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Friday, November 28, 2008

Environment - "'Clean coal' plant rises amid ill winds"

Updating a long list of earlier ILB entries on the Edwardsport plant, Rick Callahan of the AP has this lengthy report today, subheaded "Indiana site faces rising costs, future greenhouse curbs," that begins:

In the heart of southwestern Indiana's coal country, Duke Energy Corp. crews are building what the company's chief executive calls the power plant of the future -- a $2.35 billion complex where coal will be turned into a gas, stripped of pollutants, then burned to generate electricity.

The project, one of the "clean coal" technologies supported by President-elect Barack Obama, will become by far the nation's largest coal-gasification plant when it goes online in 2012, generating enough power to light more than 200,000 homes.

But opponents suing to halt the 630-megawatt plant near Edwardsport call it a colossal waste of money that will saddle the utility's Indiana customers with years of rate increases and release tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas tied to global warming.

"Once you do all the cost assessments, the fact is this is going to gouge ratepayers. The cost of this just continues to skyrocket," said Bruce Nilles, a Madison, Wis.-based attorney for the Sierra Club, which is suing to stop the plant.

Indiana regulators approved the project a year ago, even though utilities nationwide have pulled the plug on 65 coal power plants since early 2007 amid rising construction costs and expectations that Congress will limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Just this week, Indiana Gasification withdrew its application with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission for permission to build a coal gasification plant near Rockport, about 25 miles east of Evansville.

The U.S. Department of Energy in January yanked funding for the FutureGen coal plant in Mattoon, Ill., after its price ballooned to $1.8 billion, nearly double the original cost. And in July, NRG Energy's CEO canceled a coal-gasification plant in New York, declaring it had become too costly and was "ahead of its time."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 28, 2008 01:43 PM
Posted to Environment