Federal officials said last week they would spread around more than a billion dollars once earmarked for a single project in downstate Illinois. The Energy Department is now taking public comment on its plans for an overhauled FutureGen. That project was going to be a massive clean-coal power plant in Mattoon, Illinois. Instead, it's being re-imagined as a series of much smaller projects, many of them commercial plants, instead of a big research facility.
Illinois lawmakers are fighting to keep the original concept alive. However it turns out, FutureGen could have a big impact on how we generate power in coming years, and possibly on the future of Illinois's largely fallow coal fields. Eight Forty-Eight business contributor David Greising joined us this morning to explain the thinking behind the project's changes.