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[quote user="Boyd"] Next to the St.Croix river on the border with Wisconsin is the King power plant in Bayport Mn. It is east of St.Paul by about 15 or so miles. A few years ago they finished a one Billion dollar upgrade of the plant to make less emissions. I think that part of the upgrades were in the scrubbers. Its quite beyond me how you can spend one Billion dollars just to upgrade a power plant. Thats a huge chunk of money. BTW they get their coal delivered there by UP. I think it was up to about 1985 it was delivered there by barges coming up the St.Croix river from the Mississippi. [/quote] A typical coal fired Steam Electric Station (industry term) can easy cost $5 to $7 billion to build.  The cost depends to a large extent on the number of and size of the generating units. Accordingly, an upgrade of $1 billion, depending on the nature of the upgrades, is not unreasonable. My company has spent billions upgrading our older coal fired power plants.   The key question is whether the company can earn a return on the investment. In Texas, where I have lived and worked for most of my life, the market determines whether the company can recover the investment. This is also true the other states that have deregulated generation. Deregulation, by the way, does not mean deregulating health and safety standards. It means deregulating the commercial terms of generating and distributing electric energy. In those jurisdictions that have not deregulated generation, the company has to convince the regulators to allow the the cost of the upgrades to be passed through to the ratepayers. This is generally a highly political process.
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