Ye Reapeth What Ye Soweth

Forces continue to conspire and coal-fired power generation is on the ropes. As Alexis Madrigal of wired.com highlights in his June 2008 blog post, the DOE released a report showing that in 2007, 225 Gigawatts of wind power were in the queue, far more than were for coal or natural gas.

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal interview, Google CEO Eric Schmidt discusses wind power's near price parity with coal, "Wind is, on a kilowatt-per-hour basis, roughly similar to the cost of coal after the subsidies it gets today, and without the subsidies it's a couple cents higher per kilowatt. So that's pretty good. It's the one that's closest now to being a free substitute for coal..."

Now, add a ton of stimulus dough for clean energy, a forthcoming national renewable portfolio standard, a carbon tax and/or cap and trade system, a 2007 landmark Supreme Court decision making CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, the difficulty of carbon sequestration, a good doctor named Stephen Chu, and a generous dose of economic calamity to the mix and you get, courtesy of the folks at earth2tech:

THE COAL DEATHWATCH MAP