Progress Energy announced Tuesday that it was closing 11 coal-fired plants in North Carolina by 2017 and replacing them with plants that run on natural gas and nuclear power. The closures represents a bet that “natural gas prices will stay acceptably low and that stricter rules are coming on sulfur dioxide emissions, which cause acid rain.”
The plants marked for closure were built between the 1950s and the 1970s. “Some of these plants are quite old,” Progress CEO Bill Johnson told The New York Times. “They have a lot of useful life left in them, absent the need to put emissions control units on them.”
In a statement, North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue said that the “transition to toward cleaner sources of energy is good for the environment and the economy.”
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