This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
I kill polar bears. I obscure the view of national parks upwind from where I work. Oh, and I also kill between 600 and 2,000 people each year in the Salt Lake Valley, which is also upwind from where I work. Any day, a Sierra Club study will find that I am also responsible for your babies being born naked.
I work at one of those terrible coal-fired power plants in Emery County, which have lately become the whipping boy for every hazard known to mankind. I help provide cheap power for hundreds of thousands of people who enjoy the cost savings coal brings to their lives — not to mention the fact that the power is always there when they want it. I also pay money in taxes that the government is giving to other businesses to put me in the unemployment line.
If I had been a harness maker in 1900 and lost my career because the automobile put me out of business, because it was an obviously better mode of transportation, I would be angry but I could understand the reasoning. But wind and solar power, which are trying to put my industry out of business, are not more efficient, nor cheaper. Only by generous government subsidies are they anywhere near affordable compared to coal energy. Add to that the cost of legal wrangling due to the brother-in-law relationship between the EPA and environmental groups, and it's easy to feel like I'm in someone's crosshairs.
Our power plants run most efficiently at full load. Yet we are continually running from minimum to maximum load chasing wind, solar and hydro availability. We chase them because they are not a steady producer of power. On cloudy, windless days, we are called upon to deliver the power to our customers that wind and solar can't. We are always there, always ready to provide you with the power you need to write your opinions to The Tribune on your laptop with your cheap power about how horrible those coal-fired plants are. Then you can jump into your electric car, which has been charging on that cheap coal-fired power, and go do whatever with the money that you saved by having cheap, coal-fired electricity.
When the environmental groups and the government have succeeded in putting the coal industry out of business, enjoy those brown-outs while you sit at home, because all that extra cash you once had is going to pay your electricity bill, which for some reason has tripled.
Price resident Charles Fausett has lived and worked in Carbon County most of his life.