EDMONTON — A study says coal-fired power generation is likely to cause thousands of early deaths in Alberta and cost the province hundreds of millions of dollars before government regulations force plants to reduce emissions.
The study also says the plants — many of which have decades to comply with new federal emissions rules — will also be behind thousands more hospital admissions and lost workdays. It concludes the costs associated with poorer health and reduced productivity amount to a subsidy for generators because they don’t have to pay for them.
“In essence, it’s a health subsidy that’s being picked up by the people of Alberta,” said report author Tim Weis of the environmental think-tank Pembina Institute.
But an industry official said other studies tell a different story.
The institute teamed with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, the Alberta and N.W.T. Lung Association and the Asthma Society of Canada on the report that was released Tuesday.
The study combined previous research measuring the health effects of various pollutants with the known amounts of pollution coming from Alberta’s many coal-fired power plants, which burn more coal than the rest of the country combined.
It draws on many studies from the U.S. and Canada on contaminants including sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury and particulates and uses figures on the amount of those toxins released by each generator from the federal pollution inventory.
The groups also considered how long each of Alberta’s plants will continue to emit. Federal rules say coal-fired power stations have 50 years after their construction before they are obliged to reduce their emissions to match those of natural gas-fuelled generators, although provincial regulations could limit that to 40 years.
All the information was crunched together with other data such as the distance of each plant from major population centres to estimate the probable toll on the health of Albertans.
Using a peer-reviewed model developed by the Canadian Medical Association, the report estimates that between 2008 and 2031, there will be just over 3,000 premature deaths from health problems related to coal-fired electricity. It predicts there will be more than 2,000 hospital admissions for the same reasons, nearly 10,000 visits to emergency wards and more than 100,000 instances of asthma sufferers having to restrict their activities.
Those impacts are a small fraction of overall hospital or emergency visits, but Weis said that shouldn’t reduce their importance.
“That doesn’t diminish the fact that those are real people going to real hospitals,” he said. “Just because there’s something worse doesn’t mean we should not be looking at areas we know we can improve.”
And the impacts have a price.
Depending on how they’re calculated, Weis said health costs of coal-fired power work out to between 0.7 cents per kilowatt-hour to 2.1 cents. That amounts to about $300 million a year.
Weis said if that figure were reflected in the price of coal-fired power, renewable energy would look more attractive.