Roughly 82 percent of the energy USF St. Petersburg purchases comes from non-renewable resources, according to a 2013 fuel mix report from Duke Energy. The other 18 percent is attributed to “purchase power,” or energy that Duke purchases from other providers. Renewable energy and biomass fuel are included in this category, though the numbers are not specific.
Florida is a regulated energy state, which means it is divided into designated service areas. Within those service areas, customers must purchase energy from the designated provider — which for Pinellas County and USFSP is Duke Energy. Duke’s fuel mix of non-renewables for the area includes natural gas, oil and coal power. Coal, which has the highest Carbon Dioxide emissions of the non-renewable energy sources, accounts for 25 percent of the fuel mix.
USF St. Petersburg purchased an average of 1,884,601 kilowatt hours of energy per month for July, August and September. This equates to an average of 471,150 kilowatt hours per month from coal-based energy for USFSP this fiscal year.
The Sunshine State Clean Energy Coalition and the Suncoast branch of the Sierra Club, which has an office on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg, want to take non-renewable energy out of the equation in Florida, and they are starting with coal.
This week, Sierra Club will launch a local “Beyond Coal” campaign, as part of a national endeavor to retire a third or more of the nation’s coal plants by 2020. So far, Sierra Club has been involved in retiring 152 plants, which means they have either shut down or set a definite closing date.
In Florida, the group will target Duke Energy first, and attempt to persuade Duke officials to shut down the four coal plants at Crystal River.
The program also advocates installing clean energy sources once the coal is gone. Sierra Club attributes coal as a factor in climate disruption, pollution, natural resource destruction and serious health hazards including asthma.
“It’s bad for everything that breathes,” said Julia Hathaway, the coordinator of the “Beyond Coal” movement for Suncoast Sierra Club. Hathaway said the mercury pollution produced as a byproduct of coal burning also contaminates the ocean and leads to toxic mercury levels in fish.
“That’s why pregnant women are told they can only eat a card-deck sized piece of fish. It causes neurological damage in the fetus,” Hathaway said.
Sterling Ivey, the spokesperson for the Tampa/St. Petersburg branch of Duke Energy said that the company “works very closely with the state department of environmental protection to ensure compliance with all environmental regulations.”
“There has not been any notice to us from the state department that our emissions or groundwater in and around our complex in Crystal River is unsafe,” Ivey said.
According to Department of Energy’s most recent survey, Florida uses more energy sourced from coal than the national average. The zone comprised by the 33701 area code where USFSP is located uses slightly less, but coal usage has increased by 1.3 percent since 2009.
Duke currently has four coal-powered plants, all of them on Crystal River. Two of the plants are set to retire between 2016 and 2018 because they will not comply with a federal mercury law, the Mercury Air and Toxics Standards, which will come into effect at that time.
“The reason there’s a two year time frame there is because we’re running tests at both of those plants now and burning an alternate type coal that has lower emissions. And if we can successfully burn a lower sulfuric coal we will ask for our licenses to be extended through 2018,” Ivey said.
The two newer coal units, built in the mid-1990s, will not close. Instead, Duke spent more than a billion dollars to make the plants MATS compliant, installing “scrubbers” — units which remove harmful particles from the emissions. Ivey said the units will remain in service for several more years.
Hathaway said these measures are just diversions from cleaning up Florida’s energy. Sierra Club is calling for Duke to shut down all four coal plants as soon as possible, and replace them with renewable energy sources.
“Basically they have four years to comply with MATS. They’re shutting down two plants because they don’t want to spend the money to make them legal,” Hathaway said. They just don’t want to do the right thing and move away from coal, because it’s so cheap. They could keep this plant going for a quite a long period of time, and you still have all of the mal-effects.”
“You not only have all the mercury, but they’re not paying for the health costs, they’re not paying for the pollution. If they put that into their business model and showed all the externalities, coal would not be cheap, it would be very, very costly.”
As of now, Duke plans on replacing the two closing coal units with a combined cycle natural gas plant in 2018. Sierra Club and the Clean Energy Coalition are calling this another step in the wrong direction.
According to Hathaway, expediency is the key in moving towards cleaner energy, and natural gas isn’t a good enough answer.
Ivey said that while Duke is actively exploring renewable energy options, the technology isn’t there yet for an efficient solar-powered system.
“Over the next few years as the cost of some renewable energy like solar continues to come down, we’ll be looking to see how we can take advantage of it in the sunshine state,” Ivey said.
“We’re certainly familiar with the technology. There are just some gaps right now in being able to store energy. One of the areas we’re really looking at right now is how can you store that solar energy that’s available at noon and redistribute to our customers who need it at 6 at night.”
Duke is currently investing in battery storage projects in Texas, and Ivey said, “we are constantly looking at what the alternatives are for making that renewable energy available when our customers need it.”
Hathaway said claims that storage technology is not good enough yet are simply not true.
“Storage is an issue, but Duke has one percent of its energy portfolio in solar. They’re doing better, much better, in other states. The only bad thing about solar is that solar voltaic arrays do take some acreage, but if they put an array up at Crystal River, they could do it. They could easily do it, they just don’t want to.”
Hathaway cited information from one of Sierra Club’s partners in the solar industry (who she could not name for legal purposes), which says solar electricity could immediately replace approximately 25 percent of energy capacity, and that battery technology is getting better all the time. The group of solar companies involved in the movement also endorses a hybrid approach to renewable energy, or allowing energy consumers to install solar panels that would feed directly into the grid. She further cited the partner, which claims “distributed generation (on homes) would not have a storage issue, and solar hot water on every home would make a huge difference as well. Incentivizing the average income American to install these energy saving devices to their homes … tying directly into the grid, is the key to solving the dirty energy source and loss of power through distribution issue.”
Right now, there is no option for customers to feed directly into the grid, but they can produce their own solar energy and sell back any excess to Duke. In North Carolina, Duke customers can opt to take part in a voluntary renewable energy program called NC Green Power, but Ivey said the logistics for a program like that are different in Florida.
“They have a renewable portfolio standard in North Carolina, whereas we do not here in Florida. We’re looking at a lot of plans and options regarding solar, but I don’t know if we’ll be in a position to allow the solar panels to go directly into the grid. In terms of just going out into a parking lot and just setting up a solar panel and connecting it to the grid I don’t see that as an option.”
Jennifer Winter, USFSP’s sustainability coordinator, said that since the university is locked into an energy supplier, the most important thing to focus on is conserving energy wherever possible. She is currently working to win a $500,000 grant for the school through Duke’s Sun Sense program.
“It would be a half a million dollar grant to basically retrofit the parking garage and build a carport on top and fill it completely with solar panels,” Winter said. “That would help with making the parking garage a net zero energy building. Also we’re retrofitting the lights there and putting LEDs in.”
Other projects proposed by students include installing more solar-powered electric car charging stations and making buildings more energy efficient. Winter is also planning a three week energy challenge in the spring as a part of Campus Conservation Nationals. CCN is an energy and water challenge where participants monitor the energy and water usage of buildings on campus and compete to try and save the most.
Winter is also looking into getting an energy dashboard for USFSP # an online system that would allow anyone on campus to access the energy use and water consumption for any building.
“We’re looking to sub-meter each building individually,” Winter said. “We want to have it in time for the challenge because you can compare buildings to buildings, like ‘what is RHO doing compared to the USC?’ You can look at the daily, weekly or monthly numbers, and not just in terms of energy usage, but carbon emission or money saved. It’s a very interactive database.”
Winter said that the only option right now is to “keep trying to create more of our own renewable energy,” and keep conserving.
Ivey said the public should keep in mind that Duke Energy isn’t the only piece of the puzzle in moving towards cleaner energy.
“We’re one small part of that change process. There’s state law, public service commission rules and regulations…we’re looking at all of those options and working with our elected representatives to determine what kind of change is necessary,” Ivey said.
The Sierra Club will launch its campaign with a rally across the street from Duke’s offices at 299 First Ave. N. in the southwest corner of Williams Park at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 13. Learn more about the Beyond Coal campaign at sierraclub.org/coal.
