Impact of pollution controls on the productivity of coal-fired power plants

This paper contains estimates of the effect of sulphur dioxide emission restrictions on the efficiency of generating electricity from coal. Measures of generation efficiency of coal-fired power plants built since 1970 are derived using a best-practice frontier methodology. The efficiency scores are then used to evaluate the effects of regulations using plant operations data from 1984. This analysis reveals that environmental regulations have altered the productivity of producing electricity from coal. The effect of plant size on operational efficiency differs in plants with flue gas desulphurization systems (FGD scrubbers) as compared to those plants with no pollution controls. We also show the impacts of further decreasing the surphur output levels of plants on operational efficiency.