- Officials say coal ash – a byproduct of burning coal that poses risks to human health – has been cleaned up at Erickson Power Station, but contaminants could still be polluting drinking water near Delta Township.
- Residents and environmental advocates say the Lansing Board of Water and Light, which owns the plant, isn’t doing enough to clean up pollution. The utility says it’s in compliance with all regulations.
- The federal government is rolling back coal-related environmental protections and reopening coal power plants. Advocates say this could delay or stop cleanup efforts at sites like Erickson.
While driving down I-96 on the westside of Lansing, a candy cane striped smokestack looms over the skyline: the Erickson Power Station.
Although the power plant isn’t burning coal anymore, contaminants could still be polluting drinking water for people living near Delta Township.
Jon Kermiet, who lives two miles away from the station in Millet, said the uncertainties about polluted groundwater are causing fear and anxiety for nearby residents.
“What does this mean for us? What does this mean for our property? What does this mean for our future, passing our houses onto our sons?” Kermiet said.
The Lansing Board of Water and Light, which owns the power plant, said it’s complying with coal pollution regulations. Yet, environmental advocacy organizations and residents worry the company is taking too long to remediate groundwater contamination and will continue to delay cleanup efforts amid recent federal regulatory rollbacks.
From Erickson’s opening in the mid-1970s until its retirement in 2022, the power plant stored coal ash – a byproduct of burning the fossil fuel – in man-made ponds next to Lake Delta. Ash is mixed with water so it turns into sludge.
Coal ash contains a cocktail of contaminants like mercury, arsenic and lead.
When stored in ponds, chemicals from coal ash can seep into aquifers and the groundwater people drink. That poses both environmental and human health risks like cancer, heart disease, neurological impairments and reproductive issues, according to the Michigan Environmental Council.
In 2020, the utility submitted documents to the EPA that showed pollutants were leaking from the coal ash ponds, though it was unclear when the problem started. That same document asked for permission to delay closing the ponds that hadn’t been cleaned out yet – and showed the BWL violated regulations by failing to monitor groundwater in time.
The BWL said it has cleaned up the coal ash from all of its ponds. According to the utility, all ash was transported to a regulated landfill in Lansing in June 2024. Verification efforts were published at the end of that year and were approved by the state.
Now, the company said it’s trying to find out where the groundwater is contaminated – an area called the plume – so it can clean up the pollution. The plume is mobile, so the company needs to find out which direction it’s moving in.
Kermiet said the BWL needs to begin cleanup efforts.
“We can't live comfortably knowing that there's a toxic slurry of pollution potentially within the groundwater, within the aquifer,” Kermiet said.
How coal ash is regulated, and what the BWL is doing
Power plants across the country produce millions of tons of coal ash every year, but the ash has only been regulated for about a decade. In Michigan, the byproduct is stored at 18 power plants, most of which are along the shorelines of the Great Lakes.
There were no federal protections until 2015, when the Environmental Protection Agency passed a rule requiring structural integrity standards, emergency plans if contamination happens and groundwater monitoring.
About half of the coal ash-producing power stations were exempt from that rule at the time. During the first Trump administration, some of those protections were further weakened but remained mostly intact.
In Michigan, the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy also regulates coal ash ponds used for storage and disposal that require licenses for continued operation.
In 2014 – one year before the first federal protection – the Board of Water and Light closed a large coal ash pond by Lake Delta at the Erickson Power Station.
Gavin Kearney is a managing attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization.
“They claim that they took all the coal ash out of that impoundment before they closed it,” Kearney said. “We don't know that for sure. We also don't know anything about what they would have done to deal with years of groundwater contamination caused by using that surface impoundment.”
Mark Matus oversees the environmental services department at the BWL.
“We tried to clean up the site pretty thoroughly through 2014,” Matus said. “Since then, we’ve gone to the extent of removing all of the ash from the ponds and got a clean closure or full removal designation from the state.”
However, Kearney said the utility has delayed complying with regulations.
“What we saw with the BWL at Erickson is that their initial groundwater monitor results came in three years after they were supposed to under the [2015] rule,” Kearney said.
Likewise, in 2020, the utility submitted documents to the EPA that showed pollutants were leaking from the coal ash ponds.
The document also showed the utility asking for permission to delay closing the ponds that hadn’t been cleaned out yet and that the BWL had violated regulations by not monitoring groundwater.
Matus said the utility is now in compliance.
“I would say that really, there's no difference between what actually happened and what should have happened, or could have happened, had we started earlier,” Matus said. “We are in the same position now as we would have been if we just started in 2015. We caught up.”
Federal coal regulations are changing. How that could affect Erickson
Federal coal ash protections were expanded in 2024, but those expansions are being challenged by the Trump administration.
The White House says investing in coal and bypassing environmental regulations are “necessary to maintain operational coal plants, protect energy security, and allow time for viable technology solutions, avoiding broader risks to America’s economy and defense readiness.”
But research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis shows that retired coal plants are unreliable and restarting them “makes no economic sense.”
The 2024 expansion requires utilities to do a facility evaluation report – an assessment of coal ash on site, its magnitude, its location – so that then they can take steps to address it.
Kearney from Earthjustice said that since the Trump administration took over, it’s been “rolling back the clock” on coal ash protections, including the 2024 rule.
On Feb. 6, the EPA announced new orders delaying investigations and monitoring of coal ash that was required under the 2024 regulation.
Previously, power plant owners were supposed to report this year where and how much coal ash is stored at inactive ponds. Operators would be required to publicize those results by January 2029 and start groundwater monitoring shortly thereafter.
Now, monitoring doesn’t have to take place until February 2031, and the public report doesn’t need to be published until January 2032.
Kearney said the coal industry asked the government to extend these deadlines with no considerations for harm. He added that there’s a “fanatical devotion to coal beyond reason,” despite the fossil fuel harming human health, nature and pocketbooks.
“One of the things that we know from those industry communications is they said, ‘Well, what we want you to do is push back these deadlines so that later on, if you eliminate these protections, we don't have to spend money now complying with them,’” Kearney said.
Kearney said Earthjustice is expecting the EPA to deregulate coal more drastically soon. The New York Times recently reported that the agency intends to loosen restrictions and allow plants to emit more hazardous pollutants like mercury.
That’s why the organization is bringing attention to sites like Erickson across the U.S.
Matus from the BWL said the 2024 rule – the one requiring a facility evaluation report that just received the deadline extension – doesn’t affect plans at Erickson. The timeline the company is following is part of the 2015 rule.
“The rule doesn't affect us, and we are not slowing the process at all,” Matus said. “We will continue down exactly the path that we designed to complete the plume, complete our assessment of where the plume is and the cleanup efforts that we'll undertake thereafter.”
Amy Adams, the public relations representative for the BWL, said in a statement that Erickson is subject to the 2024 rule and will comply with the facility evaluation by Feb. 9, 2027.
Adams said the cleanup regulations – groundwater contamination and deciding how the company will clean up – is part of the 2015 rule.
Still, residents and advocates say the BWL is already taking too long to address coal ash contamination, citing the company’s previous delays. They worry that if federal regulations are rescinded, cleanup efforts will slow down even further.
Coal industry leaders have asked for loosening of groundwater monitoring standards, Kearney said, which means they’ll be less likely to find contamination.
They also asked for the ability to come up with their own, site-specific solutions to clean up coal ash.
“The rules as they exist right now, are prescriptive. They're relatively easy to detect, whether they've been complied with or not,” Kearney said. “What they're asking for is – rather than have a uniform set of standards from EPA – to let each site, potentially under the oversight of the state that they exist in, set their own protection standards and do it on the timeline that they see fit.”
Kearney said around 90% of U.S. coal sites are contaminating groundwater above protection standards, and few of those sites are fixing the problem.
Kearney and Kermiet, the resident living near the plant, said the Board of Water and Light is taking a “natural accentuation” approach to cleanup efforts – meaning they’re waiting to see if the issue will go away naturally.
“We deserve clean water,” Kermiet said. “We deserve clean air.”
The BWL hasn’t chosen a remediation tactic yet, but the EPA reports that natural accentuation alone isn’t a sufficient solution.
Steven Ashmead is a family medicine doctor and part of Michigan Clinicians for Climate Action.
He said when federal coal ash regulations are weakened or delayed, communities are exposed to contaminants for a longer period of time.
“Every delay in coal ash puts people in danger from that extended exposure to toxic pollution, and every rollback and standards puts communities at greater risk,” Ashmead said, “We should be accelerating cleanup, not creating loopholes that allow toxic waste to sit.”
