Sherco Power Plant: The Wrong Project, for the Wrong Reasons, At a Big Cost

Date: 22 Feb 2017 | posted in: Energy, Media Coverage | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

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.

Read the full story here.

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.

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Nick Stumo-Langer

Nick Stumo-Langer was Communications Manager at ILSR working for all five initiatives. He ran ILSR's Facebook and Twitter profiles and builds relationships with reporters. He is an alumnus of St. Olaf College and animated by the concerns of monopoly power across our economy.