One of the Midwest’s largest utilities has agreed to pay for 80 electric buses and more than 100,000 home air filters to resolve long-running litigation over unlawful emissions at a Missouri coal-fired power plant.
Ameren Missouri struck a deal with EPA and the Sierra Club to put $36 million into escrow to fund the electric buses as well as associated charging ports and to pay up to another $25 million to purchase air filters for 125,000 eastern Missouri customers. The proposed actions — outlined in a joint filing with U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel of the Eastern District of Missouri — would serve as repayment of a “pollution debt” for years of Clean Air Act violations at Ameren’s Rush Island power plant.
If approved by Sippel, the agreement would end more than 13 years of litigation over excess sulfur dioxide emissions at the 1,242-megawatt plant, which was shuttered less than three weeks ago. A court order had required the St. Louis-based Ameren Missouri to either install pollution controls or cease operations.
“Ameren broke the law and now it has to pay, but its money cannot bring back the innocent lives that utility executives cut short or repair the environmental harms of the illegal and toxic air pollution spewed by the coal plant,” Jenn DeRose of Sierra Club’s Missouri Beyond Coal Campaign said in a statement.
