After 15 years of pushing for the expansion of a coal-fired electric plant in Holcomb, Sunflower Electric pulled the plug last week.
Wind and solar energy have come into their own, industry leaders admitted, plus prices for natural gas have remained low, edging out the always-affordable coal.
The Hays-based Sunflower Electric and its development partner, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association of Denver, had plans to build an additional 895-megawatt coal-fired generating unit next to the Holcomb plant.
The expansion would have increased the Holton plants capacity six-fold, serving customers primarily in Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Texas. Kansas was to receive about 8% of the power from the expansion. CO2 emissions were expected to increase by 7 million tons of carbon every year with the new plant online.
Investors are increasingly wary about putting their money toward energy that uses dirty fuel.
The Holcomb expansion was expected to cost $3 billion.
GLOBAL WARMING is directly related to the spewing of harmful chemicals into the atmosphere.
When burned, coal releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
This most recent decade was the hottest in history. Scientists say the primary culprit for rising temperatures is the release of tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Despite this knowledge, the world burned more fossil fuels than ever before last year. This year, a record-high 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide are projected to be released by the burning of fossil fuels.
Of the three fossil fuels coal, oil and gas coal is the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive.
AUSTRALIA is in the grips of massive wildfires. More than 25 million acres a territory larger than the size of Switzerland have been turned to ash over the past two months.
The root cause of the wildfires is climate change. As the temperatures rise, the forests dry out. The dries get dryer, the wets get wetter.
