Another one bites the coal dust. As we noted last week, it isn’t just climate-change worries or regulatory uncertainty that is sinking Big Coal: It’s current costs.
The latest project to fall by the wayside? Missouri’s Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. pulled the plug yesterday on a 660-megawatt coal-fired plant. When the project was started in early 2005, its total price tag was estimated at around $1 billion. But skyrocketing construction and engineering costs, as well as rail transport and new transmission capacity, pushed the total price to around $2 billion, AECI says.
The cancellation won plaudits from environmental groups like the Sierra Club, which had been campaigning against new coal-fired capacity. But it’s economics, as much as—if not more than–environmentalism, that’s helping to shift investment away from coal.
Big banks are getting colder feet when it comes to coal financing
Missouri’s first three wind farms
defective Suzlon turbines
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