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Opening Arguments

War wounds

The War on Coal is going very nicely, thank you, and it looks like Indiana will be one of the early  casualties:

Last week the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a shocking drop in power sector coal consumption in the first quarter of 2012. Coal-fired power plants are now generating just 36 percent of U.S. electricity, versus 44.6 percent just one year ago. 

It’s the result of an unprecedented regulatory assault on coal that will leave us all much poorer.

Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”

The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.

Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year's because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.

Just our luck that this is one of the campaign promises Obama actually kept, huh? Oh, quit yer whinin', you Earth-killing lovers of heat, light and air-conditioning. Turn off those nasty appliances and start getting your cave tidied up.

Comments

gadfly
Wed, 05/23/2012 - 9:47pm

The conspiracy is greater than can be imagined.  The EPA is shutting 32 coal-fired power plants nationwide and our stupid Indiana legislature just passed a law targeting 10% of our power  to  be sourced from renewable sources, most likely wind turbines, by 2020.

Next the legislature should designate the wind turbines as our state tree.  Doesn't anybody have a clue as to the high cost and unreliability of wind energy?  Whenever a wind farm is attached to the power grid, a hydrocarbon-based plant has to be spinning its turbines in order to be available when the wind stops. With the low cost of natural gas, why would we build a single wind farm?

Folks favoring wind tubines should read about how dangerous these machines can be to humans.  Then they should investigate the abandoned wind farms in Hawaii and the west coast.  But this WSJ piece says what needs to be said:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303592404577364244006391420.html

 

 

 

 

Tim Zank
Wed, 05/23/2012 - 10:25pm

I sincerely hope a few of the morons that foisted this totally unecessary destruction of the American economy survive long enough to live in their own misery. Imagine the historians , looking over the ruins shaking their heads and saying "Holy Crap, these idiots had enough natural resources to last centuries, how could they be so stupid?"

Are any of the Democrats that read this blog smart enough to do this?

 Take your electric bill in your left hand, and a calculator in your right hand, now take the total amount of the aforementioned electric bill and multiply it by 8 on the calculator. this is your new Hopey & Changey Electric Bill in 3 short years.

It's called math.

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