grandfathering

Is King Coal in Decline?

This revealing graph from Wonkblog has some important lessons. First, power plants last a long time.  Most of the generation fleet is twenty to sixty years old. Second, at this point, coal is basically a legacy fuel.  It exists because it pays to keep old plants open. They are grandfathered and don’t have to use …

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Out With the Old, In With the New

A recent GAO report pulls together a lot of information about electricity generators, which shows how much of our air pollution problems are due to aging plants: Older electricity generating units—those that began operating in or before 1978—provided 45 percent of electricity from fossil fuel units in 2010 but produced a disproportionate share of emissions, …

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