Great news. Though Boardman is Oregon's coal plant, Oregon gets most of it's coal electricity from Montana.

Only 300 pounds of coal an hour? Questionable.

Again, Sarah, Boardman burns 300 TONS of coal per hour. And Sierra Club sure seems to be having a difficult time accepting victory, don't they? The announcment from PGE says the plant will be closed BY 2020, not in 2020. There's lots more negotiating to do, so for once, can't they just be happy that progress has been made?

What will it be replaced with? How will they generate the missing 40% of our power? From previous articles, I had the impression that almost everyone agreed Boardman should go, but we didn't have a good plan to replace it. Did someone think of one? If not, this might be a hollow announcement...

PGE will build a natural gas-fired plant at Boardman, and probably another natural gas plant at Clatskanie. And the 40% refers to total power consumed in Oregon generated by coal - Pacific Power is mostly a coal utility, with plants in Washington and Wyoming that send power to Oregon. Boardman only provides about 10% of Oregon's total electricity.

@ElGordo - Thanks! How does natural gas compare to coal? I'm guessing it falls about halfway between coal and solar, wind, etc.

Natural gas emissions are much cleaner than coal from an air quality standpoint. The carbon emissions are between 30-50% of coal on a per-unit basis for energy generated. So yeah, about half of coal, but much greater than the zero marginal emissions from renewable sources.

El Gordo,

I checked with the Sierra Club and state, then changed the 300 pounds to 300 tons. Thanks for the polite correction.

did they let anyone in to jump around inside that coal plant?

@Jay B: I highly doubt it. With as controversial as it is, I bet security is pretty tight. And unlike BPA where they have an education component to their mission statement, PGE is under no obligation to give tours. Certainly, giving an environmental group a tour every few years is a good way to avoid suspicion, (I mean, everyone knows that it is a coal plant, but they can show them that they have this and that control system in place,) but beyond that, I'd bet that the number of tours they give it quite small.

The "factories" that give tours to anyone, (like the Tillamook cheese factory,) tend to do it for marketing reasons. Even for a non-controversial thing, (for instance, the big pipe,) nobody really wants to have to deal with a bunch of random people wondering through, it is a lot of work to keep them and the plant safe.

R - Boardman supplies more electricity than resources in Montana. The facility in Montana is much larger than Boardman, but PGE only has a 20% ownership. (PGE owns 65% of Boardman.)
Source:
http://www.portlandgeneral.com/our_company…

I agree with Reymont and El Gordo that natural gas is cleaner. However, I am worried about putting too many eggs in one basket. What happens when gas prices become volatile again, or LNG facilities do not come to fruition? As dependance on gas for electrification grows, so will prices.

Why the rush to close Boardman (but not Colstrip in Montana, or whomever the #1 mercury polluter in the state may be), without a suitable permanent alternative?

Why not a push to get Salem to repeal the laws that keep clean, reliable nuclear energy from being developed?