We've been following the ongoing battle over coal in Kansas closely. (The latest is that Gov. Sebelius vetoed a bill that would have moved the plants forward and prevented her KDHE secretary from blocking future plants.)
Today brings an interesting development. A new report from a leading financial research firm, Innovest, comes to a blunt conclusion: building the plants would put Kansas ratepayers at substantial and ongoing risk. They would be saddled with long-term, unpredictable-but-rising costs.
Or, put another way: coal is not cheap.
It's somewhat startling that this is the first independent financial analysis that's been done of the plants, but the conclusion isn't surprising. As we've said a million times on this site, coal's apparent cheapness is a chimera, a fragile artifact of a number of factors that are rapidly changing.
I'm under the gun today, so I don't have time to get deep into the report. For that, I urge you to check out David Sassoon's rundown.
Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7
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amazingdrx Posted 3:46 pm
25 Mar 2008
But biogas is better with distributed generation serving a renewable smart grid.
The other wrong assumption is that wind can't serve as baseload power. With aforementioned smart grid and biogas distributed backup generation, no problem with wind variability.
Assuming carbon pricing might be wrong too. That kind of depends on politics. And the current recession turning into depression. The good ole hedge fund boys are threatening to loose a(nother?)financial meltdown if a democrat wins the election.
They may take their money offshore and never come back, hehey. And after all we've given them?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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