Last night I attended the Springfield utilities committee meeting for the presentation of the proposed wind power contract. It's covered in the SJ-R here. Greg over at CES blog (which was featured on TV20 News last night!) was there as well and he has a lot of background in this topic. His first post is here and in another post he takes on those who have their head in the sand about the scientific consensus about global warming.
From my perspective there were two points of particularly good news about the contract. First, City Water Light & Power's cost estimates for the price of wind were a little off. It will cost less than they expected.
The main objection I heard during the long public debate over the Sierra Club clean energy agreement was the potential cost of buying wind power. One person compared it to the rates being paid by Naperville, which has a different kind of arrangement than what CWLP is doing. Thankfully, we're not only paying less than the worst predictions but also less than what CWLP originally anticipated.
The other bit of good news is that they'll begin purchasing wind power sooner than was called for in the Sierra Club agreement. Jay Bartlett explained that financially, it makes sense to make the purchase sooner rather than later, partly because the State of Illinois is interested in reducing their carbon footprint and because of rising demand in the renewable energy market. So, we get to start using clean energy now and we save money. You can't beat that!