South Carolina’s environmental regulator will review long-prescribed licenses for three coal plants after a lawsuit alleged that the state was not applying protections against water pollution.
The SC Department of Health and Environmental Control has reached an agreement with the nonprofit environmental organization Sierra Club, the group said in a press release on Friday. Sierra Club was the plaintiff in a lawsuit in July.
The lawsuit claimed that the state failed in its duty to protect the environment while waiting to revise water licenses for the three stations for about a decade each. The plants are managed by the state concessionaire Santee Cooper and the private concessionaire Dominion Energy.
The DHEC agreement with the Sierra Club ends the process and establishes a timetable for when the state will issue updated authorization projects for the public to comment on.
The schedule in the agreement says:
- A license project for Dominion Energy’s Wateree Station in Eastover will be launched on July 1st.
- A license project for Santee Cooper’s Winyah Generating Station in Georgetown will be launched on October 1st.
- A license project for the Santee Cooper Cross-Generating Station in Berkeley County will be launched on October 1st.
“This is a great success for the communities surrounding the mill (Winyah) and people who have had concerns, fishermen who have had concerns about these discharges into the Sampit River,” said Xavier Boatright, an organizer for Sierra Club’s Beyond the Coal Campaign.
DHEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The schedule for releasing licenses may be delayed by up to three months if a pending challenge in court overturns current water pollution standards in effect at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
The decade in which DHEC did not act on water licenses was filled with a regulatory landscape of similar changes, when the government of former President Barack Obama proposed stricter rules for coal-fired power plants, which were also contested. While the agency waited to deal with licenses, the old standards for the three factories remained in effect, a loophole in the review process.
Existing EPA standards are much more flexible as they were implemented under outgoing President Donald Trump.
“There is nothing to say that we will be fine with the authorization decision that is made,” said Leslie Lenhardt, a lawyer for the SC Environmental Bill that represents the Sierra Club.
Still, she said, the deal is “a good step in the right direction”.
Come back to learn more about this last-minute story.
Talk to Chloe Johnson at 843-735-9985. Follow her on Twitter @_ChloeAJ.