After months of hand wringing and speculation about the possibility of Montana and Wyoming coal being exported through Washington, a more concrete facet of the coal debate will come to the fore on Lake Washington today.
An inflatable coal plant will be launched on a barge to protest Puget Sound Energy’s continued stake in Colstrip, Montana power plants that are run off – no surprise – coal. The demonstration will coincide with PSE’s presentation of their 20 year plan to Washington regulators, a plan that the Sierra Club contends is too reliant on continued ownership of coal-fired power plants.
“It just doesn’t seem to jibe with Washington’s idea of moving beyond coal and toward clean energy,” says the Sierra Club’s Krista Collard.
The numbers are indeed confounding, given the Pacific Northwest’s reputation of being a haven for hydro-power that, destructive as dams are, don’t produce CO2.
Trent Latta on Kirkland Patch has the stats:
“Puget Sound Energy holds the largest ownership share in the Colstrip power plant. The generating facility is made up of four units. According to PSE it owns “50 percent of Units 1 and 2 and 25 percent of Units 3 and 4.” “The plant is currently the second largest coal-fired generating facility west of the Mississippi and it uses an entire railroad car’s worth of coal every five minutes. And coal accounts for 36 percent of PSE’s total fuel source; the Colstrip power plant provided 16.7 percent of PSE customers’ total power supply in 2012.”
A strong argument could be made that this should be the biggest coal debate in Seattle today, not coal exports that won’t be realized until years from now: Not only do Colstrip plants produce CO2, they produce a lot of it: It’s the eighth biggest emitter in the country.
And as Montana rancher Clint McRae told me after testifying in Seattle against exporting coal through Watcom County, even if exports are stopped, the coal that would be mined near his ranch to feed China could still end up being burned – in Colstrip.
The inflatable coal plant barge sails at 3:30 today.
