Energy Alabama and GASP Comment on Alabama’s Volkswagen Beneficiary Mitigation Plan

Energy Alabama, along with GASP, provided comments to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) on their effort to draft Alabama’s Volkswagen Beneficiary Mitigation Plan (BMP). The BMP will be the state of Alabama’s strategy to best use Volkswagen’s settlement monies pursuant to a Clean Air Act violation.

Our comments included what we believe to be the three most important principles for ADEM to consider:

1. Pursuing actions with the largest emissions reduction per dollar spent;
2. Pursuing actions that reduce future stranded infrastructure costs;
3. Pursuing options that lend themselves to clear metrics and demonstrable results.

Furthermore, our overarching recommendations for ADEM included:

1. Emphasize electrification of all transportation
2. Work with utilities to share data
3. Track and report emissions reduction to the public
4. Invest in projects with large immediate emissions reductions for heavy-duty transportation

Our full comments can be found here: https://alcse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Volkswagen-Settlement-Beneficiary-Mitigation-Plan_20170511_FINAL.pdf