Illinois Coal Plants Ahead of EPA's Proposed Mercury Standards

This is the same old song and dance. I been in the houston area for more than 30 years and everytime the deadline gets close. Everyone starts the same old crap it will cost to much, whatever. If they had started 30 years ago it wouldn't have been such a cost. Spread out of the last 30 years the price would have been small. Now here we go again lets stall some more.

More than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to shut down and an additional 36 might have to close because of new federal air pollution regulations. Can't burn coal, can't drill for oil, can't open nuclear plants... Is this Obama's plan to save the earth? Regulate everything so we eat berries and live in caves to save the environment.

That's what happens when companies act instead of #$%$ and moaning.

Illinois gets almost half it's electricity from nuclear power producing nearly no CO2 directly, no sulfides, mercury or smog. While it's encouraging that such improved standards are put into place, nuclear power avoids all these problems. I support energy liberalization where energy providers are open to competitive contracts. Whoever can produce the most power the cheapest and with the smallest amount of pollution wins the right to deliver that power to consumers. Solar panels have a low power density. You need a huge array of them in order to get much of anything out of them. Germany may be one of the largest solar providers in Europe, as a whole it only provides 2% of it’s power. In Germany they’re paying 50 to 70 cents a kilowatt hour. It’s the same in Spain and France. They’ve been pouring all these billions of Euros down a rat hole to get almost no electricity at and exorbitant price. Since they’ve shut down down eight of their nuclear plants, Germany is now instantly becoming an electricity importer, ironically buying nuclear electricity from France. They’re importing three billion euros worth of electricity from France every year, and pretending they don’t like nuclear energy. At the same time, they’ve decided to phase out their remaining nine nuclear power plants by 2022. The truth is Germany is already nearing completion of 13 Gigawatts (the equivalent of about 13 nuclear plants) of fossil fuel plants, mainly coal-fired, and is planning to build an additional 10 Gigawatts of fossil fuel plants to make up for the lost nuclear energy they otherwise would have had. Germany intends to terminate it’s nuclear power use. The renewable energy is basically just window dressing to cover the fact that Germany is planning to replace clean, non-carbon emitting nuclear energy with polluting, intensive carbon emitting coal plants. Despite having a policy to reduce their CO2 emissions by 40 percent by 2020, it’s going to increase by 40 percent if anything thanks in part to the loads of coal plants they intend to build. Highly contradictory statements compared to what Greenpeace said of Germany leading the way to a cleaner energy future. Why is Greenpeace helping Germany with the deception that Germany will “shift away from coal fueled power plants” and claiming that this will help Germany to reduce carbon pollution. It might be because Germany is one of Greenpeace’s biggest source of funding and that Greenpeace wishes the public to think this is a great victory for the environmental movement.

So tell us again how it can't be done. The only reason Texas is behind is that they refused to do anything at all while Bush was in office. We simply ignored the EPA for 8 years.

And electric rates? Ours went from among the lowest in the country to higher than average when the R's deregulated it.

Why didn't they mention how much are electric bills will increase.

See, that wasn't so hard... it was probably even cheaper than all the political campaign funds to get rid of the EPA.

Facing the high rate output of federal and state regulatory legislation is like drinking from a fire hose. Ten years ago our electric rate was 4 cents/ Kwh. Now it is 12 cents/Kwh, 300% increase accompanied by constant alarms about using too electricity.
A broken mercury CFL lamps being forced on us, are a Hazmat category cleanup. Tax dollars push solar, wind and whatever else, and the total output is a fraction of the need when the sun shines and wind blows. We have witnessed that the EPA central dictatorship has it's share of politics driving our decisions.

How much mercury are they talking about? Government estimates always dramatize and overstate problems to garner public approval in support of their spending proposals. We see this over and over. While they say they lower the mercury of a "distant smoke stack", they force public close proximity with mercury contained in the new CFL expensive light bulb. Seems they are working at cross purposes.

The US is the world’s largest oil consumer, but the US is also the world’s largest exporter of refined petroleum yet the ICPP refuses to factor that out of our carbon foot print?

And American Electric Power is slating to close 14 coal fired power plants by 2014. Cost = 6700 high paying Union jobs. Higher electric bills, unemployment increasing... Yessir, the Obama Administration is laser focused on jobs and consumer protections.

Every two months the Russian’s spill more oil than the entire BP’s Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

I live in a steel mill town where the air was considered hazardous to breathe especially a few years ago before the furnaces were idled, yet I am surrounded by old people who have lived here their entire life, many retirees from that mill. They made a good living here, now we send all the jobs and money overseas where they have no epa, still the same planet, same atmosphere, same greenhouse gasses.

And our electric bills just keep going up...

Get the mecury out of the coal plants and into the light bulbs where it belongs. ;-)

I find it ironic the EPA concerns itself over mercury, when every new lightbulb sold in this country contains mercury with no system to properly dispose of them.

yes elizabeth there is no such thing as clean coal.

Let's look at Illinois "high" electric rates. Doing a little spot checking in Illinois, I find in various areas of the state:
Constellation at 5.74
Spark at 6.98 to 7.38
City of Geneva at 5.491

In my Texas city, choices range from 6.2 to 12.4.
Abilene, TX - 7.5 to 12.5
Dallas - 6.2 to 12.4

Tell me again how high your rates are.

IT is kinda funny to see these posts against the EPA well how about the american lung association and its commercials.Are they wrong also?

We can't have these burdensome regulations hampering our industry. I mean, mercury is just a metal, right? How much harm can it do? Same thing with lead in paints and such. If Megyn Kelly can say pepper spray is just a food product, then I can say mercury is just a metal, and I like heavy metal.