Does coal now grow on trees?

Coal is not a source of renewable energy, but apparently the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission thinks it is. The commission recently awarded a $10 million renewable energy grant to the Mesaba Energy Project, a planned coal gasification plant on Minnesota's Iron Range. The project, run by Excelsior Energy, apparently qualifies because of changes made to the fund's rules in 2003.

The renewable energy fund was established in 1994 as part of a deal with Xcel Energy to allow the company to continue using nuclear power as long as it contributed each year to a fund established to support promising renewable energy research and testing projects. Xcel Energy now contributes approximately $16 million per year to the fund.

While the Mesaba Energy Project does qualify as "innovative," and technology focused on cleaner fossil fuel burning is valuable, the fund's five-member advisory board did not select the project among approximately 200 others that applied for grants. Consequently, Excelsior Energy complained to the Public Utilities Commission, which has the final say over where the money goes, and won. In the grand scheme of things, $16 million per year is not a lot of money to spend on renewable energy research. But it is even less when large portions of it are given to projects not even focused on renewable energy projects. The Public Utilities Commission was wrong to go against the advice of the renewable energy fund's advisory board.

Coal is still a viable source of energy on the Iron Range, but that does not make it clean or renewable. While the Mesaba Energy Project technically qualified for this grant based on its ingenuity, in doing so it stole grants from other projects more focused on the fund's intended goal. If the state determined that the coal plants were going to be beneficial, it needed to find other ways to come up with the money.

The fund has also paid for innovations in wind power, cheaper solar cells, biomass fuel projects and hydroelectric power, yielding very positive results for the environment. These energies must trump fossil fuel projects, regardless of how economically beneficial they might be.