Oregon Public Broadcasting

The persistent haze in the Columbia River Gorge could get a lot cleaner, under a proposal state officials announced Thursday.

But as Rob Manning reports, the proposal for the Boardman coal plant isn’t sitting well with either utility officials or environmental groups.

The Boardman coal plant provides up to a quarter of the electricity Portland General Electric provides to customers.

It's also the single biggest source of haze in the entire state. But there’s a federal rule that says no single pollution source can be responsible for more than half the haze you can see in a protected natural area.

Andy Ginsburg: “Actually Boardman was in the range of four times the amount you can perceive with the human eye.”

Andy Ginsburg supervises air quality for Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality.

DEQ’s Boardman solution would use a scrubber to reduce sulfur dioxide. And Ginsburg says other changes could also bring nitrogen oxide down.

Andy Ginsburg: “They’ll be putting on new burner tips, and making some changes to the way air flows through the boiler, and getting about a 46 percent reduction. Then, in phase two, we’ll require them to put on advanced control technology – it’s the same thing that would be required at a brand new plant.”

Ginsburg says that new technology could cut nitrogen by 84 percent.

But Steve Corson with Portland General Electric takes issue with the $420 million price tag. He says it’s more than his company’s $300 million proposal – and may underestimate the true cost.

Steve Corson: “What we need to look at is the cost-effectiveness of what we do, whether it’s PGE’s proposal, DEQ’s proposal, or something else. In the end we need to be sure that the benefit the public and our customers will get from the money we spend is worth the amount that we spend.”

Neither approach satisfies environmental groups, though  DEQ officials come closer.

Aubrey Baldwin: “They chose the right control technologies, but they’re giving PGE far too long to install them.”

That’s environmental attorney Aubrey Baldwin. She says the reduction targets are also too vague.

Aubrey Baldwin: “They’re talking about percent reduction – sixty percent and eighty percent reduction, a decade from now, but they don’t tell us what that number means.”

As people weigh in on the DEQ proposal this fall, they should note what the plan won’t do. It won’t reduce greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide. In fact, all sides agree that CO2 emissions could go up slightly, even as the haze clears.