Chicago's Coal plants to close-- one by the end of the year

In a hard fought battle with the electric utility industry, it appears as if Chicago's environmentalists appear to be winning. The first plant slated to be closed by Midwest Generation is their Fisk generating station in the Pilsen neighborhood. The second plant, scheduled to be closed by 2014, is their Crawford plant in Little Village. This all comes after Mayor Rob Emanuel issued an ultimatum to the company-- "either clean your plants up or the city will close them for you".

By agreeing to do this, Midwest could be avoiding a city ordinance that deals with the two plants. In the end what this amounts to is they avoided a potentially costly court battle with the city. You can see a full story on this here.But this is not the only story there is on it, as my inbox has been flooded with news reports about similar stories for the past week.