Despite what the coal companies want to tell you, coal isn’t “cheap.” Coal prices have risen considerably in the past year, and building costs for new plants have escalated too – by more than 50 percent in some cases. According to CNN, so-called “clean” coal plants are very “expensive to build, and costs to dispose of their waste are steep.”

Coal is only “cheap” because of the tax breaks, cheap access to public lands, pollution forgiveness, and other forms of government support that politicians have given the industry – with our money. However, the costs are catching up to coal.

In fact, The Christian Science Monitor reported in late 2007 that plans for dozens of new coal-burning power plants had to be cancelled or delayed in 2007 because of rising production costs and concerns about coal’s long-term contribution to global warming. And, The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio reported that “clean” coal plant planning is stalling in state after state.

And the costs of coal are going to increase because of action governments will have to take to meet the growing global warming crisis, which has been created in large part to burning coal. The utilities talk about “clean” coal that will involve stuffing global warming pollution underground – even though the technology hasn’t even been developed.

The bottom line is that to date, executives for Sierra Pacific Power or Nevada Power won’t commit to not sticking ratepayers with the bills for increasing coal prices. With coal plant construction, they are asking us to lock ourselves into decades of payments to out-of-state coal interests when our sun and wind are free and abundant.

Their track record of managing your money is less than stellar. A recent Associated Press story details how the utilities wasted over $200 million of our money in an experimental coal plant that never ran. A spokesman for Sierra Pacific Power said that the waste of taxpayer money is acceptable, because the utility had “learned” how the technology didn’t work.