NEW YORK (AP) - Southern Co. has won approval to build a new coal-fired power plant in Florida that will use advanced technology designed to reduce emissions levels, the Energy Department said Tuesday.
The $569 million, 285-megawatt plant, will be located at the existing Stanton Energy Center near Orlando and will receive $235 million in federal funding, the government said. Co-owned by Atlanta-based Southern, the Orlando Utilities Commission and KBR Inc., the plant will produce 285 megawatts of electricity.
Located next to a 656-megawatt natural gas plant that opened in 2003, the plant will use coal gasification technology that turns coal into a cleaner-burning gas to make electricity. The plant will be able to use coal with a lower energy content, which makes up half of proven U.S. and world coal reserves, according to the Energy Department.
Last month, a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said the coal industry faces a bleak future unless ways are developed on a commercial scale to capture and store emissions of gases linked to global warming.
Half the country's electricity comes from burning coal, which is the largest industrial source of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that most scientists believe is leading to global warming, rising sea levels and other ecological changes.
President Bush has said capturing these emissions and sequestering them underground is a top energy priority.
The government hopes to have an experimental coal burning power plant called FutureGen built by 2012 capable of capturing and storing underground a million tons of carbon a year.
But the MIT report said more is needed and that the Energy Department's budget for clean coal programs 'falls far short of what is required' to ensure coal remains a primary fuel in a carbon-constrained world.
The administration asked Congress for nearly $600 million for coal technology research for the next fiscal year, including $79 million for carbon sequestration and $108 million for the next installment in FutureGen.
Shares of Southern Co. rose 11 cents to $37.19 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
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