"The ONLY reasons I can see for them building any since they lose money is for international PR or because some law makers somewhere created little known special tax breaks for them to build them into law.
Outside of those two reasons, I couldn't tell you why they would consider it."
I can tell you why. Its called clean air credits. Its a billion dollar market. For each unit of energy generated at some big coal plant, a fraction must be generated by some clean energy source to offset the pollution. This must be done regardless of cost or lack of profit. If the power companies don't meet their quotas, they get multi-million dollar fines. Some companies have been known to charge exhorbitant sums selling their credits to other companies who could not meet quota. You can thank the environmentalists and your congressmen for this.
As much as everyone complains about Bush, he deserves a whole lot of credit for not signing the Kyoto Treaty. It would have made this problem alot worse.
Thanks, figured something like that, but did not think of that exact thing.
I'm not finding any information quantifying emissions trading. I've been reading about it for years in my windmill magazines though. We have 12 gw worth of windmills in this country which means they produce nearly 30,000,000 mwhr/year of power. The wholesale value of that power is about 1 to 1.5 billion dollars per year. I doube that emission trading is of equal value. At least not in this country yet. The think about emission trading is that there are a lot of people telling their politicians they want to pay more for electricity if it is from a clean source.
I don't buy into global warming though.