EPA Orders NEPA Power Plant to Clean Up Its Act

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

October 31, 2011 | 5:44 PM

Stan Honda / AFP/Getty Images

Towers carry electricity in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the Portland Generating Station in Northampton County to cut its sulfur dioxide emissions. Sulfur dioxide contributes to particle pollution, aggravating asthma and other respiratory illnesses. The Lehigh Valley plant has been one of the state’s greatest sources of sulfur dioxide, which the wind carries over to New Jersey.
In September 2010, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection had asked the EPA to step in and enforce the Clean Air Act due to the amount of air pollution the power plant sends across the Delaware River. The coal-fired plant is more than 50 years old, and the facility has not been updated with scrubbers, which reduce pollution.
The EPA says that by meeting the new rule, the Portland Generating Station will come into compliance with the new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. But owners of the Portland plant could call it quits. The Express-Times reports that GenOn is weighing whether or not to convert the plant to natural gas. Installing scrubbers in the facility would cost between $400 and $500 million dollars, about the same amount that it would cost to build a new plant run on natural gas.