Cleveland debates 50-year commitment to coal plant

[Algorem]

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2008/02/cleveland_debates_deal_with_co.html#more

Cleveland debates deal with coal plant
Posted by Henry Gomez February 22, 2008 11:18AM
Categories: Environment

Higher electric rates for Cleveland Public Power customers hang in the balance today as Cleveland City Council members consider a 50-year commitment to buy power from a new coal-fired plant.

Mayor Frank Jackson and CPP Commissioner Ivan Henderson want council members to sign off on the contract, which has been a source of controversy for months.

Council tentatively approved the deal last fall, but could opt out by March 1 without penalty.

American Municipal Power-Ohio, a wholesale power supplier to municipal utilities, proposes building a $3 billion plant in Meigs County. The plant would serve as many as 90 cities in three states. CPP, which does not generate its own electricity, would be the largest subscriber...


Dirty Dancing
Cleveland Talks About Going Green But Considers A 50-year Marriage To Coal

http://www.freetimes.com/stories/15/42/dirty-dancing

By Dan Harkins



Elisa Young spent her childhood summers with her grandparents in the little farmhouse outside Racine, Ohio, a quiet, hard-working village on the border with West Virginia, well within the still-beating heart of coal country. The Ohio River is a constant comforting roar in the distance. On drives south, this is where the mountains start to show. In 2000, when her grandmother passed, Elisa and her family moved in to become the seventh branch in a tree dating back to when the government gave a long-ago grandfather this land in exchange for his sacrifices in the Revolutionary War. Now, Elisa is fighting a few battles of her own.

A year before she moved here from Athens, with no family history of cancer, the now-44 year old learned of the melanoma in her skin. She learned of a thyroid disorder a few years back, and last year she was told to undergo a regimen of chemo to stave off a separate precancerous condition. But even if she weren't going through all this, she says she'd be angry anyway about all the toxins - blamed for everything from acid rain and cancerous conditions to radioactive contamination and global warming - that spew unfettered into the sky.

She soon learned about six neighbors with a variety of cancers and respiratory conditions, people who'd breathed the air here their whole lives and believed the coal industry had everything to do with how dirty it is. She counted four coal-fired power plants within 10 miles, burning coal that'd long been mined from the surrounding hills. When the wind blew across those stacks and strip-mined peaks, it almost always blew in Racine's direction.

But an epidemiologist who works for several Southeast Ohio counties told her an Ohio EPA study would only be done if the cancers were similar in type. He did note a higher-than-average number of cancers in general, Elisa says, but victory could only come through regulatory change, and how do you prove such a link to legislators struggling to preserve jobs in a dying industry while sitting on small piles of money made from the support of it?...