Edison Ends Opposition to Boiler Emission Controls

After four years of battling stringent air pollution controls, Southern California Edison Co. is supporting a new proposal to restrict emissions from electric power plants, Edison Chairman John Bryson said Wednesday.

The utility’s stance removes a major obstacle to ending the long stalemate over how to control emissions of nitrogen oxides from power plant boilers, one of the largest contributors of the pollutant to Los Angeles skies. Nitrogen oxides, air quality regulators say, are a key component of smog.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District board is scheduled to consider the latest version of the boiler regulation on July 19. Edison, which is responsible for half of the emissions from utilities in the region, has wielded considerable clout in the debate over how to control boiler pollutants.

“It’s a high-stakes rule, both monetarily and in terms of air pollutant,” said AQMD board Chairman A. Norton Younglove.

The latest version would require an 86% reduction in emissions of nitrogen oxides from utility boilers, where natural gas or oil is used to heat water, generating steam to produce electricity.

On Tuesday, James M. Lents, AQMD executive officer, sent the latest revisions of the rule to Edison, environmental groups and state agencies that have lobbied the district staff and board extensively.

The district’s staff expects that Edison’s backing will mean approval. “It’s the end of a long and arduous trail. We are optimistic,” said planning manager PomPom Ganguli.

Younglove agreed. “If you can match (Edison’s support) with the environmental community, I think we can have a rather quick hearing and get this settled, which would delight me.”

One environmental activist, Tim Little, executive director of the Coalition for Clean Air, said, “I think the rule’s in better shape than it was in December,” when another form of the measure came before the board. The board postponed consideration of the most controversial portions.

“We would have supported the December rule; we would have held our nose and said, ‘Do it,’ ” Little said. “We’d support this one and we wouldn’t necessarily hold our nose.”

Gladys Meade, environmental health director of the American Lung Assn. of California, said her organization is still reviewing the rule.

Passage of a stringent regulation for utility boilers would be “a real big step,” said Little, “because most of the rules only deal with little pieces of the problem. You don’t get too many chances to take a really big bite out of smog because the sources are so diverse.”

That “big bite” is about 4% of total nitrogen oxide emissions--the combined contribution from the utilities.

Edison, which has 28 boilers at six power plants in the region, expects to spend $700 million by 1997 to comply with the rule, if it is approved. As a result, the utility’s customers would see their monthly bills increase about 1% in the next few years.

Bryson, who helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nationwide environmental group, took office as Edison’s chairman last October. In the last two months, he said, “We’ve sought to take an absolutely fresh, bottoms-up look at appropriate controls on our power plants in the basin, starting from the premise that we have a substantial responsibility if the basin is to have healthy air.”

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the cities of Glendale, Burbank and Pasadena also operate equipment that would be regulated by the AQMD measure.

But Edison is by far the largest power producer in the region and lobbied hardest on the regulation.

The company contended in the past that nitrogen oxides are not a health hazard and indeed actually help fight smog.

Now, Bryson said, “there’s no question that (nitrogen oxides are) an element of the contributors to smog and (nitrogen oxides) control is an appropriate step for the air quality management district.”

Though other pollutants and other sources--most notably, hydrocarbons from cars--must be controlled, Bryson said, “what we don’t want to do is spend an enormous amount of time debating which should come first. We feel we’re prepared to do our part and step forward.”

At one point, in 1989, the AQMD staff secretly agreed to weaken its boiler proposal in exchange for Edison’s promise not to challenge the agency’s entire sweeping clean-air plan. The board passed the compromise measure; the California Air Resources Board kicked it back on grounds that it was unenforceable.

This time, Ganguli said, top ARB staff members have been involved in the drafting process. The ARB board must approve district regulations.

The result, said Little of the clean-air coalition, is a measure that is “light years better” than the 1989 version, which would have reduced emissions by 76%.

The latest version of the rule imposes daily and annual caps on the amount of nitrogen oxides that each electric utility can release into the air.

No annual limit was included in the 1989 version of the rule.

Edison’s daily cap in both the 1989 and December, 1990, versions was about 30,000 pounds a day of nitrogen oxides. The newest version limits Edison to emissions of 13,400 pounds a day.

Bryson said the company intends to achieve the reductions by installing catalytic converters on some boilers and replacing its oldest boilers with newer, more efficient models.