The Iowa Utilities Board heard testimony last week on a proposed Alliant Energy coal plant in Marshalltown, Iowa.

Among those testifying in support of the plant was Iowa Valley Community College District Chancellor Tim Wynes. He supports the building of the 650-megawatt facility because of “the economic development that will come with the plant,” which he said was a “a huge part” of the mission of his school. Wynes said he heard “a lot of testimony concerning the impact the plant would have that were negative and mostly it was hypothetical.”

Wynes said the negative testimony played on people’s fears “of taking the initiative and moving forward” and that the IUB should “make a decision [based] on what you know and not what you don’t know or what is speculative.”

He said he attended five meetings with the Wisconsin energy company.

“Alliant brought their engineers out to the college. They also had a presentation for Marshalltown Economic Development Group, MEDIC. They did a presentation at our Rotary and they did a number of town meetings … they consistently presented what they were going to try to do.”

More from IUB witnesses, including some video interviews, are available below the fold.Taking a different economic view of the coal-burning proposal was investment banker and financial advisor Tom Sanzillo of New York. He called coal energy a “dinosaur” and said that this is the worst time to build a coal plant because of a variety of economic factors.

Sanzillo said the ethanol industry in Iowa doesn’t have sufficient growth to “demand new capacity at the level they’re demanding it. So by putting up this particular power plant they’re really using a Cadillac to do what a Volkswagen could do.”

Here is Sanzillo on the economics of the coal-burning power plant:

Dr. Jerry Schnoor said the decision to build a coal plant in Marshalltown is difficult because “ethanol plants are so economically important” in Iowa. But Schnoor worried that the proposed plant will indirectly and inefficiently be “turning coal into ethanol.” He is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa and is the chair of the Iowa Climate Change Advisory Council.

He noted that the plant, which is scheduled to be on line in 2013, will devote over half of its electrical output or about 350 megawatts to ethanol production.

NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, who was in Iowa to testify before the Iowa Utilities Board, dubbed coal power “silly” because of the threat of global warming:

“The only way we’re going to keep climate within a reasonable range is if we phase out use of coal except where we capture the CO2 and sequester it because most of the carbon dioxide in the fossil fuels is in coal.

“So we could solve the problem, that would be 80 percent of the solution but it does require that we have a moratorium on any new coal-fired power plants and, over the next 25 to 30 years, we’re going to have to phase out those that exist.

“And this is going to become very clear within the next several years, so it is just plain silly to build a new one now because you’re not going to be able to grandfather these in … Once the government understands how serious the problem is, these plants are going to have to go so it just makes no sense to make another one now.”

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) recently declared that 2007 was the second-warmest year in over a century of recorded global temperatures.

Hansen predicted that “barring a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature clearly exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next few years … because of the background warming trend attributable to continuing increases of greenhouse gases.”

Dr. Hansen is an alum of the University of Iowa and made clear that he was expressing his opinions as a private citizen.

Dr. Kristin Welker-Hood also testified before the IUB this week. She had an entirely different set of concerns with Alliant Energy’s coal-burning facility. Here is what she said about some of the health effects of burning coal:

Dr. Welker-Hood is the director of environmental and health programs for the National Physicians for Social Responsibility office in Washington, D.C.

She noted that the Union of Concerned Scientists reported a prediction of increased heat waves in Iowa resulting from global warming. She said that “the number of days over 90 degrees will increase by two- to five-fold” in the state by the year 2100.