Earth Equity News

Feds Quietly Pull out of West Virginia Coal Project. By Ken Ward, Charleston Gazette, September 4, 2008. "Federal officials have quietly pulled the plug on funding for construction of the proposed [$416 million, 85-megawatt] Western Greenbrier Co-Generation [coal-fired power] plant... Developers have for more than five years struggled to come up with private money to match DOE funds, and environmental groups have complained that the project would pollute local air and water. DOE spent more than $8 million on project planning, and the West Virginia Economic Development Authority lost $3 million in a loan guarantee approved in 2004 by the Wise administration. 'It's good that the federal government finally came to its senses,' said Joe Lovett, director of the... Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, which [has] challenged plant permits... DOE dropped the project in mid-June, less than two months after it formally approved a loan of up to $107.5 million... [and] a month after developers had obtained private funding to help complete a critical engineering report for other private financiers... Joe Culver, a DOE spokesman, said in the statement, 'it became clear that the ultimate success of the project was not likely'... Originally, the 85-megawatt plant was expected to cost $215 million, and developers hoped to get half of that in loans from the DOE's clean coal program. But costs skyrocketed to $416 million, and developers have said that they were facing financial problems."