Just saying, our political system has severely polluted our energy and electricity system with ghost cost to us little people...
Is that our future, all the electricity players get to burden their expensive pet project on the bottom half as they are draining our income away from us...then these sources get to pay the elections bills of the politicians.So Durbin wants to undermine the rate player and Exelon to support 200 workers and his getting elected through the green folks.
Typically the highest priced electricity source sets the prices on everyone else...the highest price electricity that gets on the grid they pay to everyone else.
I am just saying, I am against all sources of energy that survives by heavy government subsidies, then this expensive electricity comes on as the highest price source of electricity on the grid, this then set the cost we pay of even the lowest cost producers...
For a second here, I pity Exelon...
Effectively Durbin wants to turn Exelon into his piggy bank...
Exelon got a huge dividen cut, natural gas is breathing down their thoats...and wind is sucking the rest out of them...
Durbin blasts Exelon for FutureGen 'betrayal'
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin today blasted Commonwealth Edison Co. and its parent Exelon Corp. for what he termed a “heavy-handed corporate betrayal” after Crain's report of ComEd's plan to challenge a state decision to impose a surcharge on electricity customers statewide to pay for development of the FutureGen 2.0 “clean coal” power plant downstate.
In a statement, Mr. Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said Chicago-based Exelon, the state's largest power generator and the country's largest nuclear plant operator, acted as a member of the FutureGen Alliance for more than two years.
Exelon, he said, “was an intimate party to our state's strategy to negotiate this historic energy research project and the 2,000 jobs it will bring to our state. Exelon sent its smiling representatives to press conferences lauding the virtues of FutureGen.”
Then, Mr. Durbin went on, “last month Exelon abruptly resigned from the FutureGen Alliance without explanation, and today we learned Exelon has filed an appeal challenging the (Illinois Commerce Commission) ruling which is a critical part of our FutureGen strategy. This heavy-handed corporate betrayal has few parallels in Illinois history.”
Earlier today, before Mr. Durbin's broadside, an Exelon spokesman said the company never joined the alliance despite a January 2010 announcement that it intended to do so.
“Our decision reflects our long-held position that customers should not be forced to pay enormous above-market charges for electricity, as the project is now seeking,” the spokesman wrote in an email.
Asked about that, a Durbin spokeswoman confirmed that Exelon never paid any money or signed formal papers to join the FutureGen board. But, she said, the company participated in strategy and planning for two years and only stopped participating last month.
In a Feb. 18 letter from Exelon CEO Christopher Crane to Mr. Durbin furnished by Exelon, Mr. Crane said his company opted not to join the alliance because its financing plan shifted from one relying more heavily on corporate equity investment to one focused on charging Illinois consumers more for energy. In January 2010, when Exelon announced its intention to join the alliance, the plan was to ask 20 corporate members to contribute up to $30 million each.
“Unfortunately in 2012 this original structure was scrapped in favor of a new structure where corporate contributions are significantly reduced and customers are now required to fund approximately $150 million in annual above-market costs for the entire 30-year life of the project — a total of $4.5 billion,” Mr. Crane wrote.
The $1.6 billion project, which aims to retrofit a shuttered power plant formerly run by Ameren Corp. in downstate Meredosia and construct a pipeline to carry carbon dioxide for burial in nearby Morgan County, needs more than $600 million in private financing. The ICC in December approved a plan to require household and business power customers, whether they buy from utilities or competing retail suppliers, to purchase output from the plant at above-market prices.
Under the plan, the FutureGen Alliance projects household customers will pay a little over $1 per month extra for 20 years to finance the project.
Mr. Durbin finished his statement with this: “We fought Texas to win this project and we fought the odds to move it forward. Now we are prepared to fight Exelon to save 2,000 jobs for our state.”
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