New York Power Authority aborted plans for a "clean coal" facility in western New York, and steep costs could quell demonstrations elsewhere.July 16. 2008
The New York Power Authority on Wednesday nixed plans for a “clean coal” facility at its Huntley plant in western New York, casting doubt on the financial viability of clean coal technology.
NYPA officials say the electricity produced by the Huntley plant, in Tonawanda, N.Y., would be too expensive, requiring some $150 million a year in subsidies to compete with more conventional sources of generation. In a letter to New Jersey-based NRG Energy, which owns the Huntley plant, NYPA executives said they were not able to overcome the "substantial" financial hurdles.
The announcement comes less than two months after Gov. David Paterson said he would provide $6 million for a similar clean-coal demonstration project in Jamestown, N.Y. That plant, the first significant state investment in clean-coal technology, is run by the New York Oxy-Coal Alliance, which will also receive $800,000 to study its viability.
The idea of clean coal is to capture the greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired power plants and bury them, so they won’t be released into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. But the technology, in the early stages of development, hasn’t yet been shown to be cost-effective.
Though the two plants are different in scale—the 600 megawatt Huntley plant overshadows the 50 megawatt demonstration project in Jamestown—and would use somewhat different technology, the Jamestown plant is seen as a small-scale experiment to test the practicality of larger clean coal projects.
“The governor is very committed to advances in energy technology,” a governor’s spokesman said. “But the state has to do it in a fiscally and environmentally responsible way.”
Indeed, some environmentalists say the public’s money would be better spent on energy-efficiency programs, or wind and solar power, particularly if the high cost of large-scale projects makes even smaller projects impractical.
"There are countless environmental arguments against pursuing clean coal projects of this size before even proving they could work," said Jackson Morris, an air and energy program associate at Environmental Advocates of New York. "If this denial of a proposal gets as much publicity as the [Jamestown] endorsement received, it would do some good to reverse the message that that New York is friendly to experimental coal projects."
Both the governor’s office and NYPA say the Huntley decision will have no material effect on the Jamestown plant.
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