Steven Hayward has written an informative post on the cost of transitioning away from coal-fired power:

American Electric Power’s announcement last week that it will soon begin shutting down one quarter of its coal-fired power plants, combined with the news that replacing just a fifth of coal-fired power in Illinois could raise utility rates by as much as 65 percent over the next six years, is making the long-simmering issue of coal suddenly red hot. If the Illinois projections are true, it also appears to give the lie to the refrain that cap and trade, or other efforts to phase out coal, would be cheap and easy. On the other hand, there is something slightly odd about this story, as natural gas-fired power is now very competitive with coal on price. Shouldn’t we be able to replace coal with gas at a more reasonable cost than these news stories seem to suggest? …
While some large, 1,000-megawatt-plus coal plants may be closed down, it is more likely to be the smaller plants that will be shut down for the simple reason that the fixed capital costs of additional pollution abatement will be too high, while the costs will not be excessively high for the larger plants. (Would the University of Alaska Fairbanks, for example, really want to spend the money to abate pollution from its 13-megawatt coal units? Will it make any sense to attempt carbon capture and sequestration on tiny coal plants?) Conversely, although new gas-fired power has become very cost competitive on average, the replacement cost of small coal units with small gas units (or renewables such as wind and solar that require gas-backup) is likely to be higher than average in many cases. Hence, the kind of numbers we’re seeing out of Illinois.

Lest we forget, Illinois is also a state that is facing a crippling spending burden driven in no small part by pension obligations. The state has already sharply increased its income tax, and sales taxes have increased in a number of local jurisdictions.

I assume that there will be at least some environmental dividends from a transition away from coal-fired power, yet the cost of this transition is going to be borne unevenly. And that will inevitably engender political resistance.