On Jan. 6, the Associated Press reported that the
“ballooning $1.8 billion cost” of FutureGen, a “groundbreaking power plant in central Illinois” that
would trap greenhouse gases and store them underground, “has the government so
uneasy it wants the project’s consortium of corporate backers to rework the
design to get the price down….In southern Illinois, officials who in October
2001 announced plans for a coal-fired, 1,600 megawatt power plant about 50
miles southeast of St. Louis estimated the project would cost $2 billion.
But…the price tag swelled to $2.9 billion by the time ground finally was broken
in October.”
The Baltimore Business Journal
reported on Dec. 21, “A billion-dollar plan to build two new clinical towers
and renovate Johns Hopkins Hospital’s East Baltimore medical campus, one of the
nation’s largest health construction
projects, is $252 million over budget and two years behind schedule.”