One of Donald Trump’s big platforms during his campaign of lies was “clean coal.” Clean coal and white supremacy. Over the summer of 2017, more stories began coming out about the Kemper County Energy Facility in Mississippi. This plant has been billed as America’s, and more importantly the fossil fuel industry’s first “clean energy” facility that doesn’t utilize any of the known clean energy sources. The facility had already cost $7.3 billion since the project began about 8 years ago and was estimated at costing $2.4 billion. As The Guardian uncovered, the disaster going on in Kemper County has been well understood behind the scenes for some time now.
But thousands of internal documents reviewed by the Guardian and a series of interviews with Kemper staff uncovered evidence that the company had information showing that the project would blow through state-imposed budget limits five years before the company decided to reverse course and become an exclusively gas-fired energy plant. [...]
The documents show that Kemper’s design faced what proved to be an insurmountable issue: it required vastly more maintenance downtime than originally predicted, and according to one 2014 report would be offline 45% of its first five years rather than the 25% the company had publicly projected.
So while Secretary of Energy Rick Perry runs around telling everyone how humane fossil fuels are and how new “clean” versions of it are here and now, the reality is that the fossil fuel industry is simply spinning its wheels, wasting our time and a lot of our money. The Trump administration, and the Republican Party for that matter, know that clean energy in the form of coal is a Catch-22, so they’ve already begun loosening up the meager health regulations created to protect coal workers dying of black lung. But loosening up regulations is being coupled with attacking actually clean energy at the same time.
The Guardian points out that so far, after seven years, the Kemper County plant isn’t exactly paying for itself.
Kemper, which received roughly $400m from taxpayers, managed to produce electricity from some of its clean coal equipment for “over 100 hours”, or roughly five days last June, before construction was shuttered for good amid further budget blowouts.
In other Mississippi news:
Mississippi teachers haven’t received a statewide pay raise since 2016, and it's doubtful extraordinary measures will be taken this session to make another salary raise happen.
That $2,500 boost, part of a more than $100 million incentive package signed by Gov. Phil Bryant, though welcomed still wasn’t enough to lift the state’s educators from being among the lowest paid in the country.
The average teacher salary in Mississippi was $42,744, according to the National Education Association, which ranked the state 50th in the nation in its survey of average teacher salaries.
There’s a special election coming up in Mississippi. Just saying.
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