Almost 80 percent of electricity generated in Missouri comes from coal.
This week, the Sierra Club asked Ameren Missouri stockholders to force the St. Louis-based utility to embrace stronger clean energy goals and shift away from coal-fired power.
"Like many companies, Ameren seems concerned about earnings over the next quarter or next year," Dane Kamin, a Sierra Club member and St. Louis University finance instructor, said in a news release. "Ameren's outdated, coal-powered business model presents so many risks and costs to shareholders and the people of St. Louis and surrounding areas.
"It's time for the company to get serious now about a smart plan to ramp up clean energy."
Steve Whitworth, Ameren's senior director for environmental policy and analysis, told the News Tribune in an email that the company absolutely supports cleaner energy.
"Ameren Missouri is making the transition to cleaner energy in the most affordable way for our customers," Whitworth said. "For years, we have been executing our 20-year energy plan that is supported by stakeholders throughout Missouri.
"Our plan includes different kinds of electric generation such as renewables, natural gas, hydro and nuclear. It takes into consideration factors such as costs, risks, fuel diversity, customer preferences and economic development opportunities."
Ameren is Missouri's largest investor-owned utility, serving more than a million customers in eastern and central Missouri, including the Jefferson City and St. Louis areas.
Its electricity generation includes the Callaway Nuclear Plant near Reform, three coal-fired plants and two dams, including the Bagnell Dam, which forms the Lake of the Ozarks.
The Sierra Club's Kamin argued, "Ameren is well behind others in the utility industry in migrating towards renewable energy sources.
"As of 2014, Ameren only generated .02 percent of its power from solar. I am not sure even a kid in grammar school would get a participation award for that effort."
However, Whitworth said, "Recent additions to Ameren Missouri's system to provide cleaner electricity include the O'Fallon Renewable Energy Center, the largest investor-owned solar energy facility in Missouri; wind generation; and the Maryland Heights Renewable Energy Center, one of the nation's largest landfill-gas to clean-energy facilities."
The O'Fallon site began operating this year, and collects energy through solar panels covering a space equivalent to 19 football fields.
The company also has been developing plans for another solar panel farm in Montgomery County, but those plans have been stalled while Missouri's electricity providers determine the final effects of the Clean Energy Plan recently announced by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
In the resolution submitted to Ameren's shareholders, the Sierra Club noted, "The Clean Power Plan is a key first step in the U.S. achieving the 80 percent carbon reductions below 1990 levels by 2050 that the UN indicates is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."
However, Ameren, the resolution charged, "is unprepared for a transition away from carbon intense coal power. Ameren burns the 14th most coal and emits the 18th most carbon of U.S. utilities."
Missouri and two dozen other U.S. states are challenging the EPA's Clean Power Plan in court.