Having a husband that has been at a coal fired power plant for 35 years, they do not love these mandates. These recent mandates have caused the retiring of 80,000 megawatts from the power grid. Have caused the closing down and loss of jobs at numerous power plants. One of these mandates costs the company that my husband works for 17 million a year at 1 power plant to remove the amount of a bushel basket of ping pong balls filled with mercury amongst a entire cooling tower full of ping pong balls in one year. That’s also not factoring in the cost of 1.2 BILLION dollars to put the system in to place..... So multiply that times the number of power plants in the country that had to do this? Who do you thinks going to pay for it? That’s a lot of money and to top it off, it took a reuseable by produce of flyash, to be used in concrete and now it’s stored in landfills, because the mercury turns the flyash a dirty color, so the concrete is not attractive and they don’t want to use it. SWEET.
Hey guys, a clarification is in order: By “power company” I meant the companies that are the government regulated monopolies that deliver power to customer. They own the lines and sometimes have a separate subsidiary that owns generation. it is these companies, e.g. Duke, Vectren that I am referring to.
In general, power generation and distribution is shaping up to be like health care. We will have a few government controlled monopolies that will make serious money and they will always sign on to more regulation. It is classical crony capitalism and rent seeking.
They will protest loudly while at the very same time negotiating their rate increases. They will use their cozy regulatory relationships to drive out competitors.
The great part is that Capitalism will be blamed for the fiasco. Then as electric rates skyrocket we will see a flood of imported items that are energy intensive. Then Freepers will cry “Buy American!” and “Free Trade Doesn’t Work!”.