 Good Grief! |
Posted on 12/30/2005 8:01:33 AM PST by SmithL
LAUGHLIN, Nev. - A large coal-fired power plant will close at the end of the year rather than violate a court-ordered deadline to install an estimated $1.1 billion in pollution-control measures.
Southern California Edison said Thursday the Mohave Generating Station, at the center of an environmental dispute several years ago, would close. The plant has provided the utility with 7 percent of its electricity, but the company said its 13 million customers would not be immediately affected because of other power sources.
Under a 1999 consent decree won by environmental groups, the aging Mohave plant was required to upgrade its pollution controls or close by Jan. 1, 2006.
The groups had argued the 1,580-megawatt plant, about 100 miles south of Las Vegas, had repeatedly violated the Clean Air Act, contributing to haze at the Grand Canyon.
The utility, the plant's majority owner and operator, had hoped to keep it open as natural gas prices have continued to rise.
In a filing Thursday with the California Public Utilities Commission, Edison said it planned to continue negotiations aimed at keeping the plant open but expected to close it for at least a few months. The environmental groups have said they would not agree to a deadline extension.
The plant is the only customer of the nearby Black Mesa mine, which provides about 160 jobs to members of the Navajo Nation. The mine, run by Peabody Energy Corp., will likely be forced to close.
"It was the environmental groups that helped bring this about - for altruistic reasons, of course - but the result is that a lot of breadwinners are going to be out of work," said George Hardeen, a spokesman for the Navajo Nation.
Environmentalists said they sympathized with the tribes, but argued Edison had plenty of time to fix the plant's pollution problems. Edison should invest in renewable energy sources on tribal land, which would benefit the people "who have been exploited all of these years by the greater metropolitan centers of the West," said Roger Clark, director of the Grand Canyon Trust's air and energy program.
Enjoy your higher bills.
In the words of one of the two punks from the movie Roxanne:
"Thank you, asswipe."
Like a casino. Lets eliminate all the real productive jobs, and replace them with make believe jobs.
No need to thank me. Its what I do. I'm an environmentalist.
This is just a ploy. They will install scrubbers. It just makes economic sense. The costs of the scrubbers will be pased on to the consumers . . . and life goes on.
Isn't that Dusty Harry's neck of the woods? Guess he didn't want to be bothered with "constituents".
Let me guess. The unmarked bills for Harry Reid's family didn't arrive in time.
> ... the company said its 13 million customers would not
> be immediately affected because of other power sources.
And because it's WINTER.
If you live in CA, plan to get off-grid, or get out
entirely, before summer.
This certainly doesn't help the Vegas area with their growing energy demands. As long as the enviromental whackos get to call the shots, in a few short years you can kiss that area goodbye.
Seriously, the tribe itself should see if it can buy or become partners in the power plant, perhaps get the land it sits on declared as tribal land. And then work to get a variance on the pollution controls until they can put together the backing needed to do the work.
This is political, and needs a political solution. Republicans should look for an opportunity to salvage this situation. It could be a two-fer for them, they get to outmaneuver the enviros, and penetrate a Dem constituency, at the same time. And keep a tribe from falling back into government-caused-dependency.
Something tells me you are right.
| Good Grief! |
I wonder how much power they'd have to produce in order to generate a billion dollars of profit just to break even.
I'm guessing you probably don't run a business.
Or it could be that Dingy Harry's lips are so far up the lunatic environmentalist fringe's butt that he couldn't intervene even if the unmarked bills came in sufficient quantities.
And I'm guessing you don't know much about the generation buisness. Watch the headlines, somebody will install scrubbers on this.
> This certainly doesn't help the Vegas area with their
> growing energy demands.
And growing water demands, and of the two, the water
may be the more serious problem.
Somehow I don't expect to see this story in the WaPo,
with an "indian women and children hardest hit" subtitle.
LOL! The plant is less than 300 miles from the largest clean-burning coal deposit in the world (Clinton's Escalante Staircase Nantional Monument).
A lot of people have the impression that a power plant is a license to print money. It isn't, those guys walk a very tight line. I had the experience of sitting for a while next to the guy whose job it was to make the daily deals that kept a power plant running. Some days they are making money, some days they lose a small amount, but its better to keep running, some days they shut down because the money isn't there.
They are constantly calculating the cost of fuel versus the price offered on the market, and some days they run, and some days they don't. This is a pretty big plant, not a peaker. But the economics are always borderline.
The wackos got a bunch of things shutdown in CA (Rancho Seco, SONGS-1) and elsewhere (Trojan), and now they're going after facilities in NV. Arizona is next.
So another 1600 MW of capacity is lost. I hope the people in CA remember this incident, and where the blame lies, when they're looking at blackouts sometime in the future. But, being mostly idiots, they probably won't, and will blame the "evil corporations", the utilities, for "price fixing".
Oh those quirky environmentalist, aren't they a fun group! Killing off jobs and people. They should be made to support everyone who loses their income due to environmental activism.
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