More Good CO Energy News: Xcel Will Retire Old, Dirty Coal Plants

Coal corporations have been running ads in the Denver, CO TV market trashing natural gas for the past couple of weeks.  The reason?  The state government wants to replace antiquated, dirty coal plants with newer, cleaner natural gas plants.  The coal commercials point out a fact that I won’t deny: coal is up to 3X cheaper than natural gas in some markets; but that I will provide more detail on: because coal corporations successfully externalize their costs to every other industry.  Instead of charging customers for the real-world costs associated with the dirtiest of all fuels, coal corporations let the health and environmental industries pay for the bad effects of their product.

The good news is enough citizens have recognized coal’s costs to them and have done a better job of organizing and fighting back against the powerful coal lobby in forming public policy.  Take a look around – stories of coal plants that utilities have wanted to build but have instead been scrapped for other power plants are beginning to populate the news.  Additionally, as older coal plants near the end of their serviceable lives, utilities will be faced with the prospect of either retrofitting them, building new ones, or replacing them with cleaner alternatives.  In Colorado, the fate of old plants that generate 900MW of electricity is being decided.

If those plants end up going offline and are succeeded by natural gas plants by 2017, almost 1/3 of Colorado’s coal generation will have been replaced.  5 million tons per year of carbon pollution will be avoided, making a not-so insignificant stride toward a cleaner energy future.

Even better is, as I alluded to above, Colorado isn’t alone in this effort.  The piece I link to above also points out that Nevada has decided that instead of building a new 750MW coal plant, officials have decided to build a 750MW natural gas plant and combine it with a 50- to 100-MW solar PV plant.  One-half of the CO2 pollution that coal plant would have generated will be avoided by building the natural gas plant.   A much higher percentage of the CO2 pollution will be avoided by incorporating the utility-scale solar PV plant.  Eventually, even the natural gas plants under consideration today will need to be replaced with solar (PV or more likely thermal) and wind plants.  Emitting one-half the pollution in the near-future is a good idea.  But we need to emit even less if we are to avoid the worst-case climate crisis that we’re hurtling towards today.

EPA Will Review Potential CO2 Dangers

Back in the dark days of the Bush “administration”, the EPA was prohibited by the science-hating Bushies from controlling CO2 emissions.  Elections, as Bush famously said, have consequences.  In this case, the 2008 election means that the EPA will review the CO2 emissions control policy.

At a minimum, over 100 planned coal plants will be immediately impacted.  If CO2 is, as it should be, regulated by the EPA as pollution, the costs of operating a coal power plant will finally begin to more closely reflect reality.  Coal plants have operated for yeas at a lopsided advantage over other types of plants.  As a mature industry, coal should be able to pay for itself.  It should not receive any more taxpayer dollars and should instead by charged to operate according to its real costs on society and the planet.

More generally, operating costs for everybody will go up in the short term as those costs are passed along.  That, in turn, will have a direct influence on the imperative to develop clean energy infrastructure that doesn’t have the same costs associated with it.  The “sky-is-falling’ message will be incessant from the over-indulged coal industry.  Keep the following in mind as they gear up their multi-million dollar marketing campaigns: more jobs will be created and maintained with renewable energy; the health of people will improve with time as old coal plants are shuttered; our emissions of climate change-forcing gases will slow down and eventually decrease.

Kudos to the Obama administration. This won’t be a silver-bullet solution, but it is one step in the correct direction.