Lawsuit: Jessup Board Colluded to Punish Gas Plant Property Seller
A landowner in Jessup Borough (Lackawanna County, PA, near Scranton) has filed a lawsuit against the Borough Council as a whole (and the individuals who serve on it), claiming they rezoned the landowner’s property, cutting them out of millions of dollars, as retribution because the landowner had the audacity to sell property to the Marcellus gas-fired Lackawanna Energy Center (LEC) power plant.
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Two Democrat New York State legislators, Senator Jen Metzger and Assemblywoman Nily Rozic, are floating parallel bills that would outright ban any new natural gas-fired electric plants or natural gas pipelines in the state. Really bizarre stuff. They’re calling this lunacy “Freedom from Fossil Fuels.” Want to run a new gas pipeline from the local utility to a new housing development or commercial business park? Forget it. No new gas customer hookups *anywhere* in the state–not just in Westchester County (see 
A radical Pennsylvania environmental group called PennEnvironment is pushing a media narrative that a “collection of 88 Republican and Democratic Pennsylvania state legislators” have joined together to introduce and endorse a truly insane plan that would require all (as in 100%) of electricity generated in the Keystone State to come from so-called renewables by 2050–just 30 years from now. It will NEVER happen, but that’s beside the point. Our point is that one named Republican is part of this “bipartisan collection” of 88 leftists. The lone Republican is PA State Sen. Tom Killion from the Philadelphia area.
Here’s an interesting and fun fact: In just 12 years electricity generated by coal plants has gone from powering 87% of Ohio’s homes and businesses to just 47%. So-called renewables (solar and wind) make up a whopping 3% of Ohio’s electric generation. So what’s replacing coal? Natural gas, which now generates 34% of the state’s electricity. Gas still hasn’t beaten coal, but give it a few more years and it will.
One of the few “green” advocates we respect is Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and president of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. His articles often appear on the Forbes website (we’ve linked to many of them in our “Best of the Rest” roundup). Shellenberger, one of the few environmentalists to endorse and defend fracking, recently penned an article that accuses the fracking/shale industry of a double standard when it comes to their opposition to bailing out nuclear plants with government subsidies.
In October 2017, MDN told you a second Marcellus gas-fired electric generating plant is planned for Greene County, PA (see 
Last September MDN told you that a new natgas-fired electric plant planned for the People’s Republic of Rhode Island in Burrillville was on life support, with antis reaching to pull the plug (see 
In June 2018 MDN told you about a plan by Midwest utility company Vectren to build a 900-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant (and a 50-acre solar farm) to replace a retiring coal plant, in Warrick County, Indiana (see 
Maybe it’s time to let Ithaca just go dark. Turn the electricity off, or rather, let the plants producing electricity that helps power the college town die off, and let rolling blackouts commence across the region. The battle continues to rage in the lib Dem socialist utopia of Ithaca (Tompkins County), NY over a plan to convert a local coal-fired electric generating plant to use much better-for-the-environment and far-less-polluting natural gas. Yet local antis, who irrationally (and we mean clinically insane) hate fossil fuels, continue to object. Fine. Turn off the lights.
Good old American ingenuity has done it again. A company in Oklahoma called Newpoint Gas has, using existing technology, developed a process to produce clean water, electricity and hydrogen energy from natural gas–and do it with zero emissions. How cool is that?
New York State is already doing it, Pennsylvania is actively considering doing it, and now, Ohio has caught the contagion too. The “it” we’re talking about is soaking electric rate payers to pump more money into the coffers of big corporations so they can keep uneconomic and financially failing nuclear electric generating plants operating. Both PA and OH lawmakers have floated plans to soak rate payers in their respective states.
Energy Solutions Consortium (ESC), based in Buffalo, NY, will begin construction on West Virginia’s very first Marcellus gas-fired electric generating plant sometime “this summer.” The exact date has not yet been set, but should be announced soon. However, in a bit of a surprise (for us), the state’s first natgas-fired plant to get built will not be (as we thought) in Brooke County. Instead, it will be in Harrison County.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo finally got his wish last year by forcing the operator of the Indian Point Energy Center (nuclear power plant) located near New York City to agree to partially close down next year, and fully close down in 2021. We recently got a small preview of what will happen when Indian Point goes offline. In March Indian Point went completely offline for two weeks–scheduled outage for one reactor, and a malfunction in the other. Guess which form of energy took up the slack? It wasn’t solar. It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t hydro. It wasn’t magic fairy dust. It was natural gas that rode in to save the day.