The proposed Sherco natural gas plant bill will soon be at Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton’s desk, give him a call and tell him you oppose this billion-dollar boondoggle.
Call Gov. Mark Dayton at 651-201-3400 or email him at mark.dayton@state.mn.us.
Read more below in the op-ed that we submitted to the Minneapolis Star Tribune or in our original post excoriating the planned fossil fuel power plant.
Minneapolis Star Tribune – February 13, 2017
Sherco power plant: The wrong project, for the wrong reasons, at a big cost
By John Farrell & Karlee Weinmann
A bipartisan group of state lawmakers, including Gov. Mark Dayton, last week endorsed Xcel Energy’s plan to build a new natural gas plant in Becker, Minn. What they’ve left out is that this project is a multibillion-dollar boondoggle.
Fortunately, there’s still time to stop it.
Led by Xcel and labor groups, proponents say the plan will safeguard jobs lost when Xcel shutters coal-fired generators at the site in the mid-2020s. But the new facility is projected to employ just 150 workers, roughly half the number currently employed by the coal operations. It’s hardly worth the $1 billion upfront price tag and billions more in fuel costs borne by ratepayers — especially when there are cheaper ways to protect the workers and generate the power.
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This article originally posted at ilsr.org. For timely updates, follow John Farrell or Karlee Weinmann on Twitter or get the Energy Democracy weekly update.
