Almost none are buying new coal-burning plants, though year by year the number of these plants in operation is also quietly shrinking. And none are building new large-scale hydroelectric dams. Those heady mid-twentieth-century days of massive, secured investment in big power projects are over. As a result, in 2005, a full fifth of America’s power plants were over half a century old and reliant upon technology that was state of the art in the 1950s.
