You are entitled to an opinion and this should be a discussion, but you are doing the same thing by saying that the people who disagree with you are obviously misinformed. I have no idea what your background is, but I've spent over a decade working in the energy industry specifically for a company that owns both traditional fossil fuel generation as well as wind and solar generation. Since I am on both sides of the equation I'm much less biased than someone who is only working for a fossil fuel company or a green energy company. I may not know everything about the specific laws in every state, but I can assure you I'm not "obviously misinformed". I'm basing my statements in this thread on intimate knowledge of very similar projects and working in the actual industry, not a bunch of buzz words and political catch phrases. I don't work for Duke so I haven't seen this particular contract, but I've seen many similar contracts and in most cases they are structured to be pretty good deals for the customer over the long run. As far as efficiency, wind doesn't work in central Florida. It only works in areas with a lot of wind. Solar works pretty well...it's sunny there a lot. As far as tax breaks, solar and wind don't get any more tax breaks than have been around for for oil and natural gas companies for years. Google master limited partnership or tax breaks for oil companies. The other benefit is these projects are often times owned by an independent company or part of the non-regulated side of a utility so they don't rely on rate payers if there are cost overruns like a typical utility project. The risk is on the company not the rate payers. Talk to
@ford91exploder about stranded costs from utilities spending money poorly.
Clean coal is kinda dead at this point. It pains me to say it because I really thought for a while it had a lot of promise. There was some encouraging progress made on plasma gasification a few years back but they were never able to take a sample project and get it up to commercial size and keep the economics in place. My company actually had a contract with the NY power authority to sell the output of a plant after converting an existing traditional coal plant to a "clean coal" plant. By the time the project was reading to break ground we couldn't get the economics to work and the project died. Now that nat gas is under $3 per mmbtu and near unlimited supply from all the fracking going on, it's hard to justify converting plants into anything other than nat gas plants. Nobody is going to lend you money to build clean coal. A short sited and limited view point, but you have to convince a bank to lend you money for these types of projects or they are dead in the water.
One area for coal that has some promise is in a process where you extract the CO2 from a coal plant's emissions and pipe it to a spent oil field where it is used for oil recovery. When a traditional oil field stops producing oil easily there is usually still a lot of oil left in the ground it just needs some help coming out. For years companies pumped water into an oil well under high pressure to get excess oil out. Even after using oil there is still residual oil that's hard to get out. It was discovered that CO2 works better than water and can get even more of the stranded oil out. The only problem was getting large concentrations of CO2. If you have a coal burning power plant in say Texas that is relatively close to a spent oil field you build a pipeline and pump it in. The system allows the CO2 to be recycled at the oil field and used multiple times. Once all of the oil is extracted the well is capped permanently trapping the CO2 underground. It's basically carbon capture and sequestration with a twist. The oil produced offsets the cost of the system and you end up with a coal plant with very low CO2 emissions. This had a lot more promise when crude was over $100 a barrel but the economics still work...barely.
Nuclear isn't much better off than clean coal at this point. The obvious risks and issues with storing spent fuel are one thing, but the bigger problem is again the nat gas prices being under $3 per mmbtu. Anyone living in Illinois should know this too well. Exelon is trying to get rate payers in the state to pay well above market prices for the output of several smaller nuclear plants there in order to keep them open. It's not very easy to justify the expense of new nuclear projects. I know this again from first hand experience.
