Rich Miller over at CapFax is urging caution, rather than celebration:
Yesterday’s announcement that the lucrative FutureGen project would be sited in Illinois created a lot of hype. But the Bush administration’s Energy Department wasn’t at the press conference. The US government’s share of the project’s cost is huge, and DOE officials have been grumbling about the rising costs of the project for a couple of weeks (a bit before Illinois started to get private signals that it was ahead in the bidding war with Texas) so that should have sent up a lot more red flags than it did…
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: From today's News-Gazette:
Jack Slutz, the acting principal deputy assistant secretary for fossil energy, released a statement Tuesday calling for restructuring the current agreement between the federal government and the alliance, which is composed of power companies from all over the world.
Slutz said that because clean coal technology is so important, the public deserves to get the best technology in the most cost-efficient way. Restructuring is the answer, he said, and more information will be forthcoming in the next month.
FutureGen Alliance spokesman Lawrence Pacheco called the statement "baffling."
One big concern of mine, if and when they break ground on this plant,,it is not allowed to turn into the bloated hog the Clinton Power became,,,,,,,years of corruption,,,,enormous cost overruns,,,,,no one tending to business,,,,and by the time they got it finished it was obsolete, Hopefully at FutureGen,,,,there will strict guidelines and controls on all contruction levels. No more moving a pile of dirt on one shift,,,,then the next shift moving it back and on and on.
Bruce Byrd, maybe Steve Beckett will be but in charge of the FutureGen project and none of your concerns will be an issue!
So let's save the money by not building FutureGen so we can send it overseas for oil! (Sarcasm!)
If he is,,,,,,,,then any screw-ups will not be reported, any questions to that effect will be turned around and deflected on the person asking the question. Then an outside legal firm will be retained to handle the litgation,,,even though the county employs lawyers that are supposed to know how to do this kind of thing. Of course it is rough in a county where the current county lawyers may need to morph back into the local legal community someday,,,cant afford to hack too many people off.:)
Since the government is funding 3/4 of FutureGen, maybe it will be in charge of construction and keep the project from becoming a bloated hog like Clinton Power, which was built by private industry.
"No more moving a pile of dirt on one shift,,,,then the next shift moving it back and on and on."
That's what you get when you rely on uneducated labor as your salvation. The 1950s are over -- time to move on.
not the 50's.......the mid and late 70's up to the early eighties,,,,,,,and they were college kids working summers out there making a killing,,,,,,,so it was not uueducated labor,it was people that latched on to the gravy train while it was running:)
After years of apparent cooperation between the DoE and the FutureGen Alliance, I'm sure it's just an amazing coincidence that the DoE's sudden desire for "restructuring" happened simultaneously with the Alliance's decision not to site the plant in Texas.
Since the government is funding 3/4 of FutureGen, maybe it will be in charge of construction and keep the project from becoming a bloated hog like Clinton Power, which was built by private industry.
That would be a regulated, private industry, in a monopoly business. The end result was not pretty - kind of like the govn't run construction project known as the Big Dig:
Since the government is funding 3/4 of FutureGen, maybe it will be in charge of construction and keep the project from becoming a bloated hog like Clinton Power, which was built by private industry.
That would be a regulated, private industry, in a monopoly business. The end result was not pretty - kind of like the govn't run construction project known as the Big Dig:
What, you mean to say that in a monopoly business, private industry doesn't automatically do a better job than the guvmint? That is heresy, redstate. So, what again is the argument against the cities of Urbana and Champaign taking over the monopoly, regulated water utility? How about having city-owned electrical utilities? Oh, that's right, that's been tried in Rantoul and doesn't work. Why their rates are almost as high as the private utilities' rates. And their service? Why, their service would be even better if their utility were owned by a megacorporation, instead of their local municipality. That's got to be true.
I am posting this just 20 miles from one of the Mattoon’s competitors, which was Penwell, Texas …..
Yes, there is disappointment here that we were not selected ….. but there is also optimism that we might yet have a ‘Futuregen’ of our own, a private/corporate venture …..
I think concerns over costs are valid ….. Living in Texas, we are mindful of what can happen to a major government/corporate project when costs skyrocket ….. we saw first-hand what happened to the superconducting suppercolllider ….. and the price tag for FutureGen is already twice what it was a couple of years ago, and they haven’t even broken ground on it.
Thanks for the opportunity to share your forum.
Jeff McDonald
ArchaeoTexture
Midland, Texas
So, what again is the argument against the cities of Urbana and Champaign taking over the monopoly, regulated water utility?
My only argument against that is "taking over". If Ill-American wanted to sell, I wouldn't have too much of a problem with it. Utilities are hard for conservatives, because they don't work real well as private or gov't owned - they are still monopolies.
What is the DOE problem with Futuregen? Consider that the first sign of a problem was the DOE request that the announcement that the plant was to be built in Illinois be delayed from the announcement scheduled for Tuesday. It would be naive to believe either that DOE was not aware that the site to be announced was Mattoon. It would also be naive to believe that the plea for delay had anything to do with costs.
When delay evaporated and the choice of the Mattoon site was made public DOE calls on the alliance to slow down because it is concerned about "costs". It is hard to believe that the plant would be more expensive to build in Illinois than at the alternative sites in Texas. But on reflection it may not be monetary costs with which DOE is concerned. It may well be as simple as Red and Blue instead of Black and White. Illinois, for now, seems to be a safely Blue State in 2008. Texas has been reliablely Red. The problem that Mattoon has as a site for this bold and expensive energy experiment is that Mattoon is not in Texas.
It is hard to believe that the plant would be more expensive to build in Illinois than at the alternative sites in Texas.
It is? In this state of "big labor"?