Dive Brief:
- The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity is criticizing the Sierra Club for celebrating earlier this week the announced retirement of the 150th coal plant in the U.S. since the environmental group launched its Beyond Coal campaign in 2010.
- The groups said the Sierra Club response is "akin to partying at the funeral" of the communities where the plants are being shut and warned of "a dangerous overreliance on natural gas" for electricity.
- The Sierra Club was touting the announcement that the 1,500-megawatt Brayton Point Power Station in Massachusetts—the largest in New England—would close by 2017. The plant's new owners, private equity firm Energy Capital Partners, could not reach a deal with ISO New England for the plant's output.
Dive Insight:
While the Sierra Club would like to take credit for the 150 plants that have been or are planned to be shuttered, most of them would have shut down because they are old, unable to compete economically with newer natural gas-fired plants and the cost to retrofit them to meet tougher emissions rules is prohibitive. Moreover, most regions in the nation have more-than-adequate reserve margins and many of the plants are simply not needed.