Late last year a federal appeals court upheld the EPA’s first-ever national standards for mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants. To help power plant operators comply with the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) and reduce emissions, ADA-ED has launched ADA Health Check.
The new service provides a compliance strategy review combined with expert analysis to ensure compliance with state and federal mercury rules, ADA says. This includes a check-up on compliance technologies, including unit-specific operations, fuel variability and combustion, APC equipment and performance, ACI/DSI system operation, sorbent usage rate, CEMS operation and mercury emissions.
“With the MATS rule in place, the clock is ticking on getting power plants into compliance,” says Sharon Sjostrom, chief product officer at ADA. “Many in the industry may feel deceptively confident that they are in compliance. However, we’ve seen that results from tests conducted in the spring may not represent performance during the hot summer months. Furthermore, fuel quality can affect mercury emission levels. Our goal with ADA Health Check is to help ensure that power plants can meet MATS emission levels across a range of operating conditions and that specific control equipment is safe and reliable.”
To address plant operating variables, the ADA Health Check team assesses the impact of changes in operations, including seasonal changes, cycling load and fuel variability on future emissions. Other assessments include rating Hg control performance using ADA’s models, providing recommendations for on-going compliance to improve reliability and reduce operating costs, and evaluating the safety, reliability, and operability of mercury CEMS, ACI and DSI equipment.
ADA’s in-house team of experts use an interactive engineering process to review plant operations from coal-pile to stack to assess the “health” of power plant control systems.
