It would seem like an easy story for the paper of discord record:

In recent months, chains including Wal-Mart Stores, Kohl’s, Safeway and Whole Foods Market have installed solar panels on roofs of their stores to generate electricity on a large scale….

In the coming months, 85 Kohl’s stores will get solar panels; 43 already have them. “We want to keep pushing as many as we possibly can,” said Ken Bonning, executive vice president for logistics at Kohl’s.

Macy’s, which has solar panels atop 18 stores, plans to install them on another 40 by the end of this year. Safeway is aiming to put panels atop 23 stores….

Wal-Mart [is considering a] program that would put panels and other renewable technologies at hundreds of stores.

All that is left for the Sunday NYT story, “Giant Retailers Look to Sun for Energy Savings,” is to explain why these bottom-line savvy companies are making such large bets on rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV), even though the power is widely thought to be expensive.

This should be incredibly easy — assuming this reporter or her editor even bothers to read their own paper. After all, just a few months ago a different NYT reporter explained it all in a story titled, “Pay for the Power, Not the Panels“:

The new financial techniques allow the solar companies to separate the capital expense of the systems they sell and the tax benefits that accrue to the buyer from the final costs of the electricity produced. In doing so, the solar companies have made it possible for more corporations and even some homeowners to kill two birds with one stone: doing good for the environment while cutting the cost of the power they consume.

[Small note to NYT: In an environmental story, maybe use a different metaphor than bird-killing.]

That’s right. Corporations are actually cutting their electricity costs by installing solar panels. But you would never know that from Sunday’s story. In fact, you’d think these companies were throwing away their money:

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King Coal’s front groups — Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) — are continuing to spread misleading propaganda about its dirty and expensive fuel:

Coal is affordable and reliable. Electricity from coal costs about half as much as electricity from other energy sources. In fact, twenty-two of the nation’s 25 lowest-cost power plants use coal to generate electricity. And the price of coal has remained stable over the years, especially when compared to other energy sources. The cost of electricity from coal has risen only four percent since 1979, while costs for energy from oil have risen over 50 percent and the costs for energy from gas have increased more than 200 percent during the same time period.

Unfortunately, it is an dirty illusion that coal is our “cheapest power source” — even if the terrible costs of its pollution are ignored. A time bomb of a price explosion is ticking, with massive increases in the cost of coal-powered electricity to come, year after year after year. In the coal spot markets, high-quality Appalachian coal has nearly tripled in price in the past year:

Average Weekly Coal Commodity Spot Prices (Dollars per Short Ton) Business Week Ended August 8, 2008

These price increases in the spot market are driven by surging international demand, the collapse of the dollar, fuel surcharges in transporting coal, investor speculation, and climate-change-related “wild weather” that played havoc with Australian exports of coal. These seemingly disparate influences are are all tightly interlocked by our global dependence on fossil fuels.

Because coal contracts are purchased on a multi-year basis, changes in the market can take years to hit the consumer. But the first signs of this massive price shock are starting to appear. Coal-country utility American Electric Power, a backer of ACCCE, stated on Thursday that it “must raise electricity rates 45 percent for its nearly 1.5 million customers in Ohio over the next three years, to cover soaring coal prices and the cost of modernizing its systems to keep them reliable.” Joe Hamrock, AEP Ohio president and chief operating officer declared:

The fact is that coal has doubled in cost in the last year alone, dramatically affecting AEP Ohio’s costs.

The coal companies who also fund ACCCE — when they talk to investors, not consumers — are gleeful about how the high prices of coal will guarantee “significant earnings increases for many years to come.” As Gregory H. Boyce, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, explained when he announced record second-quarter profits last month:

The structural changes driving demand much higher than supply, across all coal markets, look to be very long-lived. We are just beginning to benefit from the repricing of legacy coal supply contracts at higher levels, which could drive significant earnings increases for many years to come.”

As it revels in record profit, King Coal is bankrolling a fossil-dependent future of energy poverty and pollution: Peabody Energy is also the top corporate funder of Newt Gingrich’s “Drill Here, Drill Now” 527 corporation, American Solutions for Winning the Future.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Monday that in the first 10 days of August, Arctic sea ice extent declined one million kilometers. Sea ice is now disappearing on a daily basis nearly 50% faster than it typically does this time of year.

So the race is on again to see whether 2008 can repeat — or beat — the record set only last year. The NSIDC explains exactly what is going on in the Arctic this summer:

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