Central Texas is excited, as it should be, about Jewett's status as a Department of Energy finalist for a zero-emissions FutureGen coal power plant.
Lots of encouraging things are happening in the use of clean-coal technology. It's too bad what TXU Energy has in mind for Texas is the next generation of grandfathered polluters, newborn granddads. They would be up and running before federal or state policies take pollution and greenhouse gases more seriously.
Right now what Gov. Rick Perry is taking seriously is TXU's need for speed. He's ordered expedited permits at half the normal time.
TXU's hurry to get 11 new coal plants authorized is not just because of demand for electricity. It's because, as CEO John Wilder told the Wall Street Journal, TXU foresees federal restrictions on carbon dioxide and wants to get its preferred technologies up and running before laws change.
Grandfathered plants, those built with old-coal technology in the '50s and '60s and exempt from new restrictions on emissions, remain a huge environmental problem.
Texans should not be satisfied with less than the strictest means of keeping their air clean.
TXU has said that when all of the new plants it seeks are up and running its cumulative emissions will be 20 percent lower statewide. How? It says that it will retrofit existing plants with new emissions controls.
That begs the question: Why weren't these controls installed before? TXU said they were too expensive.
FutureGen aside, clean-coal technology is busting out all over. Utility company American Electric Power has filed permits for cleaner-burning coal gasification - IGCC - plants in Ohio and West Virginia. Another alternative is called ultra-supercritical superpulverized coal. It gets the most out of the fuel with the least waste.
In San Antonio, the municipally owned utility there is not just talking the talk about clean generation. It is delivering. San Antonio has two of the 10 cleanest coal plants in the nation.
Of course, the difference is that the San Antonio electric plants are owned by the people who breathe the results.
If the objective is simply to make a profit while generating electricity; if the objective is getting plants grandfathered before more restrictive air regulations come along, of course you'd do what TXU is planning.
But if you represented the breathers, as Gov. Rick Perry ostensibly does, you'd insist that the process slow down, and that the cleanest possible technology be installed. After all, these babies born as granddads are going to be around for a long time.
