Utilities officials make case for stimulus funds for local power plant

In a city that gets 70 percent of its power from coal, any new laws regulating carbon emissions could have a drastic ? and expensive ? impact on wallets here, as much $15 a month for Colorado Springs Utilities rate-payers, Colorado Springs Mayor Lionel Rivera said Monday.

So Colorado Springs officials are putting great stock in a technique being tested at Martin Drake Power Plant that shows promise for removing pollutants from coal-burning emissions, at a fraction of the cost and size of other scrubbing techniques.

Monday, officials from the city and Utilities made their case to U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, to get $135 million in federal stimulus money to help install Neumann's technique and device at its other coal plant, the Ray Nixon Power Plant. Udall visited the Drake plant to hear a presentation on the technology.

"We've gotten better performance out of this than what we predicted in advance," said physicist David Neumann, whose Purestream air purification device has successfully removed sulfur dioxide , nitrogen oxide and particulate matter from the plant's exhaust.

Utilities has invested $10 million on Neumann's research so far, in a public-private partnership. His device has successfully removed the pollutants from 2 megawatts of production, and this year he plans to test it on 20 megawatts. The equipment is one-tenth of the size of massive scrubbers currently used at power plants.

Officials touted the economic benefits of building a device here that could be sold all over the world.

"We think we can put our technology where our mouth is," Neumann said. "Coal appears to be in our future for a long time to come."

"This is very exciting," Udall said after the presentation. He pledged to work to forward the funding request.

"We can get this right, then get out of the way of the public sector," he said.