This time they’re Illinois’ Progressive-Democrat governor, the inestimable JB Pritzker, and the State’s Party-dominated legislature. (The Wall Street Journal misattributed the fiasco to Pritzker, but even within Party, Governors need the complicity of Party’s legislative syndicate.) Following is from the Chicago Tribune, from which the WSJ quoted.
The owner of two-thirds of a massive natural-gas-fired power plant in Will County is moving their part of the facility to Texas.
Literally.
As in, putting huge turbines on flatbed trucks and driving them south to friendlier climes.
We’ve learned that two-thirds of the capacity at the 1,350-megawatt Elwood Energy facility—the largest natural-gas-fired peaker power plant in Commonwealth Edison’s territory and one of the biggest in the nation—now is being shut down thanks to Illinois’ landmark clean-energy law [Climate & Equitable Jobs Act] enacted in 2021. The sudden removal of that whopping 900 megawatts of capacity could well drive up local electric bills that already have been rising.
And this:
The remaining three units at Elwood will continue to operate at the site and now will be permitted to do so under the law until 2045. Why? Because the previous owner, J-POWER, sold those three units to Dairyland Power Cooperative, of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, which by virtue of being a nonprofit is allowed by CEJA to operate gas-fired power plants over the next few decades that otherwise would have to shutter in a few years.
So those emissions also will continue well into the future, but only because ownership changed from a private company to a nonprofit.
Yes, that’s how CEJA works. If you’re not a privately held gas-plant operator, you can continue to pollute.
This is far more than the empty virtue signal that the WSJ article suggested. This is the wanton foolishness resulting in destruction that Party is so enthusiastically pursuing for reasons only Party members can have a glimmer of understanding.