That would mean a mixture of renewables, nuclear, and fossil fuel power stations that capture and store the carbon dioxide they produce.
But you need so much energy for capture and compression that coal as a fuel, the entire idea of a coal fired plant, becomes uneconomic.
The bill also sets rules for building more natural-gas storage (as imports replace dwindling domestic supplies) and for developing technology to capture and sequester carbon emissions from fossil-fuel plants.
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The carbon capture and storage technology can strip carbon from fossil fuel exhaust gases and store it in rocks, but it is unproven at scale, trials are years behind schedule and it may not work in some areas of the world.
An even bigger threat looms in China and India, which are pushing to receive credits for carbon capture, which strips CO2 from the output of fossil fuel electric plants and traps it underground.
Siemens and Shell, for example, have just announced a new fuel-cell technology for oil rigs that will capture emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, generate power from them cleanly, and sequester the exhaust.
Surely at some point in the not too distant future it will be economic, and possibly even revenue generating, for companies to capture their CO2 and sell it on to companies for use in enhanced fuel production.
That's because high petroleum prices (higher, at any rate, than they were a few years ago) depress demand for gasoline and jet fuel and thus the markup over raw material costs that a refiner can capture.
Evolution has arranged financing for methane-capture equipment in Argentina and for a switch by a 120-megawatt power plant in Hungary from coal to biomass fuel.
And, by promising to capture 90% of its carbon, SCS Energy can get away with burning the cheapest but dirtiest source of baseload fuel (coal) in the most expensive retail electricity market in the country.
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