Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Exxon Free Environmental Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (6679)	12/1/2010 8:46:51 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 49098

Breaking Away From Coal Progress Energy Carolinas, one of the South’s larger utilities, faced a dilemma last winter. Several of its coal-fired power plants were aging and needed scrubbers to reduce emissions and meet North Carolina pollution laws. Executives figured that even tougher regulations were coming from Washington, and overhauling 11 generators at four plants would have cost nearly $2 billion, which would have been passed on to the company’s 1.5 million electric customers. Plunging natural gas prices, however, offered Progress Energy an alternative that would save money and help it achieve pollution goals at the same time: scrapping the coal plants and replacing them with two gas plants over the next four years, at a cost of $1.5 billion. “It’s a turning point,” said Bill Johnson, chairman and chief executive of Progress Energy, the parent company. “We’ve been a coal-based generator for decades, and until a few years ago, we thought we would remain largely coal-based and nuclear until people started talking about carbon regulation. We decided we had to do something about it.” A lot of utilities are coming to a similar conclusion. Over the last year and a half, at least 10 power companies have announced plans to close more than three dozen of their oldest, least efficient coal-burning generators by 2019. A few are being replaced by new, more efficient coal plants, but many more are being replaced by gas-fired plants. Coal still accounts for about half of the country’s electrical power generation, compared with about a quarter for natural gas, but that ratio has been shifting gradually toward gas over the last decade or so. Gas burns cleaner than coal, helping utilities meet state and corporate goals for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Older coal plants, on the other hand, require expensive upgrades, including scrubbers and other controls, to meet coming compliance rules to reduce mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions. Energy specialists estimate that compliance with new federal regulations alone could require $70 billion of investments over the next decade for replacing or retrofitting the coal power fleet. Just as significant, gas prices have remained at depressed levels over the last two years after a two-thirds collapse from the 2008 economic tumult, while coal prices have increased by more than a third this year because of higher production costs linked to tougher regulations and increased demand from China. Many people in the industry believe that gas prices will stay relatively low because of the proliferation of gas drilling in shale fields across the country over the last five years... Seventy percent of the nation’s coal plant fleet is more than 30 years old and a third is over 40 years old. Credit Suisse estimates that more than 30 percent of the American coal generating fleet have no emission controls at all, while another third lack either a scrubber for removal of sulfur dioxide or other controls for nitrogen oxides. Those plants, which are largely inefficient, will need expensive overhauls under the new rules... nytimes.com