Don't Forget Taylorville
EDITORIAL STAFF, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

February 1, 2008 – CHICAGO, ILL. - About six weeks after a consortium anointed the Downstate town of Mattoon to be the site of a megabucks clean coal plant, the feds pulled the plug on the project. They're worried about rising costs, and rightly so.

But really, why didn't the government do this before a "winner" was announced?

Our sympathies to Mattoon. The folks there probably haven't even cleaned the champagne stains from the carpets yet.

We hope that project can be revived in a more cost-effective fashion. Whether that happens or not, there's still hope for a clean coal plant in the state -- specifically, in Taylorville, a town about 200 miles southwest of Chicago. That's where developers hope to build one of the nation's first plants that would generate electricity from coal while dramatically slashing smog and mercury pollution.

Last summer, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency approved a plan for a 630-megawatt plant. "The future of clean air in Illinois starts now," declared Doug Scott, director of the IEPA.

Except that it didn't. The Taylorville plan zipped through the Illinois Senate 48-0 and then ran aground in the House. The problem: The power generated by the plant would cost customers more than that generated by the older, dirtier plants. The bill would have locked utilities into long-term contracts at rates above current market prices. And the developers weren't required to cut carbon dioxide emissions, the main greenhouse gas responsible for heating up the planet.

All of that made Taylorville a tough sell, for good reason, after the brouhaha in the General Assembly over rising electricity rates. But we're happy to report that Taylorville isn't dead. Plant developers, politicians and the state attorney general's office are exploring a revised proposal to build the plant, which could include cutting some of the carbon pollution. It would also almost certainly include changes to protect Illinois ratepayers.

Let's wait for the details. But in principle, that sounds good. We hope that a deal can be worked out that would allow Illinois, and the nation, to reap the benefits of building a clean coal plant in Taylorville at a reasonable cost to consumers.

Illinois has much to gain as the center of clean coal. The Taylorville plant would produce enough power to serve hundreds of thousands of homes. The gains in clean air also would be significant. It would take a year for the Taylorville plant to emit the amount of lung-damaging sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide spewed out in just two weeks by aging coal plants in the Chicago area, said John Thompson, director of the coal-transition project for the Clean Air Task Force. Emissions of toxic mercury would be reduced by 95 percent. "There is no solution to the nation's air pollution problems unless we clean up coal," Thompson said.

FutureGen looks to be dead. Why not build "NowGen" in Taylorville?

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