St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Worth waiting before Ameren spends more money on environmental controls
If you wanted to know what the weather was like, would it be better to go outside and look or plug data into a computer model? My answer: I’d walk outside.
That’s why I supported legislation this spring to allow electric generating facilities in Missouri to have an option to use monitors rather than computer-generated modeling to determine the actual, real-time levels of sulfur dioxide coming from power plants. Monitors allow the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to determine the actual air quality in an area rather than relying on modeling projections.
In many cases models are skewed toward giving higher pollution concentrations than actually exist; in other words, modeling is looking for worst-case versus actual measurements of air quality.
It’s important to have actual monitoring data in hand before we ask our utilities to make investments that ratepayers will eventually have to finance through higher electric bills.
