WASHINGTON — As part of the climate change agenda he unveiled this year, President Obama made a commitment to significantly reduce the federal government's dependence on fossil fuels. The government, he said in a speech in June at Georgetown University, "must lead by example."
But just two miles from the White House stands the Capitol Power Plant, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the nation's capital and a concrete example of the government's inability to green its own turf.
The plant, which provides heating and cooling to the sprawling Capitol campus — 23 buildings that include the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, and congressional office buildings, in addition to the Capitol building itself — is operated by Congress, and its transition to cleaner energy sources has been mired in national politics for years.
But the failure of Congress to modernize its own facility also raises questions about the Obama administration's ability to limit emissions from existing power plants when it has not been able to do so at a government-run facility so close to home.
The Office of the Architect of the Capitol, which oversees the operations of the plant, first moved to end the use of coal there in 2000 but was turned back by resistance from powerful coal-state senators who wanted to keep it as the primary fuel. The effort was revived in 2007 as a central part of the Green the Capitol Initiative, led by Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time. The effort was defunded in 2011 after the Republicans took control of the House.
By then the plant had reduced the amount of coal in its fuel mix to 5 percent, down from 56 percent in 2007. But it made up the difference primarily with diesel fuel oil because, as the architect of the Capitol, Stephen T. Ayers, told a congressional panel in 2008, converting the plant to burn natural gas exclusively would have required equipment modernization costing $6 million to $7 million.
At the time, the plant was spending about $2.7 million a year on fuel oil, which was twice as expensive as the energy equivalent of natural gas. The plant remained below its capacity to burn natural gas, according to a 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office, and it continues to burn diesel, which, in addition to being much more expensive, is a significant source of emissions.
A review of public records and interviews with city and federal officials suggest that the root of the problem is a lack of enforcement by regulators and insufficient oversight from Congress.
Although the power plant is required to submit emissions reports to the District of Columbia's Department of the Environment, which coordinates enforcement with the Environmental Protection Agency, and to apply for operation permits for new devices, records show that both agencies have failed to ensure that the power plant is in compliance.