Driving onto the grounds of the Cape Fear plant in Moncure, you can hear the hum of the turbines and the sound of the power plant. But it doesn’t look like you might expect – it’s a beautiful, old red-brick building with soaring ceilings.

Progress Energy spokesman Mike Hughes said it was one of the first coal-fired utility plants in North Carolina.

“This was a plant that was built in 1923, so it’s been providing service for almost 90 years to CP&L and Progress Energy customers,” Hughes said.

Inside, shift supervisor Gordon Parker stands next to one of the plant’s original generators – a 1923 General Electric that still works. Parker explained how the plant uses coal – first, it’s ground into dust, and then blown into the furnaces, where it heats water. That creates the steam that turns the turbines.

This is the only job Parker has ever had. Born and raised in Moncure, he’s worked at the plant since 1981. You can tell he’s proud of it.

“This is the very top of the boiler, and there’s your steam drum, and then you got all your components. You got miles and miles and miles of tubes,” he said.

The plant’s power output, and the building’s hum, comes from two 1950s turbines up on the seventh floor. The sound is so intense it makes the steel floor vibrate.

To Parker, it’s music –but not for much longer. Progress will shut the plant down by 2017.

It would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit the plant with the scrubbers required by the state’s Clean Smokestacks Act of 2002, Hughes said.

“That was one of the central questions – how much money do you spend, do you invest, in a power plant of that vintage? So it’s a very real economic decision. And the economics made a lot of sense for the decision that we made. A very difficult decision, but the right one,” Hughes said.

Gazing out at the coal pile behind the plant, Parker’s the first to admit his plant isn’t as efficient or clean as newer facilities. He said he understands why it’s being mothballed, but it still hurts to think about it.

“This is my life. I’ve got 29 years invested down here. This is my family. I mean, this is my family away from home. All the guys down here, all the people,” Parker said.

Progress is closing down four different coal-fired plants, including Cape Fear. The plants are either intermittent or peaking plants—the ones that come on line when demand rises, and stop when it drops.

Hughes said they’re being replaced by two new plants that burn natural gas, which should reduce Progress’s coal use from 13 million tons a year to around 10 million.

“We’re still going to burn a lot of coal where we’ve invested a lot of money in retrofit technologies for these criteria pollutants,” Hughes said. “But in the areas where we have the older, less efficient coal-fired power plants, it makes much more sense for us economically to build new gas fuel generation.”

Natural gas is about 50 percent cleaner than coal, but it’s never been the fuel of choice for North Carolina utilities. That’s partly because our state doesn’t have a well-developed pipeline system, and also because natural gas prices have historically been more volatile than other fuels. For example, after Hurricane Katrina, the cost of gas tripled.

But Hughes said new discoveries of deposits in the northern Appalachians and new technologies for extracting that gas should help keep prices stable and low for a while.

“Which, economically, puts gas in the money, if you will, and makes it a more viable means of production electricity than some of our old coal-fired power plants,” he said.

Still, Hughes thinks natural gas won’t work as a long-term solution. While it’s cleaner than coal, it’s still a fossil fuel. If Congress calls for carbon reduction of as much as 80 percent by 2050, as some have suggested, even natural gas won’t make the cut. That would leave nuclear power as the only viable fuel.

To be viable for utilities, a fuel source has to be two things – dependable and cheap. That’s why we get so much of our power from coal. According to NC State Solar Center Director Steve Kalland, the US has gone to great lengths to make electricity cheap and available. As an economic policy, it’s been a huge success, and it helped put us at the top of the global economy.

“And that's what the electric utility industry is all about, and has historically been all about, is low-cost and reliable. That's been their mandate, and they've done it very, very well,” Kalland said. “The issue is that, in the rush to get to low-cost and reliable, there are other factors that are part and parcel of using coal-fired electricity that haven't been accounted for in the process.”

For example, he said, one reason coal is cheap is that we have a cheap way to move it – our federally built rail system.

“The coal industry and the electric utility industry -- the kind of grew up hand-in-hand, and the railroad industry was kind of the third partner. Basically in this country, if you didn't have railroads that were sited in such a way that they could move called back and forth cheaply around this country the cost of coal would be tremendous and would be looking at other options for energy today,” Kalland said.

He said coal’s environmental and health costs are even more important. Coal has been blamed for a long list of problems from climate change to lung disease and environmental toxins.

Regulations help to expose those costs by turning them into dollars and cents, Kalland said.

Every scrubber and filter utilities have to buy to comply with those laws is paid for by consumers. As coal gets pricier, other fuels get more competitive.

Kalland said he thinks renewables will win out at some point – but not yet.

“It’s the problem with all of energy -- every single source, no matter what it is, has its warts -- there's a problem with all of them, even solar. Most of the solar issues deal with relative cost and issues of intermittency. You have to build a lot of solar to make up for a coal-fired power plant. A whole lot of solar,” Kalland said. “And even then, you have to have storage to go with it, or else you’ve got problems, for example, at night.”

For now, Kalland expects to see more nuclear power. He said he doesn’t think we really know the long-term cost of dealing with nuclear waste. But he said there’s a growing consensus that nuclear may be the best choice until renewables become viable on a large scale.

Kalland said cleaner-coal technology is another option. The world’s two biggest economies, the U.S. and China, both have enormous supplies of coal.

“And if no other options pan out, we’re gonna use them,“ Kalland said. “Because nobody's going to turn off their television or their refrigerator or their Keggerator or whatever it might be, just because somewhere down the road, the Outer Banks might wash away. Unfortunately, people just don’t think that way.”

Though Progress Energy is not planning any more coal-fired plants,Duke is about to open one. Duke’s controversial new unit at Cliffside is scheduled to go online in 2012. Spokesman Andy Thompson said coal will continue to play an important role in Duke’s fuel mix.

“We have invested billions of dollars in emission control equipment on our large base load units, which has significantly cleaned up the emissions from those plants, so that we can continue to rely on that fuel source, and that very efficient generation, for years to come,” Thompson said.

Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke, has said Cliffside will be his company’s last new coal plant in North Carolina.

Like Progress, Duke is switching off some older coal plants and replacing them with natural gas. And both companies are planning to add nuclear units too -- Duke in South Carolina, and Progress in both Florida and North Carolina.