Time to gaze into a crystal ball?

The Sierra Club believes that a coal-fired electric power plant under construction in Ohio could wind up hurting Danville Utilities’ customers in the pocketbook.

Danville is one of the cities that has partnered with American Municipal Power to build a new coal-fired electric power plant in Meigs County, Ohio. As a partner, Danville will contribute to the cost of building the plant and be able to buy electricity generated by the plant.

The arrangement is supposed to give Danville and its electric customers some protection from wildly fluctuating electric prices on the open market. But the Sierra Club argues that falling demand for electricity and changing environmental regulations make the plant a bad deal for cities like Danville.

While the United States is considered the “Saudi Arabia of coal” because of its vast reserves, burning coal to generate electricity produces environmental pollution. It’s quite possible that during the life of the new plant, renewable energy sources such as wind, geothermal, solar, tidal and biofuels will displace coal as better alternatives. Nuclear power is much further along than any of those sources of power and could wind up replacing coal as the primary source of electric power generated in this country.

Of course, with such a large amount of coal in the ground, it stands to reason that someone is going to come up with a way to burn it cleanly.

Danville’s primary motivation to join with other municipal governments to own and operate the Ohio plant is to give local utility customers a share of electric power generating plant so that local customers won’t get hit with large rate increases in the future.

But the truth of the matter is no one can know for sure what conditions will look like in 50 years, just as no one in 1959 could have predicted where we’d be today.

Coal may clean up its act — nearly all of the power sold by Danville Utilities today comes from coal — and demand for electricity will probably continue to rise. Or the promise of clean coal may never materialize, and nuclear power, some renewables and conservation may make the plant Danville is helping to build far less valuable.

Given all the unknowns, healthy skepticism on both sides makes a lot more sense than slam-dunk certainty.