Harrison Power Station

Harrison Power Station is a power station owned and operated by Allegheny Energy Supply Company, a subsidiary of the investor-owned electricity utility Allegheny Energy (now FirstEnergy.) The power station has an installed capacity of 1,983 megawatts. It is located in Haywood, West Virginia.

In 2013 FirstEnergy sold the plant to subsidiary Monongahela Power, rejecting a proposal from Public Service Commission (PSC) consumer advocates, agency staff and others that the company should have used a "request for proposals" to seek competitive bids for the needed generation. Critics of the deal say FirstEnergy is proposing excessive rate increases to fund the "overvalued" transaction, ignoring the potential gains from better demand-side energy efficiency programs, and locking the Mon Power subsidiary into a generation mix that is too narrowly focused on coal.

Plant Data

 * Owner/Parent Company: Allegheny Energy
 * Plant Nameplate Capacity: 2,052 MW
 * Units and In-Service Dates: 684 MW (1972), 684 MW (1973), 684 MW (1974)
 * Location: Route 20, Haywood, WV 26366
 * GPS Coordinates: 39.384389, -80.331889
 * Coal Consumption:
 * Coal Source:
 * Number of Employees:

Emissions Data

 * 2006 CO2 Emissions: 13,450,027 tons
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions: 5,063 tons
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions per MWh:
 * 2006 NOx Emissions: 21,154 tons
 * 2005 Mercury Emissions: 397 lb.

Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from Harrison Power Station
In 2010, Abt Associates issued a study commissioned by the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, quantifying the deaths and other health effects attributable to fine particle pollution from coal-fired power plants. Fine particle pollution consists of a complex mixture of soot, heavy metals, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. Among these particles, the most dangerous are those less than 2.5 microns in diameter, which are so tiny that they can evade the lung's natural defenses, enter the bloodstream, and be transported to vital organs. Impacts are especially severe among the elderly, children, and those with respiratory disease. The study found that over 13,000 deaths and tens of thousands of cases of chronic bronchitis, acute bronchitis, asthma, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, dysrhythmia, ischemic heart disease, chronic lung disease, and pneumonia each year are attributable to fine particle pollution from U.S. coal plant emissions. These deaths and illnesses are major examples of coal's external costs, i.e. uncompensated harms inflicted upon the public at large. Low-income and minority populations are disproportionately impacted as well, due to the tendency of companies to avoid locating power plants upwind of affluent communities. To monetize the health impact of fine particle pollution from each coal plant, Abt assigned a value of $7,300,000 to each 2010 mortality, based on a range of government and private studies. Valuations of illnesses ranged from $52 for an asthma episode to $440,000 for a case of chronic bronchitis.

Table 1: Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from the Harrison Power Station
Source: "Find Your Risk from Power Plant Pollution," Clean Air Task Force interactive table, accessed February 2011

External Resources

 * Existing Electric Generating Units in the United States, 2005, Energy Information Administration, accessed Jan. 2009.
 * Environmental Integrity Project, "Dirty Kilowatts: America’s Most Polluting Power Plants", July 2007.
 * Facility Registry System, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accessed Jan. 2009.

Related SourceWatch Articles

 * Existing U.S. Coal Plants
 * West Virginia and coal
 * Allegheny Energy
 * United States and coal
 * Global warming