Attorneys for the U.S. Justice Department and V.I. Water and Power Authority heard Wednesday that a federal judge may order Finnish power company Wartsila to address emission control issues with seven generators at the Randolph Harley Power Plant on St. Thomas.
The suggestion came during a consent decree status conference held Wednesday morning virtually before U.S. District Court Judge Mark Kearney. The Justice Department launched a civil action against the utility for violating the federal Clean Air Act in 2014. The consent decree was approved in 2016 and amended in 2019. Though a federal judge agreed to terminate a similar settlement agreement for the St. Croix power plant two years ago, attorneys told Kearney Wednesday that maintenance problems at the Randolph Harley Power Plant continue to hinder the utility’s efforts to achieve and sustain compliance on St. Thomas.
“They’re doing their best to try to fix them,” said Myles Flint, of the U.S. Justice Department Environmental Enforcement Section, “and once they’re fixed and we can kind of get them on that glide path — where there’s a period of time if they’re in compliance, or substantially in compliance — then we would be able to proceed with termination.”
WAPA’s outside counsel, Robert Smith, said the plant’s lack of redundancy has prevented technicians from taking units offline to perform needed maintenance. The utility has also struggled to adapt the four newer Wartsila generators to run on liquefied propane following what WAPA Project Management Director Maxwell George described Wednesday as a “catastrophic failure” last year. Smith said all seven of the Wartsila generators are having issues with controls meant to limit the emission of nitrous oxides and carbon monoxide.
“So we’re put in this position repeatedly where we have to make the choice,” he said. “Do we continue to comply with that particular limitation, primarily related to the control of NOx emissions and the water injection … or do we turn out the lights?”
Unit 27, a legacy generator which was brought back online last month after Unit 15 failed amid repeated outages on St. Thomas and St. John, has no operational emission monitors, according to Smith.
“That’s something that’s required by the consent decree,” he said.
“Yeah, I can see that being important,” Kearney observed.
Kearney raised the subject of a court order after George and plant superintendent Kevin Harrigan said Wartsila hadn’t yet given them a timeline to fix the emission controls. When Kearney asked if it would be helpful to issue a court order directing Wartsila to be more responsive, Smith sounded skeptical.
“If it was directed to them, if we had jurisdiction over them, I think it would,” he said. “But we’ve been dealing with other vendors where we’ve told them we’re subject to EPA and DOJ requirements, and the lack of response has been just enormous.”
“Okay, well, we’re going to test that,” Kearney said. Later, Kearney said he’d give WAPA personnel time to “light a fire” under Wartsila and another contractor.
“Let’s give Mr. Harrigan a little chance to say, ‘a federal judge is looking at you now, Wartsila,’” Kearney said. “Let’s give him a chance to be a customer for a bit and start asking questions.”
