20 just in that one location.
8 Pretty good investment. There must be a reason for
9 wanting to put all this in.
10 If you go any further and take a look at
11 the amount of electric power that is being
12 generated or can be generated, again, if all these
13 sites are filled with turbine generators, you're
14 going to have the equivalent of something in the
15 neighborhood of 25 nuclear plants.
16 The state of Illinois doesn't need all
17 that. You would have to be looking way out in the
18 future to find if the state goes to that point, that
19 they would need the electric power that could be
20 produced by the equivalent of 25 nuclear plants.
21 That's why I have a big question. What's really
22 going on here?
23 Also, the permits are issued prior to
24 final design of the plant. There is some
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1 information that is available that they haven't
2 decided in a particular plant whether there's going
3 to be three of a smaller turbine generator -- no,
4 five of a smaller turbine generator or three of a
5 much larger turbine generator. I would think all of
6 this before whatever is done as far as authorizing
7 the construction that all of this ought to be in
8 place and not leaving it up to some investors and
9 contractors to decide what's really going to go on
10 here.
11 Also, if you read the Chicago Tribune this
12 morning, you would find that the city of Chicago,
13 which probably most of you know, at least I did not
14 know, was under some kind of requirement requiring
15 the Federal Environmental Group, that they have to
16 be cautious about how much more pollution they can
17 allow in Chicago, that they're under some kind of
18 umbrella that they have -- that they are not
19 supposed to exceed. If that's true, these same
20 possible 400 peaker plants are all west of Chicago.
21 The prevailing winds are all east of Chicago. What
22 are they going to do with all the pollution?
23 We also know that, for example, that
24 Southern California, Edison subsidiary, Mission
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1 Energy bought Commonwealth Edison's coal plant and
2 those coal plants are continuing to operate. In
3 fact, Mission Energy purchased Citizens Energy
4 primarily to market the output of those coal plants.
5 So those coal plants will continue to pollute the
6 areas around the city of Chicago. Some of them were
7 in the city of Chicago, which makes me wonder as to
8 where is all this power going to go, plus the fact
9 that I do know that there is a power sharing
10 arrangement between Peoples Energy, which is to be
11 the new owner of Commonwealth Edison, and
12 Commonwealth Edison. Is there a relationship? I
13 don't know why we can't ask that kind of question
14 and why we can't get an answer.
15 But basically, I would like to see a
16 moratorium on issuing permits and construction of
17 peaker power plants until the Illinois Environmental
18 Protection Agency and the Illinois Pollution Control
19 Board can initiate regulations that determine what
20 electric power generating capacity is actually
21 needed in Illinois for its citizens and commerce as
22 a whole and take suitable action and we also are
23 going back to this whole situation as far as
24 pipelines -- gas pipelines, who is regulating the
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1 addition of gas pipelines in the state of Illinois?
2 I thank you.
3 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you,
4 Mr. Nesvig. Are there any questions?
5 MR. GIRARD: I have a question, Mr. Nesvig.
6 You mentioned that you were associated with an
7 energy commission of Evanston.
8 MR. NESVIG: Yes.
9 MR. GIRARD: Could you tell us a little bit
10 about what that commission does and what its makeup
11 is?
12 MR. NESVIG: The energy commission was an
13 outgrowth of an earlier committee which was
14 primarily initiated in the city of Evanston due to
15 the fact that their franchise with Commonwealth
16 Edison was coming up for renewal and this earlier
17 committee -- this goes back to 1988 through 1992 --
18 was primarily to find an alternate for Commonwealth
19 Edison due to the amount of outages that the city
20 was experiencing and the length of the outages. It
21 was not uncommon to have the city of Evanston be out
22 for not for a few hours, but it could be for a few
23 days, and this kind of made the officials somewhat
24 nervous.
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1 The city of Evanston renewed the
2 franchise, but not on a 35-year base, which is the
3 base for most of the communities that have signed
4 franchises with Commonwealth Edison, but they signed
5 an extension for seven years and with the extension
6 came the city of Evanston's formed commission. The
7 primary goals of the commission was to find some
8 kind of suitable alternate for Commonwealth Edison.
9 To put it kind of bluntly, there's never been a --
10 in the eight years that that commission has
11 operated, the city of Evanston, the council and the
12 city staff have absolutely no interest in operating
13 an electric utility. Even though that could all be
14 operated on the basis that you could -- there's all
15 kinds of contractors that would like come in and
16 would actually operate, but there's a couple of
17 things that make it very difficult. One is that
18 what are you going to operate because if you have a
19 city that is experiencing, even today, a lot of
20 outages, you have to know that the distribution
21 system is such and this is basically, in my opinion,
22 true of Commonwealth Edison's total system, it is
23 basically antiquated. It has not been maintained.
24 This afternoon driving in here, one of the
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1 transformers is burning at the corner of Wacker
2 Drive and Dearborn and it's shutting down all
3 things, City Hall, that ought to get their
4 attention, and -- but they even admitted, I went to
5 a meeting in Itasca back on May 18th, and the reason
6 I remember that is because I was very interested in
7 Commonwealth Edison stating at that meeting that
8 they had not maintained the distribution system for
9 20 years and would like to have everybody understand
10 that it would take more than two years to bring it
11 up-to-date.
12 What it really amounts to in this
13 long -- I'm trying to give you the city of Evanston.
14 You would have to replace the distribution system.
15 You certainly wouldn't want to buy something that is
16 this old and you would have to know that the
17 transformers in it and the cables in it have all
18 been overloaded. There's now studies that were done
19 by the ICC that prove the fact that this system has
20 been overloaded. If you know about electrical
21 installation, if you keep overloading it and it's a
22 progressive situation whereby the insulation
23 deteriorates, and by the deterioration it's going to
24 cause -- you're going to have an easier time on
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1 additional overloading. What you're going to have
2 is more outages, more failures.
3 What I'm really telling you is the energy
4 commission has not been successful and it is up at
5 the present time in the city of Evanston as to
6 whether it will be continued and where they're going
7 to go from here. That's the long-winded answer to
8 your question. Sorry about that.
9 MR. GIRARD: No. Well, you've answered my next
10 three questions also. So thank you.
11 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Anything else for
12 Mr. Nesvig?
13 MR. NESVIG: Thank you.
14 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Thank you.
15 Mike Shay is our next speaker. My list
16 indicates that you're here on behalf of Will County
17 Planning.
18 MR. SHAY: That's correct. My name is Mike
19 Shay. I'm the senior planner responsible for
20 long-range planning for Will County and we have been
21 dealing with these facilities a lot.
22 Mr. Overbye's presentation was
23 particularly interesting. In hearing that these
24 facilities can be located anywhere within the grid
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1 network, the facilities -- we wondered why these
2 facilities were being located in this region also so
3 we called these -- called various locators of these
4 facilities and said, why? They gave us a very
5 simple answer.
6 They said because Chicago is a place where
7 a lot of transmission lines and a lot of natural gas
8 lines cross and they're also very close to a large
9 market for their power. So we continued to notice,
10 like, a trend towards locating them in Will County.
11 When we found out that wasn't necessarily a trend
12 towards Will County, but more towards the Chicago
13 area, and the leadership of Will County became very
14 concerned about equitable distribution and we were
15 not convinced that these facilities are being
16 distributed equitably throughout the grid.
17 Sorry. It's been a long hearing. To --
18 as an interim measure to help control these uses
19 within our jurisdiction, which is the unincorporated
20 area of Will County, which accounts for a vast
21 majority of the land area and roughly 15 to 20
22 percent of the population, we did put in place
23 restrictions, land use restrictions on peaker
24 plants.
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1 We restricted them to industrial in one of
2 our agriculture districts and we restricted them to
3 a quarter-mile radius. They have to be a quarter
4 mile away from any residential structure, use or
5 district. It's a fairly restrictive standard. But
6 when we took this to the county board and to the
7 land use and zoning committee, and the planning and
8 zoning commission, they said, are you sure that's
9 good enough? They were very concerned about these
10 uses.
11 So we continued to do research and we
12 found some things that alarmed us a lot. It's a
13 very significant amount of leverage. The largest
14 thing that we found that concerned us was that Will
15 County's aquifer reserve water is about 66 million
16 gallons a day. That's how much we have -- it's
17 currently recharging -- that we could use for water
18 supply. We contacted several facilities and went on
19 several industry websites and they said five to 12
20 million gallons a day per facility for a combined
21 cycle facility and roughly a million gallons a day
22 for a simple cycle facility.
23 So we contacted some of them that actually
24 started operation in Will County, including the one
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1 that you visited today. We arranged tours. On our
2 tour, we found out they're actually planning -- or
3 they were planning for an expansion and this comes
4 to a key point that I'd like to discuss today.
5 There was discussion earlier about separating simple
6 and combined cycle plants. We do not think you can
7 separate those two facilities.
8 Simple cycle facilities are designed and
9 physically organized to be converted to combined
10 cycle facilities down the road and that plans that
11 we received as we reviewed these petitions
12 explicitly and clearly state that; that they are
13 designed to be converted or added onto at a later
14 date. So we do not want to see those two issues
15 separated at all.
16 So they -- we get into more discussions
17 with them and they say 16 million gallons a day for
18 one of the facilities which we visited, which means
19 that four such facilities of which there are already
20 that many could eat up the entire reserve water
21 capacity for Will County. We are not likely to get
22 more lake water. River water is another issue
23 altogether regarding quality of our water. So when
24 you add that to the fact that we are the fastest
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1 growing -- numerically growing county in Illinois
2 and also the fastest in the sunbelt, we see a
3 problem for a collision between growth and these
4 facilities alone for that resource.
5 We are also concerned -- when we continue
6 to do our research, we said, that's a lot of water
7 to draw from one facility. How do they get that?
8 Well, they drop wells in the aquifer obviously and
9 they pull it up at such a rate that it creates a
10 drawdown. It creates a reverse cone or a cone of
11 water supply and the radius on that for a facility
12 of the magnitude that we were discussing is six
13 miles drawdown, 300 feet drawdown at the point of
14 the well and still 25 to 50 feet of the six-mile
15 radius.
16 Will County has thousands and thousands of
17 wells; residential, industrial or group wells.
18 We're concerned about well failure because we
19 continue to place these facilities over time and if
20 they're to be converted to combined use facilities.
21 We're also seriously concerned about the
22 Clean Air Act in Illinois and that's been widely
23 discussed today from an environmental standpoint. I
24 would also like to point out that that also can
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1 affect transportation funding at a later date.
2 So we're going to experience growth and
3 not -- then we're not going to be able to fill
4 facilities to deal with that growth after it's
5 already in place. We also face the additional
6 problem that we're only in the unincorporated area.
7 So if we regulate these facilities restrictively,
8 they will do what many of them have already done and
9 go to municipalities that feel that they have
10 something to gain by the placement of these
11 facilities regardless of what they are and that is
12 why we feel action on part of the state or the
13 federal government is required so that we can't
14 simply hop jurisdictions or play an annexation war
15 or play two municipalities off of each other for a
16 lower level of regulation, which is exactly what is
17 happening in placement of these facilities.
18 I think the Bartlett facility demonstrates
19 that. If you investigate the political situation,
20 you're going to restrict us, we'll go across the
21 street to the next people power.
22 With that, we also -- I'd also like to
23 comment very briefly on the issue of taxation. The
24 lawsuit that resulted in the Illinois Supreme Court
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1 decision that stated generators were personal
2 property, that lawsuit started in Will County. I
3 think you will find that the supervisor of the
4 assessment is a guy named Richard Loding (phonetic).
5 He is very familiar with the precise nature of the
6 assessments for those facilities.
7 With that, I will conclude with my
8 presentation in the interest of brevity.
9 MS. KEZELIS: I have a question. I, too, hope
10 to be brief, Mr. Shay.
11 The status of the suggestions that you and
12 the planners for Will County propose to your board,
13 what is the current status?
14 MR. SHAY: Well, we have a first set of
15 regulations in place. We're currently discussing
16 the second set of -- we're researching and
17 discussing the second set. If I had to provide a
18 guess, which bureaucrats despise doing, but I will
19 do nonetheless, I would suspect that they will
20 prohibit the use of aquifer water for electric
21 generation.
22 MS. KEZELIS: When do you expect that given
23 bureaucracy moves slowly? How long do you think it
24 would take?
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1 MR. SHAY: The entire process -- the concern
2 about these facilities was great and the entire
3 process for the first round of regulation took just
4 under a month. Now, when we would initiate that
5 next round, I'm not certain because a date has not
6 been set. So it could be a couple of months, but we
7 are very concerned about the facilities themselves
8 and we're very concerned about jurisdiction about
9 that.
10 MS. KEZELIS: Do you know the name of the
11 particular aquifer to which you've been referring?
12 MR. SHAY: There are -- if I remember
13 correctly, there are three separate aquifers in Will
14 County. There's the Elmhurst deep aquifer and I
15 cannot remember the names of the other two. There
16 are two other aquifers here and sure enough, through
17 chance, a number of pipelines, transmission
18 facilities, happen to intersect over aquifers.
19 MS. KEZELIS: How many peakers are currently in
20 Will County in the unincorporated area, if you know?
21 MR. SHAY: In the unincorporated area?
22 MS. KEZELIS: Uh-huh.
23 MR. SHAY: There are none left. They have all
24 been annexed. One of them actually --
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 MS. KEZELIS: How have they been annexed?
2 MR. SHAY: One of them went entirely through
3 the approval process for Will County and then was
4 annexed. A couple of others started the process
5 with Will County and were -- well, one voluntarily
6 annexed and the other one, I don't like to use the
7 word coercion, but was coerced to become annexed and
8 so they are within municipalities.
9 There is another one that is partially
10 located in Will County. To my understanding, there
11 are four that are within Will County currently and a
12 number of other applications we've been notified of.
13 MS. MANNING: What are those municipalities
14 that are located -- obviously, the village of
15 Elwood, is one?
16 MR. SHAY: Elwood, you visited, Manhattan has
17 one. There is Channahon and I can't remember the
18 fourth one. I think it's in eastern Will County.
19 DR. FLEMAL: We previously heard that some of
20 the collar counties are moving towards adopting
21 ordinances that establish a hearing process for
22 siting.
23 Is Will County doing anything along those
24 lines?
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1 MR. SHAY: Anything that requires approval of
2 any sort? When I say any sort, it requires a
3 conditional use approval or a reason. In Will
4 County's case, we chose the conditional use
5 approval. It has to go through a series of
6 hearings. Our internal process is you have to go to
7 the planning and zoning commission, which is a group
8 of interested citizens who make recommendations to
9 the Will County Board on planning decisions on --
10 yes, our planning decisions. That is kind of
11 intercepted by a committee of the Will County Board
12 called the land use and zoning committee, which is a
13 group of seven of the county board members and they
14 then review those applications and that's the ending
15 point for smaller ones. These would then actually
16 go on to the Will County Board as a whole for its
17 decision-making.
18 Now, let me add something on top of that.
19 If you're within the planning area of jurisdiction
20 or if you're in a township that has formed a
21 planning commission, you have to go to theirs first.
22 So in theory, you could have as many as
23 five public hearings before you would be approved
24 for one of these facilities. That means a process
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 of maybe five or six months to get one approved.
2 It's a fairly extensive -- it is a very extensive
3 process.
4 DR. FLEMAL: There has been no attempt, though,
5 I gather at the county level to establish a
6 particular siting procedure that would address some
7 of the special aspects of peakers?
8 MR. SHAY: By choosing districts and radius
9 condition, those are the deciding factors. To place
10 one outside -- to get a reason to place one outside
11 of those districts would probably be very difficult.
12 So you need to be placed within one of those
13 districts and then go through this process.
14 That process has set criteria for it to
15 gain a conditional use approval. So there are
16 criteria in place as a matter of course and then
17 there are the additional criteria, the district and
18 radius. We're also concerned about hours of
19 operation, but that's --
20 MS. MANNING: The radius, is that what you were
21 talking about before when you were saying we
22 recommend -- one of the recommending -- things that
23 you were recommending was a setback and I think you
24 talked about a quarter of a mile?
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1 MR. SHAY: It's not actually a setback. We
2 require you to have a distance between a generating
3 structure --
4 MS. MANNING: From the -- is it structure to
5 structure?
6 MR. SHAY: It's from the structure. It was
7 intended so that if a peaker facility wanted to
8 ameliorate themselves from the surrounding area
9 because Will County is largely rural, they could
10 actually purchase the land that's surrounding them
11 and that would move any potential residence or
12 conflicts under their umbrella of control.
13 So we gave them the option to purchase
14 that land and basically eliminate the problems
15 presented by the radius. So we were looking for
16 ways to make it so they could actually build a
17 facility, but do it in sort of a responsible way.
18 MS. MANNING: But it was still just a quarter
19 of a mile from structure to structure?
20 MR. SHAY: A quarter of a mile from a
21 structure, district or use. When I say use, you
22 guys aren't planners, so let me explain use quickly.
23 Use doesn't necessarily mean a house or an
24 apartment. Schools are considered a residential
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1 use. Churches are considered a residential use. So
2 we really tried to create a situation where they
3 were not working in organized areas and it's also
4 our hope that if they become a combined cycle that
5 will also help ameliorate some of the drawdown from
6 their wells.
7 MS. McFAWN: Is the only industry that you're
8 concerned about the drawdown well or is that general
9 a concern?
10 MR. SHAY: It's the only industry we know of
11 that draws that amount that quickly. We can't find
12 another that draws from the aquifer at that rate,
13 but we're unaware of one that draws at that rate.
14 Let me illustrate this real quickly. When
15 you're talking about 16 million gallons a day, that
16 means that three of those facilities could put a
17 pipe on the end of the Fox River in St. Charles and
18 the river would end while it was in operation.
19 MS. MANNING: Where did you get those figures
20 in terms of the drawdown effect and how much water
21 is actually being used by these facilities?
22 MR. SHAY: We got from the -- well, we got the
23 information on flow and amount of the aquifers and
24 reserve capacity from the Illinois Water Survey.
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 They regularly publish those statistics and we
2 acquired them from them and then we acquired numbers
3 on the use actually directly from the industry
4 itself.
5 The engineers who built the Elwood
6 plant, we -- our land use and zoning committee and
7 planning and zoning committee visited those
8 facilities. In those discussions, we asked them
9 about water use and they gave us very frank answers
10 on that. The number that they gave us came out to
11 16 million gallons a day and we confirmed with them
12 that that was an accurate assessment. So we're
13 fairly confident of those numbers.
14 MS. McFAWN: How did you confirm that, in
15 writing, by any chance?
16 MR. SHAY: I'm not sure. I can find out.
17 MS. McFAWN: Well, I was just thinking if it
18 wasn't in letter form, it would be -- we'd like to
19 see such a letter, if possible.
20 MR. SHAY: Okay. And how would I get that to
21 you? Is there someone I could talk to about
22 contacting you?
23 MR. MELAS: Yes.
24 MS. KEZELIS: Mr. Shay, what's your
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1 understanding about the Elwood facility; single or
2 combined?
3 MR. SHAY: My understanding is that it is
4 currently a single cycle plant that the two
5 additional -- the Elwood two and Elwood three will
6 also be simple cycle. All three of those phases,
7 though, are designed to be converted to combined
8 cycle should they wish to do so.
9 MS. KEZELIS: So the 16 million gallons per
10 day --
11 MR. SHAY: Would be if they became a combined
12 cycle. They are not currently. They do have a
13 well, but it's comparably small.
14 MS. MANNING: Pardon me. What did you just
15 say? I missed that part.
16 MR. SHAY: Oh, they do have a well operating
17 there at both facilities that we visited, but
18 they're drawing a very comparative small amount of
19 water.
20 MS. MANNING: Right now? But your concern is
21 that when and if they become cogeneration
22 facilities?
23 MR. SHAY: That is correct.
24 MR. GIRARD: Mr. Shay, if Will County passes an
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1 ordinance that prohibits the use of aquifer water or
2 electrical generating facilities, would that also
3 apply to a facility that tried to site itself inside
4 a municipality in Will County?
5 MR. SHAY: No. That's why we're concerned
6 about jurisdiction hopping, but it would also cover
7 a number of the intersections of pipelines and
8 transmission facilities.
9 MR. GIRARD: Thank you.
10 MS. KEZELIS: Is there an association of county
11 planners in Illinois?
12 MR. SHAY: There's an informal group of county
13 plan directors. I know of no formal organization.
14 I know there is a regional language --
15 MS. KEZELIS: Yes.
16 MR. SHAY: -- which you're part of, but they
17 don't appear in any regulatory authority -- well,
18 with one exception, which doesn't matter in this
19 case.
20 MS. KEZELIS: I was actually thinking more in
21 terms of sharing information.
22 MR. SHAY: Yes. We've been -- McHenry County
23 has been faced with several very difficult decisions
24 as perhaps have some others. McHenry was probably
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1 the first that encountered these. In their
2 experiences and research really kind of got our
3 effort rolling and so we're not standing alone, but
4 we do all face the issue of municipalities.
5 MS. MANNING: Would you just explain for the
6 record a little more in detail your role with the
7 county?
8 MR. SHAY: Yes.
9 MS. MANNING: Do you have a planning
10 department? Are you the head of that planning
11 department? Are you a staff person for the --
12 MR. SHAY: At the county, there are several
13 departments. One of these is the land use
14 department. The land use department has five
15 divisions. It's got building, planning, zoning,
16 waste management and GIS -- engineering and so I
17 am -- there is a planning director and I am
18 underneath the planning director and I am
19 responsible for a long range of efforts for Will
20 County.
21 MR. FLEMAL: One of the things that this board
22 may see it necessary to do ultimately in our
23 decision here is to address the issue of how much
24 local and how much regional or state level oversight
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 there ought to be in the siting of these facilities.
2 We've heard quite a range of perspectives
3 from it should be entirely in the hands of the
4 locals with the facility to what I think I heard you
5 say that there should be a strong top-down oversight
6 on the plants.
7 First off, have I characterized where
8 you're coming from correctly?
9 MR. SHAY: Okay. I would like a strong state
10 or national presence on the issue of drawing from
11 wells.
12 MR. FLEMAL: Solely on that issue?
13 MR. SHAY: And issues that affect
14 cross-jurisdictional -- an aquifer doesn't make a
15 jurisdictional boundary. It could go across several
16 counties and several municipalities, et cetera.
17 Well, local authorities, because we are competing
18 for economical development efforts and because of
19 the nature of the politics between them, are often
20 played against each other by the private industry.
21 In situations like that, that should
22 become more the responsibility of the state. The
23 state should be involving itself in those
24 cross-jurisdictional issues, as it often does, with
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1 issues likes tax, with NIPC itself, the Department
2 of Transportation, et cetera.
3 DR. FLEMAL: What would you reserve to the
4 local, be it municipal or county level local
5 government, what part of the decision-making
6 process?
7 MR. SHAY: I would reserve for them the site
8 design, the general location, what zoning districts
9 it's allowed in, that sort of thing. I would treat
10 it like a normal land use in the sense of local
11 authority. When you place how far it's going to be
12 from a property line, how far does it have to be
13 from other uses, how should the site look and
14 appear? Is that system and county going to say is
15 construction -- are construction vehicles from that
16 city road appropriate or safe? Keeping in the
17 standard land use format, but I think the station
18 adopts things that we cannot exercise full control
19 over. Right now, most immediately apparent one of
20 those is water use.
21 DR. FLEMAL: How about in the general arena of
22 environmental impact? What sorts of environmental
23 impact decisions should be divided upon between
24 local and state government from your perspective?
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1 MR. SHAY: I'm not sure I am prepared to answer
2 that.
3 DR. FLEMAL: I know it's a tough area.
4 MR. SHAY: It's a very complex issue.
5 DR. FLEMAL: Maybe one of the toughest kinds of
6 aspects of this whole issue the Board will have to
7 address.
8 MR. SHAY: You know, the state doesn't have a
9 role in that and it doesn't have a role in that
10 because it's very similar to water use. Pollution
11 and environment issues do not obey jurisdictional
12 boundaries. So I guess I'm asking the state to take
13 additional authority in cross-jurisdictional issues,
14 which is what they have shown a pattern of doing
15 because it's efficient for the community as a whole
16 to do so.
17 MS. McFAWN: Ms. Zingle --
18 MR. SHAY: There is --
19 MS. McFAWN: Let me just follow with one
20 question. Ms. Zingle had brought up that under the
21 incinerator law that other communities can have
22 input into a siting decision. For instance, that
23 might be under consideration by Will County.
24 What would you think about that type of
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1 sharing?
2 MR. SHAY: I am not totally familiar with
3 incinerators, but I can tell you how land use goes
4 and that is smaller jurisdictions have the
5 authority -- or not the authority, but have a clear
6 and legal involvement in the decision-making of
7 larger jurisdictions, but it does not go the other
8 way.
9 To create an example for that, a
10 municipality can do as it pleases. When the county
11 hears the petition near that municipality, then the
12 municipality has a direct and active role in
13 decision-making. In fact, municipality or a
14 township can legally challenge certain decisions
15 made by the county -- the county and planning zoning
16 commission and Will County Board and force a super
17 majority vote of the County Board to affect a
18 decision.
19 So smaller localities could have a large
20 impact on county-wide decision-making, but it's only
21 one way. Obviously, we would prefer to be -- have
22 it both ways, but that's up to the legislatures, I
23 guess.
24 Dr. FLEMAL: Are you familiar with the SB 172
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1 landfill siting process? I know Will County has had
2 some exposure to that. Does this come from your --
3 MR. SHAY: I'm afraid I don't. It sounds like
4 an aircraft name to me.
5 DR. FLEMAL: The question I was prepared to ask
6 is if it required an answer of you since it's not
7 within your area of expertise is, whether the kinds
8 of criteria that are set up under that SB 172
9 process for the siting of pollution control
10 facilities may be landfills should serve as any kind
11 of model for a state-wide review process of peaker
12 plants as well?
13 MR. SHAY: I'm simply unfamiliar with it.
14 DR. FLEMAL: I put that on the record perhaps
15 maybe others around who --
16 MR. SHAY: We'll be looking.
17 MS. MANNING: Also for purposes of the record,
18 when people have referred to the incinerator law, I
19 believe that that really is kind of folded into what
20 we generally refer to as the regional pollution
21 control facility process. Perhaps the criteria is
22 different from incinerators than it is for
23 landfills, but I think when we review decisions of
24 government, local government, even on some
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 incinerators, for example, we did that through the
2 same process that we would do the landfill siting
3 process. Just so there's no confusion in the
4 record, I believe that is the same process, although
5 the criteria may be different whether the local
6 government is looking at an incinerator or whether
7 they're looking at a landfill. If there's any
8 further clarification, we might need to that at our
9 next opportunity.
10 MS. KEZELIS: Mr. Shay, the water use, as you
11 know, is not something that we are to address. The
12 Governor has appointed the water commission to
13 address water use for the state. Nonetheless, your
14 reference to the water use a few moments ago, I
15 needed clarification of.
16 You indicated that approximately 16
17 million gallons per day would be used by a combined
18 peaker facility and that the drawdown for such a
19 facility would impact roughly a six-mile radius, is
20 that correct?
21 MR. SHAY: That's correct, according to the
22 information we have from the Illinois Water Survey.
23 MS. KEZELIS: So you received that information
24 from the Water Survey itself?
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
730
1 MR. SHAY: Yes. We got it off their website.
2 They have a very graphical explanation.
3 MS. KEZELIS: I'm familiar with their website.
4 I wasn't sure what the source was for your statement
5 and that's what I was trying to get to.
6 MR. SHAY: It's Dr. Wood Stanley's presentation
7 on their website.
8 MS. KEZELIS: Okay. Thanks.
9 MS. MANNING: For purposes of the record, he
10 gave that presentation to the first meeting of the
11 Water Research Advisory Committee, which I sit on
12 behalf of the Board. It is cochaired by director
13 Tom Skinner of the IEPA, director Brent Manning of
14 the Department of Natural Resources, which the
15 surveys are housed in the Department of Natural
16 Resources. So that Dr. Wood Stanley gave us that
17 presentation.
18 MR. SHAY: Just -- he recently updated that
19 presentation on his website as well. He expanded it
20 a little bit if you want to take that into
21 consideration when reviewing it.
22 MS. McFAWN: You said at the outset that you
23 had a concern about equitable distribution. I
24 assume that was distribution of the electricity for
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1 power, is that right?
2 MR. SHAY: No.
3 MS. McFAWN: No?
4 MR. SHAY: The equitable distribution of these
5 facilities are over the region. We're concerned
6 that Will County has a lower incup level than any of
7 the surrounding counties and it has a number of
8 communities which have been economically troubled
9 and we're concerned about the equitable locations.
10 We're concerned that we would become a concentration
11 by these facilities over time.
12 MS. McFAWN: Is that concern related to the use
13 of water and air? I mean, you said you are
14 concerned --
15 MR. SHAY: Oh, it's water. It's air. It's
16 utilitied industrial land. It's the use of our
17 infrastructure and our extended infrastructure in
18 recent years and resources in form of water and air.
19 We're also concerned -- you know, the county or some
20 municipality within our county constructs an
21 industrial park and we have the investment in that
22 land for employment and tax revenue and we will not
23 always be able to get that return because of the way
24 that these facilities are assessed. If they wish to
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 locate there so that they cannot only sell to the
2 wholesale market, they can sell on the retail market
3 directly to the adjacent facility.
4 MS. MANNING: To your knowledge, does Will
5 County already possess a sort of higher than average
6 amount of land that's zoned industrial number one
7 and number two land that we might --
8 MR. SHAY: I have not studied that. I have not
9 made a comparison between us and other counties yet.
10 We are going to be actively pursuing that because
11 we're updating a new process. We just initiated a
12 process Monday night of updating our comprehensive
13 plans. So we'll be doing that soon. We don't
14 currently have an assessment.
15 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Anything else for
16 Mr. Shay? Thank you very much, sir.
17 MR. SHAY: Thank you.
18 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: At this point, that
19 concludes all of the speakers who have either
20 preregistered or signed it at the door to present
21 testimony to the Board this evening.
22 Are there any persons in the audience who
23 wish to speak to the Board at this time? Just once
24 again, I'll ask for Jim Musial or his daughter,
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
733
1 Valerie. Not present?
2 Okay. As a brief housekeeping matter, I
3 neglected to accept Susan Zingle's testimony in as
4 an exhibit in this matter. I believe she had
5 presented three exhibits at our hearing last week in
6 Naperville. So this one will be marked as Zingle
7 Exhibit 4.
8 (Document marked as
9 Zingle Exhibit No. 4
10 for identification, 9/14/00.)
11 MS. MANNING: Before we leave the record as
12 well, since it's served us well, I think, to sort of
13 ask for information, one of the persons who
14 testified in our Naperville hearing, I think her
15 name was Connie Schmidt, I say that to Ms. Zingle
16 and whoever else might want to respond to this
17 particular issue, raised the issue of vibrations,
18 the potential in the concern of vibrations and
19 specifically spoke to the proximity for one of the
20 peaker facilities as being planned.
21 If you have any information about that
22 particular subject or if anyone else does, the Board
23 would certainly appreciate hearing whatever
24 information there is. Certainly, it's not geared
L.A. REPORTING (312) 419-9292
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1 towards one of the specific questions, but if there
2 is an issue out there regarding that particular
3 concern, we have no information in the record about
4 it other than her concern. Thank you.
5 HEARING OFFICER JACKSON: Okay. The transcript
6 from today's proceeding, as I mentioned, at the
7 beginning of the hearing will be transcribed and
8 available within three to five business days. As
9 soon as we receive it, we will place it on our
10 website.
11 The next hearing in these sets of inquiry
12 hearings is scheduled for next Thursday at 3:00 p.m.
13 in Grayslake up in Lake County. We invite you all
14 to attend. At this point, we are adjourned and we
15 will see you next week. Good night.
16 (End of Proceedings.)
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1 STATE OF ILLINOIS )
2 ) SS.
3 COUNTY OF C O O K )
4
5
6 I, TERRY A. STRONER, CSR, do
7 hereby state that I am a court reporter doing
8 business in the City of Chicago, County of Cook, and
9 State of Illinois; that I reported by means of
10 machine shorthand the proceedings held in the
11 foregoing cause, and that the foregoing is a true
12 and correct transcript of my shorthand notes so
13 taken as aforesaid.
14
15
16 _____________________
17 Terry A. Stroner, CSR
18 Notary Public, Cook County, Illinois
19
20 SUBSCRIBED AND SWORN TO
before me this ___ day
21 of ________, A.D., 2000.
22
_________________________
23 Notary Public
24
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