July 11, 2010-By Michael Hawthorne in the Chicago Tribune. “By the time construction began on the Prairie State plant in 2007, Peabody had raised the price tag to $2.9 billion. Since then, the estimated cost has risen to $4.4 billion, forcing municipal investors throughout the Midwest to borrow more to cover the overruns.”
Editor’s Note: We take little solace in the fact that Valley Watch was the first organization in the nation to make the arguments this story outlines. We wrote letters to City Councils and Town Boards warning them of this exact scenario while they were being sold a pig in a poke by a greedy Peabody Energy.
Now, communities across Indiana and much of the midwest will face significant financial hardships because they chose to listen to snake oil salesmen instead of reasoned economic and environmental arguments.
First, it was Peabody’s greed but that greed was passed to those small, ignorant communities that allowed themselves to be taken in and will now forever pay a price in their own economic and environmental demise.
Truly sad but very predictable even in 2001 when we first began making those arguments.
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Sold on a promise of cheap, clean electricity, dozens of communities in Illinois and eight other Midwest states instead are facing more expensive utility bills after bankrolling a new coal-fired power plant that will be one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-change pollution.
As the Prairie State Energy Campus rises out of a Downstate field, its price tag already has more than doubled to $4.4 billion — costs that will largely be borne by municipalities including the suburbs of Naperville, Batavia, Geneva, St. Charles and Winnetka.
The communities are locked into 28-year contracts that will require higher electricity rates to cover the construction overruns, documents and interviews show. Municipal officials told the Tribune they expect costs to soar even higher before the plant begins operating next year.
Then there are the environmental costs of the project, which was designed by St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, to burn fossil fuel from one of its nearby coal mines. (MORE)
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