A lot of those power plants are going Galt. Not that the owners of them are doing it for that reason, its more due to the cost of the over regulation, then take my toys and going home.
Example in my area. The Stateline power plant in Hammond Indiana. This coal fired power plant was built in the 1920's directly on the state line between Indiana and Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan. You can't miss it, it's huge. Can be seen from Lake Michigan itself and the Skyway highway bridge.
For its first fifty years, no one thought much of it and it just did what it was intended for. It provided power for our local electric company NIPSCO and surplus was sold to Commonwealth Edison of Illinois for use in Chicago. It was made even bigger sometime in the late 1950's.
Fast forward to the late 1960's early 1970's when the enviro-wacko movement began. Then it wasn't seen as "progress" anymore but as a big polluter. One of my favorite lines my late grandma often said, "Back then it was progress, now it's just pollution". Back then she saw that the nation was changing and not in a good way (she passed back in 1986), lot of the things she said would happen if we continued down that road, have unfortunately become true. She did have hope at the end of her life, because her friend, Ronald Reagan had become president (yes, she had know Reagan since the 1960's).
But I am going off subject.
The plant went through many changes. Yes, it became a bit cleaner over the years with some pollution controls. One of the older units closed down. It kept making power for the Chicago area. But the area around it is now mostly poor and minority. And that pollution was racist, yes racist. Never mind the worst pollution occurred before there were minorities in the area to be polluted on. So it was on the hit list of not just greenies but folks like Jesse Jackson and his ilk (another plant in Pilsen was on that hit list).
The plant was sold to a third party, one of those companies that came into being after some de regulation, I think about 1999-2001ish. When they bought it, they told their investors that they would operate the plant until the existing equipment was worn out, in about 2020. After that they said it would not be worth the expense of doing any more upgrading under the EPA regulations of the Clinton and W era.
In comes Barry. As you all know, the EPA goes crazy with new regulations, many aimed directed at old "grandfathered" plants like Stateline. Then that company said, well, we will close in 2016, then it was 2014. It ended up closing in 2010, when they told their employees during the summer it would close at Christmas.
They recently sold the plant to an operator that will scrap it for its tons of steel and other metals. I am guessing the land will be left vacant for a long time due to leftover pollution and the regulations that come with building near water. So even if we got a government that rolls back the regs, this plant is toast.
