Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Energy, Environment, Junk Science | Tags: Colorado Economy, Governmental Regulation, Renewable Energy
The small town of Craig, Colorado is economically dependent on the local coal mines and the coal-fired power station. The 1,211 megawatt Craig Station is a supplier of relatively low-cost, reliable electricity. Approximately 300 people work at the plant. In 2002, the Tri-State Association embarked on a $121 million, multi-year environmental upgrade to address concerns about opacity and the mitigation of particulate matter. The upgrades were prompted by a settlement agreement reached between the Sierra Club and the five owner utilities of the Yampa Project. The plants were built between 1974 and 1984 at a cost of $1.2 billion, and receive their coal supply from two local mines, one located one mile from the plant and the other 30 miles Southwest.
The Sierra Club declared war on coal, one of our vast resources of reliable,cheap and abundant energy. According to Chris Horner, writing in 2010, the Sierra Club had budgeted $18 million at that point, and hired 100 people to promote a worldwide anti-coal campaign.
Environmentalists are members of a sect. Once they were obsessed by population growth; now they are driven to restrict access to energy because abundant energy fuels all the industrial activities they despise. … Environmentalists are mobilizing hundreds of anti-coal groups worldwide that are pounding out the false message that coal is dirty, dangerous and unaffordable.
When environmental groups failed to obtain U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, lo and behold along came a little known outfit called the Center for Climate Strategies (CCS) claiming to be an independent, objective advisory group that helps state policymakers get a handle on the issue of global warming and guide their exploration of policy options. They were funded by liberal foundations and were in fact an advocate for more state regulation. They said that the states were “laboratories” for climate mitigation policymaking and that states were compelled to act only because of Washington inaction.
You can sympathize a little. State governments didn’t know anything about climate change, they heard it was a big problem and they certainly didn’t want to be the ones blamed for an approaching disaster. And here was this nice group offering to run meetings and provide policy options, and get you in touch with all the other governors who were doing good things for the climate.
You would get to brag about your state’s reliance on clean green energy. Nobody paid much attention to the fact that the Earth had quit warming, or that solar energy only worked when the sun was shining and there weren’t a lot of clouds, and night, of course. Wind energy was free and clean, and nobody really pointed out that the wind blew only very intermittently and you needed one of those dirty coal plants ready to fill in every time the wind stopped blowing.
You can probably anticipate what has happened. Colorado imposed a renewable energy mandate that stipulates that 30 percent of energy production must come from wind, solar and other renewable sources by 2020. The eligible resources are solar, wind, geothermal, biomass or hydroelectricity. Everybody says there really aren’t any places for big hydro projects where there aren’t dams, and Big Green doesn’t like dams. Biomass doesn’t work, all the plants have gone bankrupt. And wind and solar just aren’t going to supply any 30 percent of anything.
“Society cannot have reliable power based on when the wind blows and/or when the sun shines,” said Rick Hohnson, plant manager at Craig Station. The Cimarron Solar Facility in New Mexico, for example, has a capacity to produce 30 megawatts. The Kit Carson Windpower Project in Colorado has a capacity of 51 megawatts. Capacity is what the project would produce if the wind was blowing at the right speed all the time; or, in the case of solar, if the sun was shining brightly all the time. Neither plant was operating at capacity when the video was made.
In Craig, the power station and its employees support all the other businesses in town, and, for example, revenue at the Best Western Hotel is forcing the owners to lay off workers for the first time.
“Really what’s happening in Colorado is this perfect storm of federal regulations hammering down on the energy industry and state regulations that are having a tremendous impact on the cost of electricity,” said Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research. “This is happening in places all around the country where we see this attack on the very energy sources that have powered our economy and made this engine run.”
It doesn’t matter to environmental extremists that coal today is burned more cleanly that ever before. The environmentalists find the mere act of taking it from the ground offensive to their sensibilities. They claim that clean coal requires carbon dioxide-free combustion, a practical absurdity since coal is a carbon-based energy source — but then carbon dioxide is not the source of global warming anyway — it’s that harmless, colorless, odorless gas that we exhale every time we breathe. And those fumes that you see coming from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants — water vapor. But never mind reality. The war on coal rumbles on, and what state regulation doesn’t destroy, Obama’s EPA will. Remember, Obama told us he was going to bankrupt coal.
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