War On Coal

Updates

February 21, 2014: Bloomberg is reporting another coal plant in the heart of coal country is closing. The country is converting to natural gas. This is for the archives. Some day folks are going to be wondering why their electric bills are so high. Come back to this article for an explanation. For the archives.

For evidence, look to the E.D. Edwards power plant, built in 1960 close to the coal mines south of Peoria. While it pumped out electricity for once-booming steel mills and distilleries, the plant cruised along and avoided spending the millions of dollars to install a scrubber on its smokestack.

And so Edwards, confronting a need to meet state and federal rules to clean up and mounting competition from cheaper natural gas, was part of an unusual transaction last year. Owner Ameren Corp. paid Dynegy Inc. to take Edwards and four other Illinois coal plants off its hands, a transaction that perplexed some analysts.

“This was an exercise in kicking the can down the road,” said David Johnson, an analyst at ACM Partners, a financial advisory firm that reviewed the sale for environmentalists trying to scuttle it. “To throw money at someone to take something off your hands is a bit atypical.”

Ameren’s move is among a series of closures, bankruptcies or fire sales by companies desperate to get out of investments in aging U.S. coal plants. Owners are reacting to abundant electricity from natural gas and wind, flat or declining demand and a slew of new environmental rules meant to clean up the country’s top source of pollution. Also in the mix: efforts by environmentalists targeting individual coal facilities.

Original Post

 

This story is now tracked here. 

Bloomberg is reporting a very interesting and instructive story in Mississippi. It appears almost everyone will lose under O'Bama's war on coal:

Coal’s future is being built in rural Mississippi, and so far this is what it looks like: a $1 billion cost overrun, a stew of legal battles, a revolt by ratepayers and a credit downgrade for the local utility.

With all those challenges, Southern Co.’s $4.7 billion project in Kemper County may still be coal’s best hope to survive President Barack Obama’s limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. 

It’s a transformative project,” said John Thompson, a director of the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based environmental group. “It will be the largest and cleanest coal plant in the world, but I don’t think it will hold that title for long.” 

For the archives. I don't follow coal very closely. But something tells me this is not going to end well for someone (or someones).