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Posts Tagged ‘carbon tax’

Portland General Electric plans to shut down its coal plant by 2020

Posted in Coal, Energy, Global Warming, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 22, 2010 |

Austin is not alone in preparing for clean and affordable energy.

When good news like this comes across the internet like this, we have to share. From the cloudy northwest:

Portland General Electric Co. would shut down the state’s only coal-fired power plant 20 years earlier than planned under a proposal it hopes to finalize with state and federal regulators in the coming months.

Essentially, the new plan to shut the Boardman plant down 20 years earlier than planned is to avoid extra costs for pollution controls (more than $500 million by 2017) and avoid carbon risks.  PGE still owes $125 million on the plant, and replacing the 500 MW of power will have its costs too, but read on…

Based on its analysis of carbon and natural gas prices, however, PGE maintains that a 2020 shutdown would be the low-cost, least-risk plan for utility ratepayers and shareholders [emphasis mine]. Under the existing plan, both face the risk of making the huge investment to control haze causing pollution – which does nothing to control the plant’s carbon emissions — then seeing the plant close anyway if global warming legislation or a carbon tax makes its output prohibitively expensive.

Read the full article here. Coal represents about a quarter of PGE’s generation mix. (Los Angeles also has a goal to get out of coal by 2020.)

Austin Energy has similar plans to get out of its only coal plant, the Fayette Power Project. No target date is set yet, but the utility’s 2020 generation plan would reduce Austin’s dependence on it by 20-30%. The next two years will be important as Austin works with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas  (the grid operator for most of Texas) and the Lower Colorado River Authority (co-owner of Fayette) to see what the most practical and fair way out. Learn more about the resource plan and some excellent additional recommendations at www.cleanenergyforaustin.org. You can also learn a lot from AE’s website www.austinsmartenergy.com.

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By promoting cleaner energy, cleaner government, and cleaner air for all Texans, we hope to provide for a healthy place to live and prosper. We are Public Citizen Texas.

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Dallas Journalist Shares “6 things economists wish journalists knew about greenhouse gas reduction”

Posted in Global Warming, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 28, 2009 |

Dallas Morning News journalist Elizabeth Souder shares the Six things economists wish journalists knew about greenhouse gas reduction on the DMN’ Energy and Environment Blog.  They sound a lot like the 6 things EVERYONE should know about greenhouse gas reduction, so I thought I’d share them.  Kudos to Elizabeth Souder, and be sure to keep up with her work on the Energy and Environment Blog.

I’m attending the McCormick Energy Solutions Conference for journalists this week at Ohio State University. Andy Keeler, an economist with the John Glenn School of Public Affairs here at the university, offered six things journalist should know about greenhouse gas reduction.

1. It makes economic sense to reduce greenhouse gases. Even though doing so costs money, it will end up costing us even more if we do nothing. Dealing with the effects of global warming, of seeing Texas and the Southwest become a dustbowl, could be financially devastating.

2. Cap and trade, which is the method Congess is considering to regulate greenhouse gases, does two distinct things. By issuing tradable allowances for greenhouse gas emissions, the system raises the price of energy produced from greenhouse gas-heavy fossil fuels. It also generates revenue for the government by selling those allowances, and the money can be used for anything.

“Criticism of cap and trade which mixes these two together is deliberately misleading,” Keeler said.

3. Cap and trade creates broad and efficient incentives. Using market signals as part of our response to climate change risk is good public policy.

4. Who gets the money the government makes by selling allowances is a public expenditures question, not an environmental question.

5. A carbon tax and a cap and trade program have strong similarities. But the details of the program are more important than the choice between the two.

Keeler concludes that, even though economists tend to agree that a tax is cleaner and more elegant than a system of trading allowances, the current bill includes reasonable goals. Therefore, rather than starting from scratch and renegotiating the cap, which leads to a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and an 80 percent cut by 2050, Keeler prefers to stick with the current bill.

6. Trade and competitiveness concerns exist, but are neither broad nor large. The bill could have significant effects on the iron, steel, aluminum, cement and paper industries, but those problems could be solved with targeted rules, rather than broad regulations.

“It’s not to belittle the problem for people in these industries, but it’s misleading to cast it as an overall disaster from a trade point of view,” he said.

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