(By Keith Kohl) - Last month I was alerted to an organization calling itself “Americans for Balanced Energy Choices” (ABEC)–a group that supposedly provides a voice to community leaders in the development of energy and environmental policies.

Folks, it’s a $35 million spin job paid for by big coal.

Boasting on its homepage that coal is our most abundant fuel, it fails to mention that for the past five years, the U.S. was required to import record amounts of the stuff. In fact, in 2006, imports rose 19%, while exports actually declined.

But that’s just the least of Big Coal’s worries.

Renewables Take Over Where Big Coal Leaves Off

This past week, while the coal industry continued to saturate the media with its latest ad campaigns, trying to convince us that coal is the solution to our energy needs or that coal is now clean and green, the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory released a report that’s proving to be quite damaging to Big Coal-but quite beneficial for renewable energy investors.

According to the report, utilities have canceled or put on hold 45 coal plants that were in development last year.

Meanwhile, the Boulder-based energy information supplier, Global Energy Decisions, announced it had found that natural gas and renewable energy projects have now officially moved ahead of coal in the development pipeline.

While there are about 66,000 megawatts of coal in development, there are more than 70,000 megawatts of natural gas and renewables in development.

And to make matters worse (for coal, anyway), three of the world’s biggest financial institutions, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, are now taking into consideration the cost of carbon emissions before approving any new power plant.

Of course, some will still play the broken record of “renewables can’t meet our demand for power generation.” But we counter that with a DOE report which stated that covering 9% of Nevada (a plot of land about 100 miles on each side) with concentrating solar farms can provide enough electric power for the entire U.S.