On the surface NIPSCO doesn't seem to be bad about Renewables, as long as someone else does them:
https://www.nipsco.com/our-services/renewable-energy-projects
they offer net metering or feed in tariff or co-generation. From all I can tell, it's not a bad approach to people's decentralized electric generation.
However, it's with the big boys that NIPSCO constantly is greedy or just short sighted. They appear to be investing 250 million dollars in scrubbers for their Coal plant in Michigan City.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_City_Generating_Station
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Michigan_City_Generating_Station
why not just use that money to make a natural gas plant, or buy renewable energy sources.. I am guessing the money came from some federal grant and they are deep in the hog trough..
There is no doubt something needed to be done, since the plant was judged the 11th worst plant in the country for overall pollution out of 1200 plants in 2006 by the Environmental Integrity Project.. you got that right... #11 out of 1200. I wonder if this has anything to do with Lake Michigan having so many environmental problems.. but anyhow, moving on, why not spend that quarter billion dollars transitioning to a cleaner form of energy. Well, supposedly NIPSCO does get credit for making a very clean Natural Gas Plant near Terre Haute, Sugar creek,
http://www.ccj-online.com/nipsco-sugar-creek-generating-station/
but on the scale of Awful to just sort of crappy, Natural Gas is crappy compared to Coal being awful... it's not 'good' like wind power.. especially when the ice caps are melting and you are creating a natural gas plant that might not create a lot of other particulates and cancer and acid rain and toxic fish causing horrible stuff, but still creates almost as much CO2 as Coal.
http://www.narucmeetings.org/Presentations/HADLEY%20LA%20Clean%20Coal.pdf
what is absurd is that NIPSCO pays less than half a billion for Sugar Creek in today's dollars, $330,000,000 in 2008, which produces as much power as Michigan City and likely more efficiently and definitely less destructively, so why spend 250 on scrubbers for some derelict plant in Michigan City which looks ugly and spills toxic clouds into Lake Michigan and downstream no matter how much you spend on scrubbers?
So what does NIPSCO do when someone moves in and tries to sell them clean wind energy, tries to go all in and sidestep these problems almost completely?:
http://www.rtoinsider.com/nipsco-ferc-wind-farms-12411/
Rip them off, of course!
I once asked a really good business lawyer, and he told ms flat out that Fiduciary Responsibility has nothing to do with screwing people, and if NIPSCO wants to make excuses for it's greed, there aren't many when people are starting to suffer from global warming with droughts and food shortages while they try to siphon cash out of windmill installers. What a bunch of creeps!
