The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's regulations for coal-fired electricity plants may close some Duke Energy plants, like the 81-year-old one on Charlotte's Mountain Island Lake (aka our drinking water).

The Riverbend coal plant (they like to call it a "steam station" because the company burns coal to heat water that morphs into steam that turns turbines that generate electricity) went online on Oct. 29, 1929. It's an easy date to remember since it's more widely known as "Black Friday," the day the Stock Market tanked and the Great Depression got kick started.

At the time, the Riverbend plant was located out in the sticks. Now, as the city inches toward it, those same dozen miles to Uptown feel a lot closer.

Most coal plants don't look like this anymore. (See photo.) It was built back when it took a village — literally, there was a village built around the plant — to build and run a coal plant. It's small, compared to the huge coal plants on Lake Norman and Lake Wylie. It's inefficient; it takes about 12 hours just to warm the 'ol girl up. And, the two high-hazard, unlined coal ash ponds behind it drain directly into Charlotte's main drinking water reservoir. It's no longer a job producer either; only a few people are there at any given time.

Those ponds probably seemed like a good idea when they were created; in fact, the first one, built in the mid-1950s, was a little ahead of its time. See, the people in the village were so tired of their houses, cars, kids and everything else being covered by black soot that they moved away and the company eventually sold and moved many of the mill-style houses. To keep much of the soot out of the air, they added precipitators, those metal structures behind the brick building, that add water to the soot to weigh it down so it can be pumped into the ponds where the sludge stands for a few days — again allowing gravity to do it's work and pull some of the yuck out — before being drained into Mountain Island Lake.

But, even that innovation (well, it was at the time) is more than 50 years old.

Here's the thing: Coal plants are only supposed to be viable for 30-40 years. That makes Riverbend the company's great grandma coal plant, and it's time to dig its grave.

Here's the other thing: Duke Energy says they're going to close the plant in a few years, but they still use it, they say, for peek energy usage periods — like when it's really hot or really cold and all of us crank up the AC or the heater at the same time. I know for a fact that they still use it because I live nearby and see the black puffs of smoke rise from the smoke stacks when it's cycled on.

However, recent EPA regulations might mean the end for Riverbend ... and it's about damn time.

Oh, P.S. Because it's such an old plant, it doesn't have many of the air quality controls on it that more modern plants include.

Happy breathing!

From Kingston, Tenn.'s Bristol News:

New regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency mean a lot of coal-fired power plants will shut down soon, said James Wood, deputy assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy.

He said the approval of new rules for air pollution, water pollution and waste disposal could result in the retirement of between 35 and 70 gigawatts of coal-fired power generation nationwide, with EPA predicting much less and some analysts predicting much more.

Read the rest of this article, by Debra McCown, here.