![]() ![]() “We have ended the war on American energy and we have ended the war on beautiful, clean coal,” he said in this year’s State of the Union address. Donald Trump has been particularly vocal about his support for clean coal. The United States has spent hundreds of millions in federal taxpayer funds chasing the chimera of clean coal. Kemper’s failure will have a profound impact on international plans to slow climate change which rely heavily on the rapid development of technology to capture carbon and store it, technology that has so far shown little progress. ![]() “It was exciting times, but it turned out to be like a mirage,” said Brett Wingo, a former Southern Co engineer who first went public with his concerns about Kemper’s construction delays in a front-page New York Times investigative report in 2016 and is now suing the company over alleged retaliation. View image in fullscreen Illustration: Thomas Pullin ‘A pony show’ Their public statements helped to prolong the notion that their “clean coal” power could be affordable, costing Southern’s customers and shareholders billions, giving false hope to miners and firing dreams that American innovation had provided a path forward for “clean coal” technology at a reasonable price. “If the initial project doesn’t work then who’s going to invest in any more like it?”Ĭompany officials have blamed the failure on factors ranging from competition from tumbling natural gas prices to bad weather, bad timing and plain old bad luck.īut a review by the Guardian of more than 5,000 pages of confidential company documents, internal emails, white papers, and other materials provided anonymously by several former Southern Co insiders, plus on- and off-record interviews with other former Kemper engineers and managers, found evidence that top executives covered up construction problems and fundamental design flaws at the plant and knew, years before they admitted it publicly, that their plans had gone awry. “This was the flagship project that was going to lead the way for a whole new generation of coal power plants,” said Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. It’s failure is also likely to have a profound impact on the future of “clean coal”.
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