The New England-Based Energy Supply Shrinks
From an aesthetic and health point of view, Michael Holtzman’s Fall River Herald report certainly doesn’t bother me:
“The decision is irreversible,” a spokesman for Brayton Point Power Station, along 300 acres fronting Mount Hope Bay, told The Herald News in an hour-long phone interview.
It’s “the permanent retirement” of coal-powered Brayton Point, not “mothballing” the 1,488-megawatt plant, said David Onufer, external communications and media relations manager for Houston-based Dynegy Inc.
Still, we need energy. Right now, thanks largely to fracking, we’re enjoying a period of relatively cheap energy, but that could change. If it does, the effect will be analogous to the increase of interest rates after a household has put itself into a great deal of debt during a time of cheap credit.
As a society, we’ve let environmental concerns rise up on the scale relative to the production of energy and all of the uses to which we put it. Some crisis may or may not shock us to the realization that we went too far, but clearing the landscape of existing energy sources while blocking anything that isn’t a fashionable, subsidized, “green” alternative seems reckless on its face.