One less coal plant being built to darken midwestern skies.

A power plant ran out of steam Monday as developers announced that they have decided not to build the $1.6 billion Big Stone II project near South Dakota’s border with Minnesota. The joint announcement by four utilities brings to an end one of the larger environmental debates in the state in recent years because of mounting public concerns about global warming and energy policy.

The proposed plant was also seen as a major potential pollution source for the Minnesota River. With one of the companies involved already stating that it can meet it’s requirements by expanding wind power, this looks like one of those cases where what isn’t happening is good news all around.

If you’re a U.S. homeowner thinking of upgrading your heating and energy systems in the next few years, you’ll want to keep an eye on a proposal called “Recovery Through Retrofit.” (pdf file)

To answer the most important question, yes, there will be money available.

The Department of Energy today also announced $454 million in Recovery Act financing for home retrofits and energy efficiency.

Stimulus funds amounting to $390 million will go to the new “Retrofit Ramp-Up” initiative, intended to help create partnerships to deliver energy bill savings to entire neighborhoods and towns.

This is a proposed policy that just came out of the Vice Presiden’s Office.

At a Middle Class Task Force meeting earlier this year, the vice president asked the White House Council on Environmental Quality to develop a proposal for federal action to lay the groundwork for a self-sustaining home energy efficiency retrofit industry.

In response, the Council set in motion an interagency process with the Office of the Vice President, six other White House Offices and 11 departments and agencies to develop recommendations for how to use existing authority and funding to accomplish this goal.

Here’s a chance to see whether a good idea can make it all the way from proposal to policy to possible legislation and remain a good idea. That’s the way it’s theoretically supposed to work, but too often these days doesn’t. But this sis an idea that would create jobs, cut energy costs, improve people’s houses and save them money. Sounds like a no-brainer.

As nice as it would be to see the country give up its dependence on coal as an energy source altogether, the reality is that we’re going to be burning coal for quite some time to come. Given that situation, the least we can do is try to keep the pollution down to a minimum.

Both sides in a dispute over a coal-fired power plant in far Southwest Virginia said they were happy after the state issued a new permit for the plant yesterday.

David K. Paylor, director of the state Department of Environmental Quality, issued the permit shortly after a Richmond Circuit Court judge released an order setting aside the original permit.

The judge, Margaret P. Spencer, had ruled Aug. 10 that the old permit did not sufficiently limit mercury pollution. But she didn’t issue her order until yesterday, sending the issue back to the state.

The new permit includes a 4.45-pound-per-year mercury limit that was in the previous permit. But the new permit removes a provision that allowed that limit to be loosened if the plant had trouble meeting it.

“We wanted a firm mercury limit” and got one, said Cale Jaffe, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a Charlottesville-based organization that challenged the permit on behalf of several environmental groups.

The new permit, Jaffe said, includes “the most stringent mercury limit for a coal-fired power plant in the nation, bar none.”

The 585-megawatt plant in Wise County, owned by Dominion Virginia Power, is under construction and scheduled to begin operating in mid-2012.

A strict limit on mercury emissions is a good thing, the bad news is that there’s no corresponding limit on carbon dioxide emissions from the plant. Oh well, one step at a time is still progress, and given recent news about mercury contamination in humans, the lower the limit on mercury, the better.

Under the Bush Administration, an all-out effort was made to open up public lands for oil and gas leasing. The Obama Administration, including Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar it seems, is looking at alternatives.

Mr. Salazar, appearing in Las Vegas with Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said that 670,000 acres of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (an agency within the Department of the Interior) would be studied to determine whether they could support large solar power arrays.

Twenty-four tracts of land in six states — Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah — are under review. Maps of the land will be published shortly in the Federal Register.

Given the current need to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, re-build our energy infrastructure, and Obama’s desire to create green jobs to stimulate the economy, it seems pretty inevitable that some public lands will continue to be opened up to energy production. And if the choice is between ripping up the landscape in an increasingly desperate quest for more oil and covering a few thousand acres with solar panels, bring on the solar panels.

On the campaign trail, President Obama pledged an energy policy that would produce twenty-five percent of the U.S.’s electricity from renewable sources by 2025. That pledge was the stating point for negotiations on the energy bill working its way through Congress, and if the early indications are correct, barely a third of that goal is going to remain intact.

There’s also the possibility that the bills will encourage the construction of so-called “clean” coal plants and even new nuclear power plants. That’s not quite what the backers of clean, renewable energy have in mind, and, unfortunately, also a long way from Obama’s campaign pledge. The battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lower our reliance on fossil fuels, isn’t going to be won in one session of Congress.

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At least there still is a bill. But the bill that’s emerging from the House Energy Committee has some significant changes from the original version.

The bill targets an 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by mid-century — a long-term goal that is in line with the President’s.

But Greenpeace USA questioned that was realistic given that the bill also sets a 2020 target of a 4-7 percent reduction below 1990 levels.

The measures are the latest concessions to come out of weeks of negotiations aimed at winning over the committee’s moderate Democrats who expressed concern about the cost the legislation would place on industry and electricity customers in their districts.

Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., had already agreed to:

Lower targets for renewable energy.

Require a smaller reduction by 2020 in the emissions blamed for global warming.

Give away valuable emissions permits to electricity distribution companies and auto manufacturers.

The final compromise was a major giveaway to corporate interests in the form of free pollution permits. Instead of auctioning off a hundred percent of the permits, in affect charging companies for the right to pollute, only fifteen percent will be auctioned off with the rest given away to the energy companies.

Keep that in mind when your local utility starts citing the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions as a reason for raising rates.

Update: Devilstower over at Daily Kos has an interesting look at an analysis that compares carbon emissions across the country, and then matches that up against voting patterns on the climate bill. The upshot is that the confluence of high CO2 emissions, poverty-stricken areas, and conservative dominated Congressional districts meant that no bill was going to get through without some major compromises, and reinforces Devilstower’s observation:

Want real progress on the fight against pollution and global warming? It won’t come by giving in to the demands to carbon-state legislators to get a compromise that really means a bill too weak to be effective. Instead we need to convince carbon-state voters. We need to offer them a package of benefits that will provide education, environmental restoration, and a promise of jobs. And it needs to be a good offer. A big offer.

You can find the entire post here.

Looks like a deal’s been made that could get a climate bill through the House of Representatives.

Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have reached a deal on the most contentious aspects of cap-and-trade legislation for carbon emissions and plan to unveil the bill on Thursday, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said Tuesday night.

“We have resolved a good number of the issues,” Waxman said after a meeting with committee Democrats, adding that the bill remains on track to clear his panel next week. Opening statements are planned for Thursday with a marathon markup beginning on Monday.

“I am optimistic. I believe we will have the votes to pass the bill [next week],” Waxman said.

They reduced the target on reductions from 20 percent to 17 percent by 2020 and gave the energy companies some breaks. That all pales behind Waxman’s assertion that the bill could pass the House next week. A few months ago I thought the climate and energy bill would be the most difficult to pass of all the big issue stuff, now it looks like it could be passed before health care starts to really heat up.

Of course, there’s still the Senate, where it only takes 41 votes for legislation to die.

With a new Congress about to be seated, the committee chair situation in the House of Representatives is still in the process of being settled, but so far there’s good news for anyone hoping that this year’s Congress will make real progress towards dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

From the Boston Globe:

Representative Edward Markey today will be awarded a key energy and environment leadership post in the House, a move that will make the Malden Democrat one of the most powerful players on Capitol Hill on an issue central to President-elect Obama’s first-term agenda.

Markey, a 17-term congressman with a strong record against nuclear power and for more fuel-efficient cars, will be named chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, lawmakers and Democratic leadership staff confirmed to the Globe. Markey already chairs the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, a new panel that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created in early 2007.

“It’s time to create the clean-energy age,” Markey said in an interview. “My goal is now to create an energy policy that creates millions of new jobs in the United States,” many of them in New England, where high-tech firms can benefit from Obama’s proposed Green Jobs initiative, Markey said.

Along with Henry Waxman taking over the Energy and Commerce Committee, these moves are a good indication that representatives committed to actually doing something about energy policy and the environment are moving into more influential positions in the House. For an example of how these moves could change policy, take a look at who Markry is replacing.

Markey, the House’s most vocal advocate for tighter automobile emission limits, will replace Democratic Representative Rick Boucher, who represents a coal-country district in Virginia. Boucher will take Markey’s current position as chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

Boucher is actually quite good when it comes to telecommunications issues, but when it come to energy he’s a supporter of the coal industry. Markey isn’t, and by making this switch the chances of having both a good energy policy and a good telecommunications policy (Save Net Neutrality!) are greatly improved. let’s hope it works out that way.

Solar energy and wind power get more press, but geothermal may have as much potential as an alternative energy source as either. In fact, it’s happening now out in the Utah desert.

Within six months of discovering a massive geothermal field, a small Utah company had erected and fired up a power plant — just one example of the speed with which companies are capitalizing on state mandates for alternative energy.

Anticipation of new energy policies has sparked a rush on land leases as companies like Raser Technologies Inc., based in Provo, lock up property that hold geothermal fields and potentially huge profits.

If we’re going to be drilling out there in the desert, better for hot water than oil.

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The press conference is just finishing up, and president-elect Obama has revealed his choices for several key environmentally related posts.

As expected, Dr. Steven Chu has been named to head the Energy Department. it’s worth saying twice how big a difference it is to have this post go to someone other than a corporate or political insider. Chu is a physicist and expert in alternative energies, his appointment says a lot about how different Obama’s energy policy could be from Bush’s.

Lisa Jackson will head the EPA. She’s a career government worker who has at times been accused of being to close to industry. Even if true, she’s still gotta be a step up from the current administrator, a full-fledged, proven friend of industry over environment.

The White House Council for Environmental Quality chair goes to Nancy Sutley, another career politician with a good record on environmental issues.

The final appointment announced today was Carol Browner as the White House Energy and Environment Policy Co-Ordinator, already being referred to as the “energy czar”.

The announcement of Interior Secretary and Agriculture Sevretary will come in the near future.

The candidates all stressed the theme that alternative energy sources and environmental awareness are good things economically. Obama in particular tied economic recovery to energy policy and climate change.

That’s certainly a different tune than we’ve heard the last eight years. Obama’s statements and appointments, especially in health care and now energy and the environment, hint at plans for truly sweeping changes and ambitious programs. If that’s what happens, the next year is going to feature political theater of a rare kind.

Update: Salazar rumored for Interior Department.

ABC News’ Sunlen Miller and David Chalian report: President-elect Obama will tap Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., for Interior secretary, in an announcement to come later this week.

Salazar, a first-term Colorado senator, headed the Coloado Natural Resources department and was a former attorney general for the state.

The formal announcement will be made later this week in one of many Cabinet-level announcements Obama makes before heading to Hawaii for the holidays Saturday.