In the National Environmental Policy Act Environmental Questionnaire, Southern Company explains that the alternative use of a conventional boiler would create environmental impacts slightly higher than those for the proposed project. Southern reports to the Department of Energy that the new project would have a smaller environmental impact than conventional coal combustion.

Southern Company applies to the Department of Energy for clean coal funding and asks for $235 million toward a $557 million pilot-project plant that would produce 285 MW of electricity. The proposed plant builds on Kellogg, Brown and Root’s design. Part of what makes this document so important is that it shows how Southern put much of the risk of its project back on the federal government. Long before the technology was proven or built, Southern told federal officials that it intended to sell the technology from the plant abroad and use revenue from those sales to repay the federal government for loans provided. “Based on this information, and from its own technology marketing experience, KBR has projected the likely sale of TRIG plants worldwide,” the document says referring to Kellogg, Brown and Root, or KBR, and the new Southern technology known as TRIG. The document adds, “License and user fees from these sales will provide the revenue for repaying the DOE’s investment in the Demonstration Project.”

Mississippi Power Company is allocated $133 million in tax credits for the Kemper County plant.

In a press release, Southern Company announces plans for a IGCC coal plant to be built in Kemper County, Miss. The company says that the project will cost about $1.8 billion and will be completed in 2013. The plant will incorporate new technologies that Southern has been researching for 15 years, and the company has high hopes for the project. Unlike other coal gasification pilots, the gasifiers Southern plans to build in Kemper County will be able to use so-called "low-rank" coal as fuel, opening up an underutilized resource that represents half of America's coal reserves. According to Southern, using these low-rank coals will increase energy independence while still emitting less carbon than a traditional coal plant.

Southern Company sends the Department of Energy an email that includes copies of news articles discussing the Kemper project in a positive light. One of the articles states that the plant will create more than 1,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent jobs. The article discusses a press conference held by Governor Haley Barbour alongside Mississippi Power Company. Mr. Barbour states that the project will be an “economic shot in the arm” for Kemper County and East Mississippi.

The President of Southern Company writes a letter to a Department of Energy official expressing Southern’s desire to keep Department of Energy funding. Southern wants to receive permission “as rapidly as possible” to apply this funding intended for a project in Orlando to a project in Kemper County, Miss. Southern Company writes that it expects to have the Kemper project in commercial operation by June 2013.

Department of Energy officials hurry to complete the final work on the environmental impact statement on Southern Company’s Orlando clean coal project. An environmental impact statement is required before Southern Company can receive federal funding for the project. Signaling Southern's influence over the Department, one government official writes: “HEADS UP. THE SQUEEZE IS ON!” According to emails, the Department of Energy seems to be rushing to publish a final decision so that Southern has the environmental statement in hand “or something indicating that it is going to be signed” before the next Southern Company Board meeting. Southern was guaranteed $235 million for the Orlando project, almost half the cost of the plant.

Brett Wingo, an engineer who would eventually call attention to problems with the project, was hired to work as a subcontractor for Southern Company. Mr. Wingo went from living paycheck to paycheck, working in several struggling factories, making industrial motors and fans, to doubling his salary at one of the world’s largest power companies. His duties included helping to make scheduling and design decisions on the Kemper project. In interviews, Mr. Wingo still says that he believes in carbon capture technology. He says he also believed when he started working on this project that it would make engineering history. Soon after starting, he proudly emailed his wife, Cindy, a photo of his new, second-floor cubicle.

Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality issues a construction permit to Mississippi Power Company for the Kemper plant.

Southern Company and Orlando Utilities Commission announces cancellation of their Orlando “clean coal” project. This occurs roughly two months after breaking ground on the project and after the governor of Florida said that he did not want more coal plants in the state. Southern's Orlando project was the fourth coal project to be canceled in Florida in 2007, but the first to be scrapped after breaking ground. Southern had hoped the site would demonstrate the clean coal technology it had been developing for over a decade. Instead, the site would become a conventional natural gas generation plant.

An official from the Department of Energy headquarters asks other energy officials if they are working with Southern on changing the location of its clean coal project, and how long of a delay this site change will be. As of the date of this correspondence, Department of Energy had not received information on the financial, environmental, or technical feasibility of the Kemper project.

Department of Energy officials are informed by email that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Southern’s C.E.O., David Ratcliffe, have requested a meeting to discuss shifting federal support from the Orlando project to the Kemper County plant. Southern is hoping for federal support as it plans to shift the new gasification technology from Florida to Mississippi. The email says that Mr. Barbour hopes to have the meeting during his visit to Washington, D.C. on Feb. 25, 2008, when he is attending a Republican Governors Association dinner. A Department of Energy official also says in the email that she informed Mr. Barbour about the type of information that would need to be submitted with a proposal. “I think he envisions this as more of a ‘listening mode’ meeting,” the energy official says.

In an earnings call held by Southern, an analyst from Atlantic Equities asks Paul Bowers, a senior Southern official, for an update on the company’s plans for the power plant in Kemper County. Mr. Bowers acknowledges that the company had not yet decided on its plans for the project.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, through BRG Holdings, the lobbying firm that he founded before becoming governor, notifies Department of Energy officials that he wants to talk to them about shifting federal support for Southern’s Orlando project to the Kemper County plant. The lobbying firm writes that the Kemper project is “a key piece of America’s and indeed the World’s energy future.”

In a letter to the Department of Energy, Tom Fanning, who at the time was Southern’s chief operating officer but later became the company’s C.E.O., pushes for the transfer of federal funds, previously allocated for a Southern coal plant in Florida, to the Kemper project in Mississippi. If the funds transfer is approved, federal goals for the canceled Orlando project “will be exceeded” in Mississippi, at no added cost to the federal government, Mr. Fanning says. Shifting federal funds to Kemper will also promote the use of underutilized coal reserves, “which run from Texas to Alabama,” he adds. He also touts the Kemper project’s “economic impact on a depressed region of Mississippi.” Part of what makes the project so innovative is that its architects saw opportunities where others saw none. For example, the plant will run on an undesirable type of coal – lignite – that most utilities avoid because it is “wet” and difficult to burn, but is an abundant Kemper County resource. Kemper County has enough lignite to power the plant for 50 years or more, the company says. Southern argues that this cheap and abundant local lignite coal makes the proposed Kemper plant distinct in its commercially viability. At the same time, the Obama administration is selling the Kemper project as a plant than can be replicated, a perception Southern tried to correct.

In a written proposal, Southern Company asks the Department of Energy to transfer federal funds to the Kemper project in Mississippi that the agency had previously allocated to Southern to build a smaller clean coal project in Orlando. In a letter accompanying the proposal, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour says that he “enthusiastically” supports the project. He adds that the project is “a much needed economic catalyst for this region’s development and prosperity.” Southern’s proposal cites the project’s expected “economic impact to a depressed region of Mississippi.” On page two, the proposal argues that the Kemper site “is ideal for demonstrating Carbon Capture and Sequestration,” because of the pre-existing right of eminent domain for pipelines in Mississippi, and because of the site’s proximity to a potential buyer for captured carbon. Southern asks the Energy Department to expedite environmental impact review of the Kemper project, in order to speed the approval of federal loan guarantees and thereby minimize Southern’s financial exposure during the plant development phase, stating, “Project viability hinges on these funds." Southern also asks the department to waive the loan repayment obligation contained in the 2006 federal funding agreement for the Orlando project. The company says that without such a waiver, the Kemper plant is unlikely to be competitive. The waiver is necessary because of a change in federal tax policy, made after the funds had been initially approved. Southern says that Kemper will be in service by June 1, 2013. Skeptics of Kemper – and of clean coal, generally – question whether the plant can be commercially competitive without significant support from subsidies or tax breaks.

A group of officials meet to discuss Department of Energy approval for moving Southern’s clean coal project from Orlando to Mississippi, so that Southern can keep the $270 million previously awarded by the Department of Energy for a coal project in Orlando.

Attending the meeting are: Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, Southern Company C.E.O. David Ratcliffe, Mississippi Power President Anthony Topazi, and Eric Burgeson—Mr. Bodman’s former chief of staff, who now works for BGR Group, a lobbying firm founded by Mr. Barbour. A memo prepared for Mr. Bodman by his staff, in preparation for this meeting, explains that Southern is requesting an expedited environmental review process. Additionally, the company seeks the Department of Energy’s waiver of Southern’s obligation to repay the $270 million in federal funds for the new Mississippi project. The memo explains that the move to Mississippi is the last chance to support Southern’s special technology and that if the environmental review process does not begin quickly, Southern will lose its Department of Energy funding. The memo says that a waiver of repayment is necessary for Southern to avoid paying taxes on the $270 million award. A recent policy change had made the federal funds taxable, but only if they had to be repaid. The memo to the Secretary adds that, in the meantime, an office within the Department of Energy has submitted a proposal to the Internal Revenue Service, asking it to reverse its new policy and not tax the $270 million award to Southern company.

Mississippi Power C.E.O. Anthony Topazi writes to the Department of Energy to confirm his commitment to work with the federal government on the Kemper project. To help sell and promote the gasification technology, Mr. Topazi promises to allow government representatives and third parties to tour the Kemper facility. From the Kemper plant’s inception, Southern Company, Mississippi Power’s parent company, hoped to win returns on some of the project’s costs by selling the clean coal technology abroad. For the Bush administration, a successful Kemper project would pay out in political capital and positive publicity, demonstrating that federal investment in new technology can help transition coal to a cleaner future, while countering climate change.

The President of Mississippi Power writes to the Secretary of Energy, thanking him for their meeting on February 26, 2008. The letter provides information demonstrating that the Kemper project can be the best option for Mississippi ratepayers. Miss. Power claims that if Department of Energy gives its support, the company can receive state approval and build the Kemper plant with clean coal technology by 2013.

Department of Energy officials share a memo from Carl Bauer, the director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory. The memo explains the terms for shifting to the Kemper County plant several hundred million dollars in federal subsidies that had been designated for the Orlando project. The memo emphasizes that the federal government is only putting a fixed amount of funds into the project and it will not pay any more money than they would have for the Orlando project. The memo also points out that the Kemper project will be a more ambitious engineering project and potentially more expensive than the Orlando project, which had been canceled. “With the termination of the demonstration project at the Orlando site, the Mississippi site will now confront the first-of-a-kind risks that the Orlando project was going to bear and help resolve,” the memo says. The memo notes that the Kemper project has already started creeping up in price and the federal money is not yet allotted. “The cost estimate for Kemper is $142 million higher than at the time the earlier applications were submitted,” the memo says. This memo offers a glimpse at early concerns about the scalability of the project, specifically its technical feasibility and cost.

The North American Coal Corporation sends a letter to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality detailing a meeting with federal and state officials. A federal Fish and Wildlife Service employee points to several protected animals in the area surrounding the Kemper plant, including species of crayfish and a pair of bald eagles that have nested nearby.

The Baseload Act becomes law in Mississippi, after the governor approves the bill. The law allows utilities to charge ratepayers for the cost of building a power plant before the plant is complete and without a guarantee that the plant will provide ratepayer savings in the long run. This seems to draw on at least some aspects of model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative policy advocacy group also known as ALEC. Critics of the new law say that it unfairly turns ratepayers into de facto insurers of risky projects. Backers of the law say that it is necessary to spread the cost out over time to avoid the “sticker shock” that consumers can otherwise experience when electricity prices suddenly jump after a new plant comes online. Utilities, like Mississippi Power, see the law as essential to spread out the risk of bringing innovative technologies, like those at the Kemper site, into their energy portfolios.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman approves Southern Company’s request to waive repayment of the $270 million Department of Energy award, as part of moving and expanding Southern’s “clean coal” project to Kemper, Miss. This waiver will only be needed if the Internal Revenue Service declines to give Southern a tax break on the federal loans. The waiver comes with terms, including that the Kemper project must capture 25 percent of its carbon emissions each year. The plant will also have to “actively work toward” the goal of capturing 50 percent of carbon by 2020, according to the waiver.

A memo says that the waiver of repayment is necessary because Department of Energy “attempts to convince the IRS” not to tax the $270 million award have been unsuccessful. In addition, if a waiver of repayment is not granted, and Southern’s federal funds remain taxable, it will jeopardize approval of the project by the Mississippi Public Service Commission (PSC), which is required for the Kemper project to go forward. The memo also explains that moving the project from Florida to Mississippi was necessary because regulatory changes required carbon capture and storage, a technique designed to prevent carbon from entering the atmosphere, and carbon capture and storage “is not technically or economically feasible at Orlando.”

The approval represents a major victory for Southern in its ongoing attempts to weather changes in state and federal regulation, on both environmental and financial fronts. This memo also offers a subtle lesson on the economics of carbon capture plants – Southern on the one hand decided that a carbon capture plant was not economical in Florida but, on the other hand, it determined that a much larger and more complicated carbon capture plant was indeed viable in Mississippi.

The Department of Energy and Southern Company establish the National Carbon Capture Center. The facility is located at the Power Systems Development Facility in Wilsonville, Ala., where Southern has been developing new coal technologies, with federal funding, since 1996. The Center will receive $200 million in federal funds over five years, representing 80 percent of the total project cost.

The Mississippi Natural Heritage Program sends a letter to Southern’s environmental consulting company citing the number of animal species and communities that live within two miles of the Kemper project site.

Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality issues an air permit for the Kemper plant.

The Mississippi Wildlife Federation sends the Department of Energy a list of 37 questions about the environmental impact of the Kemper plant. The group asks about the efficiency of carbon dioxide sequestration, the metal toxicities of the proposed lignite coal fuel, and where the plant’s ash byproduct will be sold. They also question how much of the project cost will be paid by federal and state taxpayers and ask, “Why have these plants been declined in other states?”

A Department of Energy memo amends Southern Company’s federal funding agreement, finalizing the transfer of funds from Florida to Mississippi. The amendment notes that Southern has been granted a repayment waiver, to avoid an unexpected $121 million tax burden that “could jeopardize the Kemper project’s ability to incorporate carbon capture and sequestration technology and receive a certificate of public convenience from the PSC.”

Once built, the Kemper plant would gasify lignite coal into various molecules including “syngas,” or synthesis gas, which would then be burned in the conventional natural gas-style power plant. But manufacturing synthetic natural gas from coal makes economic sense only if the ordinary natural gas that it displaces is more expensive. In arguing to regulators that the Kemper plant is the best option for ratepayers and commercially preferable to alternatives like building a natural gas plant, Mississippi Power submits a document with natural gas price projections. The document says that natural gas prices will be above $11 per unit by 2016. Because of the revolution caused by fracking technology and the resultant glut of natural gas, many energy economists were, at the time, projecting far lower prices. However, Southern and Mississippi Power had reason to present a different picture, since they needed to argue that Kemper was a competitive and commercially viable option. Charles Grayson, a board member with the Bigger Pie Forum, a free-market think tank based in Mississippi, cites this document as one of the most important sleights of hand that the utility engaged in during its marketing of the Kemper plan. The utility's use of these projections became even more egregious, Mr. Grayson says, as it, and its regulators at the PSC, continued using these numbers as late at 2012, when there was overwhelming evidence, including from federal energy officials, that the price projections were inflated.

Mississippi Power Company applies to the PSC for permission to build the Kemper plant.

In a quarterly progress report to Southern Company Services, Project Manager Tim Pinkston says, “A decision was made to design for approximately 50 percent carbon capture,” at the Kemper County site. At other points in the discussion of this project, its carbon capture potential is projected at 65 percent.

In a Mississippi Power brochure, company officials celebrate Kemper’s planned coal gasification technology, saying it will provide affordable electricity from clean energy. “The question is, are you ready to be part of the future of generating electricity today?” the brochure reads, in bold letters. Mississippi Power President and C.E.O. Anthony Topazi’s face is featured on the second page. “The energy benefits of this project significantly outweigh the upfront capital investments,” says a letter from Mr. Topazi. The brochure says that Mississippi Power’s $2.2 billion capital investment “will greatly expand the local tax revenue,” and that “revenue from the project will enhance local schools, lower property taxes, and help first responders.” Further, the brochure promises that Kemper County “will improve roads and bridges with tax revenue and other sources derived from the project.” Later in the document, the company highlights a $270 million grant from the Department of Energy, and its receipt of $133 million in investment tax credits from the Internal Revenue Service, provided under the National Energy Policy Act of 2005. The brochure also states that the technology that Southern Company has developed is “critical to our nation’s energy future.”

Southern Company provides the Department of Energy with a final report on eight years of clean coal research, conducted at the Power Systems Development Facility, a federally funded testing site in Alabama. The report announces the development of a reliable method to “scale-up to commercial applications” of clean coal technology. In this report, Southern cites the commercial-scale use of this new technology at the company’s Kemper project in Mississippi. This sort of real-world application of new energy technologies would demonstrate the continuing value of government (and industry) investment in cutting-edge research.

Mississippi Attorney General James Hood files a motion with the PSC arguing that it only has authority over electric utilities, not over plants like the one at Kemper, which is unlike standard utilities because it will incorporate first-of-its-kind technology. Mr. Hood also later questioned whether the PSC was fulfilling its duty to act in the public interest.

A Department of Energy official presents a paper, co-authored with Southern Company, at a Department of Energy Carbon Capture and Storage Conference in Pittsburgh. The paper highlights a need for cost-effective clean coal technology as “a vital part of any strategy to reduce CO2 emissions.” Protesting in front of the conference, environmental groups argued that the Department of Energy was ignoring environmental justice impacts of its support of the coal industry.

Officials from Southern Company and the Department of Energy email back and forth about plans for the project. In their exchanges, they reference a news article about Southern’s plans to sell clean coal technology to China. The discussion about this sale seems especially noteworthy since the technology had not yet been refined. In fact, in the same exchanges, several officials voice frustration about the project’s lack of reliable budget information and other concerns about design problems at the testing plant – the emails refer to a “recently discovered issue with corrosive material deposition.” Morgan Moser, project manager for the Department of Energy, also prods Southern’s Doug Maxwell in a September email, saying he hasn’t “seen anything on the economic study.” These emails are important because they show the confidence that Southern officials had in being able to sell the technology overseas, even before the technology was fully developed. From the project's outset, Southern had planned to export its new technology, in part to help offset the costs of bringing a first-of-its-kind facility online.

The President of Southern Company writes to the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, to announce that Southern is withdrawing from a controversial Department of Energy clean coal project, FutureGen. Southern writes that it is withdrawing so that it may focus on its other clean coal projects, including the Kemper plant, a project in Alabama, and a clean coal testing facility sponsored by the Department of Energy. According to Southern, these three projects “represent substantial financial commitments for the company.” Southern also claims they are “now ready for commercial deployment” of the clean coal technology planned for the Kemper plant and that this technology is being discussed for licensing in China and Australia.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood blames energy company influence for the newly passed $6 billion state budget that failed to allocate funds for the PSC. State legislators had said they would not fund the PSC until it agreed to take 11 new auditing positions “off the table.” A little more than a week later funding is restored with an extra $280,000, but not the additional staff.

A federal Department of Energy official, James Markowsky, writes a letter to the PSC supporting the Kemper plant. He says that the project will create clean, cheap, reliable energy, and jobs. The Department of Energy was so eager to support the project that it sent this letter even before the draft Environmental Impact Statement was issued, which the Sierra Club later contended was in violation of federal law.

The PSC holds the first day of hearings to determine if Mississippi needs additional power sources. The hearings run several days. Mississippi Power Company contends that state energy needs will not be met without the proposed Kemper plant, which will produce less than 600 megawatts of power. The Sierra Club argues that there is already sufficient capacity, including 12 natural gas plants that are only used 15 percent of the time. These plants, the Sierra Club says, have the potential to provide 7,995 megawatts.

The federal Department of Energy releases a draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Kemper Power Plant project. A complete and final environmental impact statement is required before Kemper can move forward.

Craig Roach, the independent evaluator hired by the PSC, submits testimony, raising questions about the credibility of information provided in support of the Kemper project. Mr. Roach voices skepticism whether there is even a need for a new plant but he says that, if the Kemper plant is to proceed, the PSC should impose a cost cap and other measures to protect consumers from the risk of the plant underperforming and running over budget. Despite Mr. Roach’s cautions, the PSC votes unanimously that there is a need for new generating capacity. In interviews with the Times, Mississippi Power and Southern officials emphasize that over the next months and years, the PSC determined that the Kemper plant was the best option to provide new power for the state on three separate occasions: April 29, 2010, May 26, 2010, and April 24, 2012.

The Department of Energy holds a hearing on the draft Environmental Impact Statement for Kemper.

Craig Roach, the independent evaluator hired by the state, submits testimony noting uncertainties and assumptions in Southern’s Kemper proposal. He questions whether the up-front cost of the Kemper plant is worth the gamble for Mississippi ratepayers, as compared to relying on a natural gas plant instead.

David Schlissel, a consultant who specializes in energy economics and represents consumers in utility cases, testifies on behalf of the Sierra Club. He says that the Kemper plant will likely go over budget, by as much as 40 percent of its then $2.4 billion cost projection.

The Mississippi Chapter of the Sierra Club writes a letter to Richard Hargis, a Department of Energy official in charge of the Environmental Impact Statement on Kemper. The letter outlines violations, omissions, and deficiencies in the Impact Statement, and predicts that the costs of the project might be significantly over budget. The letter also says that other alternatives, like natural gas or biomass, could better meet energy needs and further reduce emissions, at a lower cost.

Craig Roach, the independent evaluator hired by the state, compares cost projections ten, twenty, and forty years in the future for energy produced by Kemper versus a natural gas plant. Based on certain constraints and assumptions, Kemper comes out on top in a 20-year projection only if natural gas price estimates are high. If Kemper’s capital costs run 20 percent over budget it will be the least competitive project in most scenarios, he says. In testimony, Mr. Roach says that cost increases of 10-20 percent were “fairly probable.”

Department of Energy official James Markowsky writes the PSC a second letter in support of the Kemper project. This letter is sent to the PSC a week before it holds hearings on Kemper. The letter describes the plant as one of “the nation’s most promising opportunities to successfully demonstrate the use of clean coal technology.”

The PSC holds an additional hearing related to the Kemper project. Kimberly Flowers, vice president of Mississippi Power Company, testifies that the possibility of cost overruns on Kemper is “unlikely and comparatively insignificant.”

Entegra Power, a company that owns and operates natural gas plants, files a brief with the PSC that highlights the daunting challenges that Southern will face, in terms of cost and operation, in the way it envisions scaling up from the Alabama pilot version of the plant to the commercial version that it aims to build in Kemper County, Miss. Entegra warns that neither Southern nor its subsidiary, Mississippi Power, have “built or operated a commercial scale gasification plant using TRIG technology to manufacture synthesis gas.”

Following a Mississippi Public Service Commission hearing on whether Mississippi Power should receive a “certificate of public convenience and necessity” to build and operate the Kemper plant and related facilities, Entegra Power and Calpine Corporation submit a brief to the Public Service Commission urging them deny the certification. Entegra and Calpine are independent power producers, and Entegra is a competitor to Kemper.

The brief states that the Mississippi Public Service Commission cannot allow Kemper to go forward because the commission, “is not in a position to confirm and approve estimated construction costs of the Kemper project given the vast uncertainties and unknowns as to the cost of this first of its kind project”. To support this, the brief states that cost estimates, 2.695 billion at the time, do not include the costs of owning the lignite mine that will feed the plant, post-construction improvements, the $354 million in ratepayer financing to be recovered, or costs of the CO2 pipeline to transport carbon captured from the plant. According to statements in the brief, even cost and projections that have been accounted for by Mississippi Power are dubious. The brief says that this is because only 10% of the costs of the plant are known and because Mississippi Power “is not willing to guarantee the cost of Kemper” or that the clean coal technology will work.

The brief also calls into question Mississippi Power’s calculations regarding the timeframe for ratepayers to see breakeven savings from building Kemper. The independent monitor for the plant estimates that, depending on natural gas prices, it will take 17-36 years for ratepayers to break even. As discussed on pages 32 and 33 of the brief, if Kemper faces just a 20% cost overrun from the projected costs provided to the PSC in 2010, ratepayers will not save money through the building of the Kemper plant.

Entegra and Calpine point out that the long-term risk for Kemper is borne by ratepayers: “If the ratepayers are locked-in to a 40 year Kemper decision, MPC will receive a steady stream of income year-after-year as its return on the Kemper capital investment, while the risk of MPC guessing wrong about natural gas prices falls entirely to the ratepayers.” The PSC later granted Mississippi Power the certificate, a decision that was challenged by Entegra and the Sierra Club.

Two environmental advocates from Mississippi submit a financial, technical, and environmental analysis of the proposed Kemper plant to the Department of Energy. They ask the Department of Energy to refuse to grant Mississippi Power a loan guarantee for the Kemper project. The writers call the project a “boondoggle” and accuse Mississippi Power of skewing natural gas cost projections in statements to the Mississippi Public Service Commission, whose approval is required for the project.

The PSC approves the Kemper plant but imposes certain restrictions, including a cost cap, limiting the construction costs Mississippi Power can charge to ratepayers to $2.4 billion. The utility responds by saying it will not build the plant because the cost cap is too low, and the PSC later agrees to raise the cost cap. This is one of the moments when the company felt that it made very clear to regulators that, unless it received better ability to recoup its costs on the project, it could not initiate this project. The company argues that even though regulators say they understood and were willing to provide better terms, regulators did not live up to that commitment.

Brandon Presley, a regulator with the PSC, argues against the decision to approve Kemper. He emphasizes the technological risks and says that the technology at the scale proposed for Kemper will not work. Other critics of the plant voice similar concerns, saying that coal gasification requires a narrow temperature window that makes the technology difficult to successfully implement. If plant operators burn too hot or too cool, there will be slag or other complications and the plant will have to be taken off line. On page four of his dissent, Mr. Presley says that 90 percent of the cost of the project is unknown and subject to escalation. This statement echoes a common critique that the company underestimated operations and maintenance needed to build the plant. Mr. Presley says that Southern Company has a good record with “cookie cutter projects,” but because the technology and costs of Kemper are not familiar, the reliability of the utility should not be overstated. The PSC approval of the project at this stage "is the equivalent of buying a car and having no idea whether or not the engine will run, but buying it anyway," he says. Mr. Presley says that the PSC and the public should not have to rely on Southern for all cost estimates involved. "There is no benchmark, no independent experience or expertise anywhere, outside of the Company's confidence; therefore there is no way to judge whether the $2.4 billion figure project cost cap is correct."

Mississippi Power files a motion with the PSC, objecting to the $2.4 billion cost cap on recoverable construction costs for the Kemper project. Mississippi Power insists that it cannot proceed with the project unless the cap is lifted because “the Commission's proposed cap is too low to obtain financing and imposes too much risk on MPC.”

The Department of Energy secretary, Steven Chu, writes a letter to PSC Commissioner Brandon Presley stressing the importance of the Kemper project. Identical letters were sent to Commissioners Leonard Bentz and Lynn Posey, and Governor Haley Barbour. “Without the Kemper County Project, DOE may not have the opportunity to demonstrate this technology and make it available for the cost-effective use of low rank coals for power generation,” Mr. Chu writes. This intervention by federal energy officials shows competing priorities. While Mr. Presley was more concerned about the affordability of the project and the burden it might put on local ratepayers, federal energy officials were more focussed on the national significance — political, environmental and economic — of the Kemper project moving forward.

The federal Department of Energy releases a final Environmental Impact Statement for the Kemper project. The Sierra Club later files a legal challenge.

Governor Haley Barbour sends a letter to the PSC, warning of an “awful, outrageous outcome” if the state lost out on $680 million in federal grants and tax breaks available “exclusively for the specific technology” that Kemper would deploy.

Overturning its prior decision, the PSC votes to raise the amount that the Kemper project can cost ratepayers. The cost cap increases by 20 percent to $2.88 billion, from $2.4 billion. Certain other costs, however, were exempted from the cost cap that would total $1.2 billion by March 2016. Mississippi Power and Southern point to this as the moment when the PSC provided for 100 percent recovery of project costs (under something called CWIP or “Construction Work In Progress”) for work done in 2012, 2013 and 2014. This claim becomes important later, when the utility is not allowed to charge ratepayers for work done during this period. In describing the slow-motion way that the price tag on this project crept up, Charles Grayson, from the Bigger Pie Forum, a free-market think tank, compared it to the adage about how to cook a live frog: "You slowly raise the water temperature and it doesn’t notice," he said.

The Sierra Club files a lawsuit against the PSC for easing restrictions on rate increases for Mississippi Power Company customers. The lawsuit claims that the utility has submitted no additional evidence to support the changes to the order.

In an earnings call with analysts, Southern Company announces that the Kemper plant had been approved by the PSC. Southern officials estimate that the plant will cost $2.4 billion and that it will be in service by May 2014. They also state that Mississippi ratepayers will start to pay for the plant before it is completed. “So we're real confident that we can make the contracted or the target price, the $2.4 billion, but we have the $2.88 billion cap that's available to it,” says Paul Bowers, Southern’s chief financial officer. Southern's C.E.O., David Ratcliffe, adds, “We believe this plan is clearly the best choice for our customers.” Mr. Ratcliffe also quotes Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who had called Kemper a project of “national importance” that provides a “viable option for using our abundant coal resources.”

The Department of Energy issues a 50-page Record of Decision, authorizing $270 million in federal funds for the Kemper project. The decision is based on the objectives of the Clean Coal Power Initiative, and on the findings of an Environmental Impact Statement regarding the Kemper site. On page six, the document says that the Kemper project “provides a significant opportunity to demonstrate a technology that can use the nation’s abundant coal resources in a cost-effective and clean manner while reducing GHG emissions.” It goes on to say that the federal agency “has reviewed and participated in the technology’s development and believes it is ready for commercial demonstration. Without this project, DOE would not have the opportunity to demonstrate this technology and make it available for the cost-effective and clean use of low rank coals.”

Mississippi Power Company provides the “break-even price of natural gas for the Kemper IGCC project” in response to a public records request submitted to the Public Service Commission by a Mississippi Business Journal writer. The break-even price is a key factor in determining if Kemper would save Mississippi ratepayers money over a natural gas-fired power alternative. As explained in the request, in order for the Kemper project to be a less costly alternative to natural gas, “the price of natural gas must reach a certain price range.” Mississippi Power’s break-even natural gas price for Kemper is “in the $11-$12 per mmBtu range as of 2014, then escalates to the $14-$16 per mmBtu range in 2030, and then continues to escalate to above the $22 per mmBtu range in 2052.” Natural gas would have to hover at these prices or higher in order for the Kemper project to provide any savings to ratepayers. If Mississippi Power’s high natural gas cost projections are correct, ratepayers will start to see savings in 2027. On the other hand, if natural gas prices follow lower price projections, "then ratepayers will never see any savings from Kemper on a cumulative net present value basis.” During this period, the fracking revolution began sharply increasing natural gas production, setting off a long and steady decline in natural gas prices.

Men in black suits and polished shoes gather in a muddy clearing in eastern Mississippi for the plant’s groundbreaking ceremony. Governor Haley Barbour helps shovel some of the ceremonial dirt at the site. “Prayers of thanksgiving are very appropriate here,” Mr. Barbour says. “Workers welcome,” reads the sign posted on the front lawn of the Liberty Baptist Church, across the street from the site. The Sierra Club disrupts the ceremony with an airplane banner stating: “Dirty Expensive Unnecessary.” Kemper construction begins, without an official certification from the PSC.

Mississippi Power releases a video illustrating the community’s hope for a positive economic impact from the Kemper project. One county official expects the plant to “bring about opportunities this town has not had for quite some time,” and to increase the county’s tax revenue, which will go to education, roads, and other services. Project contractors are patronizing local businesses in Kemper County, and those businesses are appreciative of the project, according to one local representative. Kemper’s construction site general manager says that 100 people in Mississippi have been employed by the project, with over thirty from the Kemper County area.

Mississippi oilman Thomas Blanton, an antagonist of the Public Service Commission and critic of the Kemper project, begins running controversial television ads showing an older woman eating dog food. The ads, which are in response to plans by Mississippi Power to pay for the Kemper plant with rate hikes, aim to highlight the sacrifices that poor people must make if they cannot afford to pay for their electricity.

The Mississippi chapter of the Sierra Club challenges the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality Permit Board’s decision to uphold an air permit for the proposed Kemper project.

A federal court denies the Sierra Club’s lawsuit against the Department of Energy. The Sierra Club had argued that the Department of Energy should not fund a project that endangers the health of citizens.

In an earnings call, Southern officials tell analysts that there are 1,000 workers onsite at the new Kemper facility, and predict that employment at the plant will peak at 2,000. They say that the company’s three-year forecast includes $1.5 billion for the Kemper project. Art Beattie, a Southern executive, notes that the U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantees for Kemper and another project could cover $4.3 billion in spending, or 40 percent of the company’s expected $10.4 billion long-term debt obligations. Investment analysts on the call question how the low price of natural gas and anticipated federal carbon rules will affect the future of Southern’s coal-fired assets. “We have Kemper County in Mississippi, which is going to have an environmental signature better than or equivalent to natural gas,” says Tom Fanning, Southern’s C.E.O. Near the end of the call, an analyst asks whether Southern should be considered “cash flow negative.” Mr. Fanning pushes back, assuring the analysts that Southern will be able to pass along some of the costs to ratepayers before the Kemper plant is completed. “We kind of look cash flow negative,” Mr. Fanning says, “but that’s because we’re growing.”

The Mississippi Supreme Court reverses the PSC decision to allow Mississippi Power to go forward with the Kemper plant. The decision means the Kemper plan will be returned to the PSC for further review. Critics of Kemper would argue that the high court’s reversal makes this an example of how the regulators at the PSC exerted insufficient oversight. From another perspective, this back and forth is exactly the kind of regulatory uncertainty and delay that Southern Company feared might slow construction and raise overall costs.

The PSC holds a closed-door meeting, lasting less than a minute, and issues emergency authorization to allow construction at the Kemper site to go forward. This action comes two weeks after the Mississippi Supreme Court’s attempt to block the PSC’s plan to raise the Kemper cost cap. This is one of several incidents when the justices of the Mississippi Supreme Court pressured state regulators to exert tighter control over the escalating costs of the Kemper project. More often than not, the PSC found ways to circumvent the court’s rulings and continue funding the Kemper project’s growing budget.

The PSC recertifies the Kemper plant. Comments from the public were not permitted at the hearing, and the PSC did not re-open the record.

In an earnings call, Southern Company officials reassure analysts that the PSC has recertified the Kemper project. Tom Fanning, Southern’s C.E.O., tells analysts that the testing and startup of the plant are now 14 months away. “We remain confident that this project will provide the best value to customers over the long term,” Mr. Fanning says. He adds that the previously stated construction schedule and costs remain “achievable.” When asked about the Department of Energy loan guarantees for the project, Mr. Fanning says that he remains hopeful that the company will finalize the federal loan guarantees. But he adds, “I must say that the value that we are bringing to customers since certification has been rather extraordinary, in my view, and we'll be successful whether we have them or not.”

Sixteen days after state regulators re-certify the Kemper plant, Mississippi Power Company alerts them of a new cost overrun of $366 million. This raises the total price of the project to $2.76 billion. It is later revealed that the utility had withheld this information from regulators while they were deciding whether to approve the project.

The Congressional Budget Office publishes a report on the federal effort to reduce the cost of carbon-capture technology. The report says that the cost of building clean coal projects is typically about 75 percent higher than for traditional plants. The report also says that the Department of Energy has two goals related to carbon-capture technology: to reduce the added costs of carbon capture plants to 35 percent, and to improve technology so that the plants are capturing 90 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted during generation.

Mississippi Power Company says that it intends to raise electricity rates to pay for the cost overruns at the Kemper plant. A hearing is held at a state office building in Jackson, about 80 miles from ratepayers who would be most affected by the rate increase. Advocates have to bus ratepayers – many of whom are rural, poor and black – to the meeting. Of note, Kemper County itself is not one of the counties that would receive electricity from the plant. In June, the average high temperature in Jackson, Miss., is over 90 degrees. In the small, cramped trailers, where some of the poorest people in the state live, the temperature reaches 110 degrees – potentially deadly for older residents who cannot afford to keep their air conditioning running.

“Quite a circus y’all got in there,” a utility official remarked to Louie Miller, director of the state’s Sierra Club, in the hall outside of the meeting room. During the hearing, ratepayers offer rousing testimony about why they oppose the rate increase, which would have averaged about $20 per month per customer. “Some people are still living in trailers and now you want to build a plant you can’t guarantee,” said John Gooding, a cabinetmaker from Bay St. Louis, who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Gooding wanted to know, if the utility can charge ratepayers for a plant not even built, what incentive does the utility have to keep cost down, or to ensure that it delivers savings or that it even works? “You don’t want to pay to build my home,” he said, “and I don’t want to pay to build your plant.”

In an interview, Lynn Posey, a regulator with the PSC, admits to concern about how quickly cost estimates have risen since April: “Am I surprised? I’d say disappointed would be a better word. I don’t know what the magic number will be, but everything over $2.88 billion will be on their dime.” Mr. Posey says raising the recoverable cap is “completely off the table.” The PSC voted against the rate increase that Southern was expecting to get. In recent interviews with the Times, Southern and Mississippi Power officials said that this PSC decision was an important setback for the project and that they were told that the regulators would not approve such reimbursement until the Sierra Club's litigation was resolved. The consequence of this denial, the utility said, was the creation of cash flow shortages for the company, credit downgrades, and the impression that regulators were turning against the project. This action from the PSC also caused an increase in financing costs to customers of $600 million to $800 million. "With more than two years of construction complete and less than two years remaining with no indication of a schedule challenge or a challenge to stay within the cost cap," Amoi S. Geter, a spokeswoman for Mississippi Power said, "it was too late and too costly for the company to walk away."

The Fitch rating agency, citing the PSC decision not to allow a rate hike, lowers Mississippi Power Company’s credit rating from A to A- and revised its outlook from stable to negative. Also on this day, a free-market advocacy group named the Bigger Pie Forum, files a public records request with the PSC. The request seeks to find out what natural gas price forecasts Mississippi Power Company used to justify Kemper plant. The question being pursued was whether the utility used accurate and legitimate cost estimates in arguing that a coal plant was commercially viable and a better option than natural gas. In response to the open-records request, the utility files a protective order over the requested records.

Mississippi Power Company releases its May status report disclosing a new estimated cost overrun of $117.9 million, bringing the total cost to $2.88 billion. This is another example of the steady and incremental budget over-runs announced by the utility.

Mississippi Power Company appeals the PSC’s denial of the requested rate increase with the Mississippi Supreme Court. The utility claims that the PSC broke state law by blocking their rate increase. The utility also says that the rate increase will save customers money and “reduce potential rate-shock.” The utility argues that by spreading out the cost over time, the law helped to avoid the “sticker shock” that consumers can otherwise experience when electricity prices suddenly jump after a new plant comes online. Thomas Blanton, an oil businessman and opponent of the plant cross-appeals.

A senior manager at the Kemper plant, Brett Wingard, writes an email to a group of engineers asking for input on ways to save money at the plant. “Ed Day wants all cost cutting ideas,” he writes. Mr. Day is the C.E.O. of Mississippi Power. Mr. Wingard adds that cost-cutting proposals should be ready by the next morning.

During an earnings call, analysts voice confusion and concern over the PSC denial of the rate increase for Mississippi Power. Tom Fanning, Southern’s CEO, reassures them that the plant “has an environmental profile better than natural gas” and “an economic profile roughly equivalent to a nuclear plant.” He quotes press releases from PSC commissioners Leonard Bentz and Lynn Posey to show that Mississippi regulators remained supportive of the Kemper project. Mr. Bentz and Mr. Posey were appointed by Governor Haley Barbour and championed the controversial Kemper deal. Mr. Fanning also says that the company’s “current analysis” indicates that the overall cost to customers “will be less than projected in the original certification.”

The consulting firm Ernst and Young produces a study for the Mississippi Development Authority on the estimated economic impact of Kemper. The study, “using project data supplied by Mississippi Power,” expects the plant to be complete by 2014. The report notes that “major equipment assemblies will be imported from out-of-state suppliers.” It predicts a total employment impact of 5,242 jobs for 2013, dropping to 778 jobs once the plant is completed in 2014. “For the entire project, an estimated 22 percent of the $3.2 billion of spending during the four-year construction period will be paid directly to Mississippi labor and businesses.” The report does not include the impact that rate increases from paying for the plant will have on the 23 Mississippi counties that form the rate base area of Mississippi Power. The jobs and income figures are predicated on demand from the oil industry for plant by-products – a demand calculated when oil prices were much higher than they are now.

After several leaks to the media, Mississippi Power Company’s C.E.O., Ed Day, sends an email to senior staff: “I would like to remind everyone ‘again,’ no numbers, schedules, or information in general should be communicated to external parties until I review it/them first.........no speculation, no estimates, no forecast, etc.”

Mississippi Power Company issues a news release saying that the plant is two years away from being operational.

In a news release, Southern Company announces that the Kemper plant is about half complete and should begin powering Mississippi homes and businesses in May 2014. The company projects that the plant will create up to 3,000 jobs, directly and indirectly, during construction, and more than 300 permanent positions.

One of the challenges of carbon capture plants is what to do with the carbon once it is captured. For the Kemper plant, the answer was to pipe it 40 miles to an oil operation that could use the carbon to stimulate production of oil reserves. By selling the carbon, Southern would also offset some of the expense of building the plant, making it more commercially viable, assuming that local demand for carbon remained steady. In this news release, Southern says, “The company has signed long-term contracts to sell the byproducts from the gasification process.”

The company forecasts that, “Revenue from the sale of these byproducts will lower the overall costs for customers by approximately $50 million annually once the plant is in service.” However, energy economists and Kemper skeptics have questioned whether the demand for these byproducts, including carbon, will be sufficient and reliable enough to underwrite expensive projects like Kemper.

Should Southern’s geographically convenient purchase contract fall through, finding an alternative buyer could be difficult, if not impossible, they say. The alternative to reusing the captured carbon is disposing of it by injecting it into disposal wells for permanent storage, a process that is expensive and an additional cost concern of these projects. Whether those disposal wells might eventually leak, removing the environmental benefits of the projects, is another concern.

An independent monitor hired by the PSC provides a summary of its reviews of the Kemper project prior to certification by the PSC. The independent monitor periodically provides analyses of the economic viability of Kemper compared to other natural gas options for Mississippi and had raised questions about some of the technological and economic assumptions made by Mississippi Power regarding the Kemper project. For instance, the independent monitor noted that, among calculations presented by Mississippi Power, “forced outage rate for Kemper appears low” and natural gas “price forecast appears high.” After these issues were raised by the independent monitor, however, Mississippi Power concluded that Kemper is still the most viable option compared to gas-fired power plants. Mississippi Power replies to questions raised by the independent monitor and PSC by noting that natural gas price forecasts vary even from the most reliable sources. The company concludes that, instead of the low natural gas prices representing a longer-term shift in the market, the current low is “a short-term phenomenon that is not likely to persist.” The projection of natural gas prices directly impacts the analysis of whether the Kemper project will be more economically viable than natural gas options.

Mississippi Power Company issues a news release saying that the plant is on schedule for 2014 operation and costs remain at or below $2.88 billion. At this point, the utility says that the plant is 70 percent complete, and that new effluent pipes and transmission equipment were completed ahead of schedule.

In an earnings call with analysts, Southern officials say that the Kemper plant is still expected to be up and running by May 2014, and that the final cost of the project is expected to be below $2.88 billion. Tom Fanning, Southern’s C.E.O., says that he believes the coal-gasification technology could spread after the Kemper project. “Basically we think there is a terrific market for this worldwide,” Mr. Fanning says, adding that China and India are going to need more electricity in the near future. “We think it will be a solution not only for America but for the world to take advantage of this excellent fuel resource.” Exporting commercial-scale gasification technology would be a victory not only for Southern, but also for the Obama administration, vindicating federal investment in clean coal technology. Mr. Fanning also addresses the regulatory hurdles that Mississippi Power Company faced in recent months, including the PSC’s decision to stop the company from collecting money from ratepayers before the Kemper project is finished. “That surprised us. That, frankly, has been about the only negative that I can put there. I think the folks at Mississippi, the policy makers, are working hard to create a way forward that will work for both Mississippi Power and its customers.”

Greg Zoll, the independent monitor for the Public Utility staff, publishes a report saying that Kemper's schedule has slipped roughly three months, and that the delays would nudge the total project cost over $3 billion. Mr. Zoll writes that Southern Company Services “is not utilizing some basic project management and project controls tools and techniques that are available and customarily used in the industry for a project of this magnitude." Mr. Zoll also highlights the risk associated with scaling from the pilot project in Alabama to the actual plant in Kemper. In this case, the scaling up was by a factor greater than 100, which is larger than the industry standard for moving from a model to an actual plant. Mr. Zoll says, “There is still a technology risk due to scale-up and the extrapolation of the TRIG technology from the Wilsonville PSDF pilot facility size to the commercial Kemper project which could delay start-up and result in additional project costs.” Southern Company had originally planned to scale-up its new clean coal technology at a much smaller generation plant in Orlando, Fla. This very problem that Mr. Zoll identifies in 2012 is referenced much later, in 2015, when one of Kemper’s major backers, South Mississippi Electric Power Association, backs out of the project.

Tim Pinkston, a senior manager at the Kemper plant, sends an email to engineers emphasizing that all internal and external presentations relating to the Kemper project should be approved by upper management.

In a news release, Mississippi Power Company says that the plant is 75 percent complete and reaffirms a May 2014 start date for the combined cycle portion of the plant. The utility also reports that “nearly 12,000 direct and indirect jobs are being created during construction and more than 1,000 direct and indirect permanent positions once the facility opens.”

Mississippi Power Company and the PSC reach a settlement for the utility’s lawsuit against the PSC. They agree on new terms for how the utility can charge ratepayers for over-budget costs.

Mississippi Power Company files a request with the PSC for a 21 percent rate increase that means an additional $172 million from ratepayers. The rate hike could show up on bills as early as April 2013.

In another attempt to shore up funding for the project, the Mississippi legislature approves a bill allowing Mississippi Power Company to issue bonds up to $1 billion to cover costs of the Kemper power plant. The legislature also approves a bill giving the PSC authority to approve a multi-year “rate recovery plan” for Kemper. A little over two weeks later, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signs both bills passed by the Mississippi legislature into law.

Mississippi Power Company files a seven-year rate plan with the PSC, to recover costs of building the Kemper plant. At this time, the company says no further rate impacts are expected through 2020. The utility later files for another rate increase in 2015.

The PSC denies Mississippi Power Company’s request for a $172 million rate increase, and instead approves a plan to increase rates by $125 million in 2013, and $156 million in 2014, a 15 percent and 3 percent increase, respectively.

Thomas Blanton, an oil businessman and opponent of the plant, appeals Mississippi Power Company’s intended rate increase, arguing to the Mississippi Supreme Court that the hike is an unconstitutional tax.

Mississippi Power reports to the PSC that the Kemper project is on schedule and its total capital cost will be $2.88 billion. Later this month, the utility will report an additional $600 million increase in costs.

Bigger Pie Forum, a nonprofit group that promotes free-market policies, had filed an open-records request to the PSC demanding the release of documents related to the Kemper project. The organization is most interested in learning what figures Southern had used for the projected price of natural gas in arguing that a coal-fired plant would be commercially viable and financially competitive. The PSC had so far declined to release the documents, but on this date, a Chancery Court Judge, Dwayne Thomas, orders the PSC to release the requested materials.

An explosion occurs at Georgia Power’s coal-fired power plant just outside of Cartersville, Ga. Georgia Power is a subsidiary of Southern Company. The blast takes place in a unit of the plant being shut down for scheduled maintenance, causing three minor injuries to employees, and significant damage to the plant. Southern Company reviews the incident and determines that poor communication and a failure to comply with company procedures led to the event. Later in the year, OSHA investigates and finds 17 major safety violations at the Georgia plant, and proposes a fine of $119,000.

Mississippi Power releases a video updating the public about milestones reached, and still to be reached, at the Kemper project in 2013, including the first fire of the clean coal technology. The video explains that local lignite coal will be used to produce clean and reliable electricity for decades to come. The video emphasizes “immediate customer benefits” of the Kemper plant from its low fuel costs and says that the plant will generate revenue through the sale of carbon dioxide and other by-products. In the state of Mississippi, the use of Kemper’s captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery is expected to help produce two million more barrels of oil every year. The video includes visuals of unique construction features like the “lignite dome” and carbon dioxide pipeline.

Following a court order, the PSC had agreed to provide filings from Mississippi Power to Bigger Pie Forum, a nonprofit group that promotes free-market policies. Now Mississippi Power Company instructs the PSC to hold off on releasing the records, and the PSC tells Bigger Pie Forum at the last minute that they will not be releasing the documents.

Mississippi Power Company appeals the Chancery court’s decision to the Mississippi Supreme Court. The utility seeks a stay in the case about whether it should have to release thousands of pages of documents related to the project.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Southern says the Kemper project will cost $3.4 billion, a $600 million, and nearly 20 percent increase, from its last estimate. On the same day, the utility publicly attributes the increases to additional labor, engineering and materials costs.

During an earnings call, Southern officials report that their settlement with the PSC included a two-step rate increase associated with the Kemper project. Southern's C.E.O., Tom Fanning, says that a May 2014 commercial operation date was still achievable and repeatedly tells analysts that startup activities at the Kemper plant are 40 percent complete. A Goldman Sachs analyst asks about possible Southern investment in natural gas power. Mr. Fanning says that because of their coal-fired plants, Southern’s subsidiaries are unlikely to need additional energy sources before 2023. In response to a Fidelity analyst’s question about the effect of the Kemper plant cost overruns on Southern’s credit ratings, Southern’s chief financial officer, Art Beattie, says, “We have spoken to all three of the rating agencies. We have reviewed the situation with them, and they've given us a response that, yes, it’s of concern.” He adds that Southern is committed to maintaining Mississippi Power’s credit ratings. An analyst from Glenrock Associates asks if Southern officials anticipate another write-off, and Mr. Fanning responds, “Listen, you know how conservative we are. This is our best estimate with everything that we know right now.”

Southern files a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating an "estimated loss” on the project of about $540 million. The company says that this will push the cost of the plant above the $2.88 billion cap. The company also reports that its subsidiary, Mississippi Power Company, failed to keep and publicly report certain information about schedule delays and cost overruns. These failures, Southern says, “constitute a material weakness in internal control over financial reporting.”

Mississippi Power Company’s C.E.O., Ed Day, abruptly steps down, as the company acknowledges that he withheld information about cost overruns from regulators while they were deciding to re-approve the project. The company’s top lawyer, Ed Holland, becomes the new C.E.O. Mr. Holland tells utility regulators that Mr. Day had directed or allowed employees to withhold documents from the PSC about the $366 million cost overruns while the PSC was deciding whether to re-approve the project. Mr. Holland issues a statement that says "information was asked for by the (Mississippi) Commission and unfortunately we did not provide that information in the detail requested. I am sorry for this and apologize. I will see that it never happens again." Several other top executives resign or retire around the same period. Utility regulators say they hope the departures would help lower the overall salary costs of the company’s top executives, who earn between $400,000 and $3 million annually.

PSC regulator Brandon Presley says that Mississippi Power intentionally withheld documents that noted a $366 million cost overrun at Kemper in mid-2012, in statements quoted by an energy industry news service. "There is no doubt, when a regulatory agency asks for a document and you want it and you need it and then it is withheld and you find out that there was at least some inference that it was withheld at the behest of a company official, well my Lord," according to Mr. Presley. "The most egregious part of it is that these people don't have any competition."

Southern Company Services files a report with the Energy Department detailing its testing plans for the Kemper project. The report says that the Department will provide funding for the planned four years of testing and the subsequent six months’ transition period as the plant moves into commercial operation. The report says the Kemper plant “will employ state of the art emission controls.” The reports also says that the plant will produce electricity at roughly “37.4-percent efficiency,” which the report adds will “match the natural gas equivalency for carbon emissions.” To meet these performance goals, the report also says that “near flawless operation” of new technologies will be “critical” in the first year of operations. Southern Company Services adds that any challenges to these critical systems “will be addressed expeditiously.” The document is also noteworthy because it shows the company’s vision, one shared by federal regulators, that the Kemper project would help save the coal industry in the face of new regulations, saying, “Coal-based generation needs to be considered as part of the future generation mix.” The report adds that the Kemper project “will be in our nation’s focal point as precisely it is the path that regulators are aiming for utilities to follow with coal based power generation.”

Duke Energy’s multi-billion-dollar carbon capture plant in Edwardsport, Ind., begins commercial operation. The plant is similar to Kemper in several ways. Like Kemper, the Edwardsport plant was lauded for using “first-of-a-kind” technology, exceeded initial cost projections, missed critical completion dates, and was criticized by environmental and consumer groups. The cost of the Edwardsport plant continues to rise as utility regulators and company officials grapple over how to finance the plant and who should pay for it. Ratepayers in the Edwardsport service area are seeing significant increases in monthly utility bills.

Roughly 146 Southern Company officials attend a meeting in Birmingham, Ala., to address company culture in response to a Georgia Power coal plant explosion and Mississippi Power’s misleading financial reporting. A few days after the meeting, Southern Chief Operating Officer Mark Crosswhite sends a memo to Southern employees emphasizing recent failures that “damaged equipment, diminished our Company’s credibility and harmed our co-workers.” Mr. Crosswhite urges company employees to step forward with ideas, questions, and criticisms, adding that anyone who voices concerns will not face retaliation.

In an email to Brett Wingard, Yvonne Avila, a Kemper project engineer, expresses mounting frustration over construction delays. Specifically, she vents about the inability of others working on the project to provide her with firm and accurate estimates on the amount of pipe needed.

Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy (PACE), an Alabama non-profit organization that advocates for Kemper, publishes an advertisement in local newspapers attacking the Sierra Club and other critics of the plant. “The Sierra Club wants to gamble on Mississippi’s energy future,” the advertisement says, emphasizing the importance of a diverse energy portfolio. The advertisement warns that natural gas prices can fluctuate greatly, and that Mississippi relies on natural gas for 75 percent of its power generation.

PACE, a group supporting the Kemper project, criticizes the Sierra Club, an environmental group, and Bigger Pie Forum, a free-market advocacy group. PACE says that the Sierra Club’s opposition to coal was paid for by the natural gas industry and that Bigger Pie Forum is “a paid assassin with an agenda.” PACE describes itself as a coalition that “believes that the national conversation about the future of energy must include discussions about the cost of particular energy alternatives, not just their benefits.” PACE accuses Bigger Pie Forum of being funded by federal and state tax money intended for technology development. PACE rejects Bigger Pie Forum’s criticism that Kemper’s technology is unproven. PACE also says that the Sierra Club and Bigger Pie Forum’s opposition to Kemper is part of a larger “campaign for natural gas supremacy.” PACE says that Kemper, compared to natural gas, “is actually environmentally friendlier in a number of important ways” and that Kemper “offers hope of using America’s most abundant energy resource, coal.” PACE is also connected to a new joint venture of Alabama’s largest utilities that aims to “build public support for Alabama’s energy industry.”

Supporters of the Kemper project run radio advertisements attacking critics of the project. The advertisements say: “For months Kelley Williams and Ashby Foote – the forces behind Bigger Pie Forum – have criticized the new Kemper County power plant. They say officials should force the plant to use natural gas instead of coal. But Williams and Foote aren’t telling you the whole truth. They aren’t telling you that they have long histories with the natural gas industry, a competitor of clean coal. Williams and Foote are apparently using your tax dollars to push their personal agendas, but they aren’t telling you that and they aren’t telling you that relying even more on natural gas puts Mississippi families and businesses at risk of higher power prices. They say they are looking out for you, but it’s all part of a bigger lie. It’s time for Kelley Williams and Ashby Foote to come clean about their real motivations to admit that Bigger Pie Forum is using public tax dollars, and if they won’t, it’s time for Mississippi leaders to stand up and demand the truth. Learn more at biggerlie.org.”

JobKeeper Alliance, an Alabama organization with close ties to Alabama Power (a Southern Company subsidiary), passes out flyers discrediting Bigger Pie Forum, a critic of the Kemper plant. “We can’t trust Bigger Pie Forum,” say the flyers, which are distributed at a Mississippi county fair that draws large crowds and major state officials.

In an earnings call, Southern officials acknowledge that projected financing and capital expenditures for the next three years are $1 billion higher than the figures they quoted at the end of 2012, largely because of the Kemper project, which has encountered mounting regulatory and technical delays. Southern officials provide two target dates for keeping the Kemper project on track: first fire of the gasifier by the end of 2013, and the project’s completion by May 2014. Tom Fanning, Southern’s C.E.O., tells analysts that if they don’t hit that May 2014 completion date, the cost of the plant could grow exponentially – by $15 million to $40 million a month. Mr. Fanning goes on to tell analysts that the extra money and work they are putting in to meet that deadline is a “dominant solution” that “represents no regrets.” Asked by a SunTrust analyst how the additional $1 billion in expenditures affects his view of the Kemper project, Mr. Fanning makes a distinction. He says that the project is still “exceedingly attractive” to customers, but he also says that Southern’s shareholders are “taking a hit.” “We understand that,” he says. “Nobody here is happy about that, but that's the honest truth.”

As his performance reviews make clear, future whistleblower Brett Wingo started out at Southern more as a model employee than a malcontent. When he was hired in 2007, he could not have been happier. He went from living paycheck to paycheck, working in several struggling factories making industrial motors and fans, to doubling his salary at one of the world’s largest power companies, overseeing scheduling and design decisions on a project that he believed would make engineering history. Soon after starting, he proudly emailed his wife, Cindy, a photo of his new, second-floor cubicle. Before long, Southern began flying him to Houston for meetings to explain what his PowerPoint called the "tip of spear" technology to be erected at Kemper. In 2008 and every year thereafter while he was on staff, Mr. Wingo was awarded the $2,000 "Southern Excellence" prize for exceeding company expectations. His bi-annual reviews were consistently glowing: six or above on a seven-point scale because he "Demonstrates loyalty to the organization," "Motivates and inspires others," and "Demonstrates courage to do the right thing."

Mississippi Power Company files an “Initial Submittal of Prudently Incurred Costs” with the PSC. A confidential DVD contains all relevant information.

Element VI, a climate and carbon consulting firm, publishes a highly critical assessment of the Kemper project. Focusing on the plant’s carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) objectives, the consultants question what incentives Southern has to live up to its stated 65 percent carbon capture objective, given that the likely costs of capturing carbon at Kemper exceed the market price for carbon as a commodity, and that none of Kemper’s government funding sources are strictly conditional on that figure. The consultants say that, “In fact, it appears that the more carbon Kemper captures, the more money it will lose, a situation which encourages lower levels of CCS.” While the consultants applaud Southern for pursuing new technologies, they question who will be left paying the bill, and finish their report with this speculation: "We suspect that somewhere at Southern Co. there are a whole bunch of spreadsheets with various permutations of percentage of carbon capture, loss per ton of CCS, cost of losing some or all of the 48A tax credits, cost of repaying some or all of DOE’s grant, risk of penalties – or an injunction — for violating Mitigation Action Plan, etc. They would make interesting reading.”

Environment America, an advocacy group, releases a study indicating in Appendix Table A-2 that in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, Southern utilities owns the two dirtiest coal plants in the country.

Two think tanks host an event in Washington, D.C., focusing on the Kemper project as it relates to energy security, energy access and climate change. The discussion features members of the energy industry and government. Stephen O. Andersen, of the Environmental Protection Agency, cites the importance of “diversification” of energy sources so that power grids can be more insulated from price fluctuations. He also says that it is important to be agnostic about what type of fuel is used, whether it is coal or natural gas or others. Instead, he says, decisions about energy sources should be based entirely on the source’s “carbon footprint.”

Speakers emphasize the potential of carbon capture and storage to reduce emissions around the world, even in areas that rely heavily on “lower-valued” coal. Victor Der, a think tank representative, says that the first-of-a-kind project at Kemper will provide a “learning curve” and will bring down future costs of carbon capture and storage technology. Before joining the think tank, Mr. Der worked at the Department of Energy, where he was involved with approving the move of Southern’s clean coal project from Orlando to Kemper County.

Mississippi State Senator Terry Burton says that he is excited about what is happening at Kemper. He also notes that the rate increase expected to pay for the plant is “not exorbitant” and on par with what ratepayers experienced when another new power plant opened in Mississippi. A Department of Energy official points out that more investment is needed for carbon capture and storage to compete with alternatives.

Ed Holland, C.E.O. of Mississippi Power Company, writes an op-ed in the Meridian Star. He says that with low expected operating costs, the Kemper facility should be an “effective hedge against volatility in natural gas prices, to the benefit of Mississippians and the environment.” The plant “will capture at least 65 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced,” he says, and Mississippi Power is “contracted to sell it to oil companies to satisfy the region’s large and growing demand for enhanced oil recovery.” He adds, “More than two million extra barrels of Mississippi oil will be produced annually as a result.”

He also cites comments by Ambassador Paula Dobriansky, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In her remarks, Ms. Dobriansky said that, “When you turn your back on innovation, all you do is guarantee that, wherever power plants are built in the future, they are built using yesterday’s technologies instead of tomorrow’s.” Mr. Holland writes, “Between 2004 and 2009, Mississippi Power’s fuel rates increased more than 43 percent because of the volatility in the natural gas market. Without building the Kemper project, as much as 90 percent of customers’ electricity could be generated with natural gas, leaving our customers highly exposed to natural gas market price fluctuations.”

He continues: “I have said many times and will repeat here, we’re estimating that we will not raise customer rates more than a total of approximately 22 percent for the Kemper County energy facility. That’s far less than the more than 30 percent predicted at the time of certification. The majority of the 18 percent already approved by the Commission earlier this year is being collected in current rates. Approximately 4 percent will be recovered by low-interest bonds, which was approved by the Legislature earlier this year to be recovered after the plant goes into service.”

Mississippi Power company announces that it will not meet its May 2014 deadline, and must repay $133 million in federal tax credits as a result. The company cites bad weather and additional work that became necessary. Mississippi Power President Ed Holland says the Kemper construction site is now so congested, with 6,000 workers onsite, that further increases to the workforce would result in diminishing returns, as work conditions become too crowded for efficiency.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental advocacy group, publishes a blog defending the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed carbon emissions limits for new coal plants. NRDC advances several arguments as to why requiring carbon capture and sequestration, an emissions reduction technology, is a good idea for new coal plants. In the blog, NRDC notes that carbon capture technology is indeed ready, and that this conclusion is supported by E.P.A. documents used to form the rule for new coal plants.

NRDC says that costs at Kemper, a plant that uses a particular kind of carbon capture technology, are high because it is a “first-of-a-kind” project. In addition, all new coal plants, with or without carbon capture technology, tend to be expensive. “Should new coal become economically viable at some point, carbon capture is a demonstrated technology and its incremental costs are reasonable,” the group says. NRDC also accuses the coal industry of “spinning” information about cost overruns at Kemper, even though the cost of Kemper was not used by the E.P.A. to form the rule for new plants. The group says that Southern Company has agreed that carbon capture “is adequately demonstrated for use.”

Months later, Southern objected to the new source rule as something that would “essentially eliminate coal” and petitioned the E.P.A. to change the rule based on their insistence that carbon capture and storage technology “has not been adequately demonstrated,” as seen in the March 13, 2014, and Dec. 18, 2015, entries in this timeline.

During an earnings call, Southern officials report that the completion date at the Kemper plant is now set for the end of 2014. They also inform analysts that the further delay is going to cost between $15 million and $25 million a month. Asked about the PSC’s review of spending at Kemper, Tom Fanning, Southern’s C.E.O., tells analysts that he believes the problem at Kemper is that they agreed to a price commitment on the project when only 10 percent of the engineering was completed. “We made a mistake on the engineering. We agreed to a price cap without having done fully our homework on the deal,” Mr. Fanning says later in the call. “And we're paying for it.” When an analyst asks whether Southern is now a riskier investment because of the company’s large investments, Mr. Fanning says: “The only black cloud here is Kemper.”

Congressman Tim Murphy, Republican from Pennsylvania, delivers a ‘State of Steel’ address to industry leaders in which he criticizes Southern Company, calling carbon capture and sequestration plants an “economic impossibility.” He notes the cost overruns associated with the Kemper plant and claims the Kemper plant is “pricier than a comparable nuclear plant.”

A think tank releases a 5-minute video emphasizing the benefits of the Kemper project. The video includes interviews with Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, Mississippi Power C.E.O. Ed Holland, and Southern Company project manager Randall Rush. Mr. Barbour says that the Kemper project is an example of “Mississippi being on the cutting edge of technology” while providing “two billion dollars of revenue back on stream and all of that will be saved by the customers.” The plant has a unique and challenging design, says Mr. Rush: “What we are building at Kemper will be the cleanest coal plant that has ever been built.” Mr. Holland says that Kemper can capture about three million tons of carbon dioxide each year. He also says that, “It has been a long journey, but we are getting very close and we are all very excited that we are fast getting to the point where it will be completed and providing electricity to our customers.” The video describes the 6,000 jobs created by the Kemper project and the excitement and pride people have about working there. Mr. Bryant notes that a project like Kemper “takes time and effort and investment . . . but this can change the world.”

Federal Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz tours the Kemper site, accompanied by visiting dignitaries representing eight foreign nations. In remarks given after their tour, Mr. Moniz says, “We’re going to need not 10, maybe 100 more of these plants across the country in the future.” When asked about rate hikes, Mr. Moniz says a rate increase is nothing unusual for any new major power plant. In a Facebook post about his visit to Kemper, Mr. Moniz says, “Projects like Kemper represent the future of fossil energy.” One of Mr. Moniz’s foreign guests, Norway's Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Tord Lien, says he’s impressed. However, he adds, the high cost of construction would make it difficult to build this type of facility in Europe. Mr. Lien hopes the costs will come down, and says, “Every time someone builds a carbon capture and storage project like this it contributes to bringing the costs down. That is the key element to make this a world-wide thing.”

At the Governor's Energy Summit in Jackson, Miss., former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich voices strong support for the Kemper project, indicating that he thinks the project could be the most important energy experiment in the world. "If only we could get away from this war-on-coal mentality that says I don't care how good your plant is, I don't want you to use it all," Mr. Gingrich says. "You look at what's happening at Kemper, it took some visionary somewhere to begin thinking about a brand new model." At the same summit, he encourages Mississippi to push ahead with the Kemper project. "You have a chance to be a remarkable leader in the country in the next 10 to 20 years," he says. "In the United States, we have trillions of dollars’ worth of coal. Literally trillions. Worldwide, huge deposits."

Dr. Frank Clemente, professor emeritus, Penn State University, discusses the Kemper County Energy Facility at the Governor’s Energy Summit in Jackson, Miss., in a presentation titled, “Coal's Role in Meeting Global Energy Needs.” He says that “clean coal technology works and we have demonstrated that since the Clean Air Act of 1970, when coal generation increased by 150 percent and emissions that are regulated, like sulfur dioxide, decreased 90 percent and particulate matter decreased 90 percent. So clean coal technology works. Mississippi has already taken a tremendous step forward in the building of the Kemper power plant. One of the most important power plants being built in the world today.”

Southern files a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that the project will be in service before the end of 2014. The report cautions that the Kemper project could encounter further construction cost increases and delays, citing factors that might cause further schedule extensions "associated with start-up activities for this 'first-of-a-kind' technology, including major equipment failure, system integration, and operations, and/or unforeseen engineering problems."

During an earnings call, Southern Company's C.E.O., Tom Fanning, touts the utility’s relationship with state regulators and says, “In what was arguably our busiest year ever, from a regulatory standpoint, we saw an unprecedented level of activity across all four states.” Southern’s chief financial officer, Art Beattie, cites after-tax charges totaling $729 million from increased Kemper project costs. “Mississippi Power will not seek recovery of estimated cost to complete the facility above the $2.88 billion cost cap,” Mr. Beattie says. An analyst for BGC Partners, a brokerage company, asks when the Kemper plant will be completed. Tom Fanning responds, “The other thing I just want to point out too here, just to remind everybody, if we had perfect foresight, the cost increases we've had on Kemper were really kind of entered into the day we entered into a fixed price agreement with only 10 percent of the engineering done. That was kind of 2009 and 2010. The construction of the plant had actually gone pretty darn well and in fact in this latest reporting period we think we're on budget, on schedule on construction.”

In his website’s weekly news update, Representative Tim Murphy, Republican from Pennsylvania, refers to the Kemper plant as a $4.7 billion “boondoggle.” He says that the project is “pricier than a comparable nuclear plant and five times as expensive as a gas-fired plant.”

A think tank releases a video explaining the global perspective on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, one of the new technologies being deployed at Kemper. Former Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky, discusses the challenges of continuing to use coal despite a need to reduce emissions: “You have a lot of countries that have large coal reserves. They’re wanting to modernize.”

Milton Catelin, chief executive of the World Coal Association, says, “It is totally unrealistic to meet any poverty alleviation target unless coal is in the mix,” though he acknowledges that the burning of coal releases carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming. A representative from the Global CCS institute comments that “only CCS is going to deal with the emissions from fossil fuels.”

A European commission spokesperson says that countries cannot meet carbon reduction goals “without the rollout of CCS.” Tom Fanning, chairman, president, and C.E.O. of the Southern Company, said, “We will capture 65 percent of the CO2 and in this case CO2 is not just a waste. We sequester it via enhanced oil recovery. It will have a carbon footprint somewhat less than a conventional natural gas plant.” Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz says, “President Obama made it clear that this CCS is part of an all of the above energy strategy.” Professor Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics says that the price of doing carbon capture and storage is “modest and manageable“ and “the price of not doing it is immense.”

In an email to Southern Company and Mississippi Power Company officials, Joshua Keller, a scheduling contractor with PMAlliance, warns against using hypothetical and misleading information in a published schedule that could ultimately be used by investors, regulators and the public.

During the monthly production meeting held at the Kemper plant site, Steve Owen, a Southern Company official, presents a scheduling document that Brett Wingo and PMAlliance, a firm Southern Company contracted to handle scheduling at the plant, had previously warned Southern Company against creating or publishing because it presented a misleading and inaccurate rendition of the project timetable. The presentation of the document at this meeting remained unknown to Mr. Wingo and PMAlliance until the following week.

In response to pointed questions about suspicious activity surrounding the official project schedule database, Babar Suleman, a Southern Company contract scheduler responsible for controlling access to the database, warns Brett Wingo against further discussions by email.

Tom Stevens, the president of scheduling firm PMAlliance, sends an email to engineer Brett Wingo saying that PMAlliance is resigning from the Kemper project. Mr. Stevens claims that despite being warned, Mississippi Power used misleading information in a published schedule that is provided to investors, regulators and the public. In the email, Mr. Stevens faults Southern Company for having published a “‘what-if’ version of the schedule that makes a number of drastic assumptions about the duration and sequencing of project activities that (in our opinion) are neither supported by the project team or the facts.” He adds, “Accordingly, we must respectfully withdraw from our involvement in the Startup and Commission schedule for the Kemper project immediately.” A few months later, PMAlliance rejoined the Kemper project after receiving assurances from Mississippi Power Company that scheduling discrepancies would not occur in the future.

At a noon meeting with Southern Company and Mississippi Power officials, John Huggins, a Mississippi Power official, presents the same document that was presented in the February 19, 2014, production meeting. The document includes a timetable that several engineers and schedulers had warned was false and misleading. The document claims that the project was 80 percent likely to finish by December 1, 2014. Several engineers at the meeting recount Mr. Huggins saying that if the schedule slips even one day into 2015, it would represent a $500 million “financial Armageddon” for Mississippi Power due to lost tax savings.

Immediately after the meeting with Southern and Mississippi Power officials, Brett Wingo privately explains to John Huggins that PMAlliance has resigned due to the falsified and misleading scheduling document. Mr. Wingo voices his concerns regarding Sarbanes-Oxley law, meant to protect against corporate and accounting fraud, and its implications for individuals who may sign financial disclosures based on the deceptive document.

Brett Wingo writes an email to Mississippi Power officials, warning them that the company was providing the public with misleading scheduling information in violation of federal Sarbanes-Oxley law. Mr. Wingo writes, "This is a high-profile project with many misguided enemies, so why give them free ammo?" He warns later in the email: “Hope is not a strategy.”

Brett Wingo sends an email to an official from PricewaterhouseCoopers, an auditing firm working on the Kemper project, flagging the use of misleading information in a document that had been produced by the firm. The official responds by email saying that his colleagues are “concerned.”

John Huggins, a Mississippi Power official, calls Brett Wingo to say that Mr. Wingo’s emails have caused concern in New York with PricewaterhouseCoopers executives, as recalled by Mr. Wingo. Mr. Huggins asks Mr. Wingo to refrain from sending any more emails about scheduling because they are discoverable. A meeting is set up for March 6, 2014, to address Mr. Wingo’s concerns. Mr. Huggins explains, as he had in earlier meetings and discussions, that the published schedule could not slip into 2015 because it would be a “financial Armageddon” for Mississippi Power.

Despite being told by Brett Wingo that the updated schedule was unrealistic and presented potential Sarbanes-Oxley concerns, John Huggins, a Mississippi Power official, sends an email to managers and executives at Southern Company and Mississippi Power stating that, based on his meeting with Southern Company Gasification Technologies, the employees in Gasification Technologies believed 2014 was achievable, “to a man.”

In a meeting at the Kemper site, John Huggins of Mississippi Power, and Ashley Baker of Southern Company, tell Brett Wingo that his concerns over the manipulation of the scheduling document are unfounded. The men say that official projections on cost and schedule are based on “management opinion,” something they referred to as “gut feel,” according to Mr. Wingo. Mr. Baker and Mr. Huggins further state that schedules and risk analyses of those schedules are simply “opinions” and “garbage in, garbage out.” Mr. Huggins and Mr. Baker ask Mr. Wingo if he understands that the manipulation of scheduling documents is not in his jurisdiction and is not a compliance issue. They ask Mr. Wingo to agree that he is not being coerced. Mr. Wingo asks that the scheduling document include a disclaimer stating that it was not for production use and that it was to be used purely as a hypothetical. Such disclaimer was never added.

Phone records indicate a call between Brett Wingo and Southern Company's C.E.O., Tom Fanning, about Mr. Wingo’s concerns that Southern is violating the federal Sarbanes-Oxley law, which is meant to protect against corporate and accounting fraud. Worried that a cover-up was underway, Mr. Wingo explains his worries in a 21-minute conversation, according to Mr. Wingo’s recollections and corroborating phone records. “You did the right thing bringing this to me,” Mr. Wingo recounts Mr. Fanning saying. “I plan to get to the bottom of this.”

Brett Wingo sends an email to Helen Nalley, a Southern Company compliance officer, documenting his concerns regarding Sarbanes-Oxley and the creation and presentation of a scheduling document he believed to be falsified and misleading.

A meeting occurs between high level officials at Mississippi Power Company and Southern Company to discuss who controls scheduling now that PMAlliance, the scheduling contractor, has resigned. Joshua Keller from PM Alliance is in attendance because Southern Company wants to bring the contractor back onto the project. During the meeting, Mr. Keller scrawls down a quote by Bill Boyd, a Southern Company official, who says that the schedule had been changed in the past to “protect ourselves.”

Southern, which relies heavily on coal at its other power plants in the Southeast, becomes increasingly outspoken in its opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency's new regulations on power plants – and the use of the Kemper plant to promote these regulations to a skeptical public. "The revised new source performance standards would essentially eliminate coal as a future generation option," Tim Leljedal, a spokesman for Southern Company, tells The Guardian. The Kemper plant was a one-off that made commercial sense only because the plant was close to coal fields and Southern had a market for the carbon dioxide, he explains. "The location of the Kemper County Energy Facility – near its fuel source and existing CO2 pipelines – makes the plant the right choice for Mississippi and other places with common characteristics," Mr. Leljedal writes. "The Kemper County Energy Facility should not serve as a primary basis for new emissions standards impacting on all new coal-fired power plants." A week later, a Mississippi Power spokeswoman, Amoi Geter, is careful in an interview with The Los Angeles Times about avoiding any suggestion that Kemper was a model that could easily be replicated. "To say there is a one-size-fits-all, that what we do here is applicable someplace else, would probably not be accurate," she says.

David Schlissel, a consultant who specializes in energy economics and represents consumers in utility cases, testifies to the PSC on behalf of the Sierra Club about the Kemper project. Mr. Schlissel claims that the $2.1 billion cost increase since the PSC first approved Kemper was “inevitable, foreseeable and, in fact foreseen.” Construction costs for coal-fired power plants were skyrocketing at the time Kemper sought approval, he says.

Mississippi Power ignored the "canary in a coal mine," a clean coal plant in Indiana called Edwardsport that was facing cost overruns at the time Kemper was approved, Mr. Schlissel testifies. Mississippi Power also vastly overestimated natural gas prices to make the Kemper project look like a better financial alternative to building a power plant that runs on natural gas, he says. Not only did Mississippi Power present natural gas prices that contradicted reliable forecasts, he says, but the company also ignored a “seismic shift in the domestic natural gas industry” recognized by other utilities and investors.

Those “seismic shifts” in the energy market had already caused at least one planned coal plant in Louisiana to be canceled, he says. Even if Mississippi Power could effectively outfit Kemper with clean coal technology, he says, the increase in cost of the project beyond Mississippi Power’s estimate was inevitable, because the construction for Kemper began before the plant design was completed.

Brett Wingo recounts a story from this date. After weeks of tense exchanges with upper-level managers at the plant about his and other engineers’ concerns that the utility is misleading the public about the plants costs and timetable, Mr. Wingo wonders whether he is alone in the view that there is no way the plant can be completed by the end of 2014, as the utility was reporting publicly. One night after work, while eating at Logan’s Roadhouse, a restaurant in Meridian, Miss., about 30 minutes south of the plant site, Mr. Wingo asks the bartender how he planned to adjust when construction soon finished and business died down. The bartender laughed. “Every worker here knows that construction won’t be done for two, maybe three more years,” Mr. Wingo recounted the bartender saying. Mr. Wingo sends himself an email reminding himself to add this to his journal. He says it felt darkly comical: While the company was telling regulators and investors that the plant would be done by 2014, it was an open secret among workers and local business owners that such a deadline was unlikely.

Southern Company files another report with the Securities and Exchange Commission maintaining the company’s position that the plant will be ready by the fourth quarter of 2014. Southern officials go on to report that they “identified decreases in labor productivity at the Kemper IGCC due in large part to adverse weather, unexpected excessive craft labor turnover, and unanticipated installation inefficiencies.”

In a meeting, Southern Company officials tell Brett Wingo that his concerns are unfounded, that the planning documents he was concerned about were a miscommunication, that the company does not admit schedule slips unless they are 100 percent certain, and that the company’s attorneys have agreed that basing financial disclosures on a 2014 projected finish date is acceptable. At the meeting’s conclusion, Mr. Wingo, according to his OSHA whistleblower complaint, warns Southern officials that if they continue to report the expected 2014 finish on their next Securities and Exchange Commission filing, it would constitute an act of willful deception and would likely violate securities laws. If that happens, he says, “I will feel we have broken the law and will have to contemplate my next move.”

Greg Zoll, the independent monitor hired by state regulators, files a report with the PSC concluding that Southern’s decision to start construction at the plant before completing engineering and procurement had caused serious scheduling problems. While the company “attempted to maintain the original commercial operation date and compressed schedule,” Mr. Zoll says there was “mounting evidence that it was not achievable.” Mr. Zoll says that Southern rushed the schedule to achieve a 2014 completion date, which meant a “just-in-time approach to engineering and procurement” that led to costly congestion at the work site and constant work-arounds. Missing the May 2014 completion deadline will cost Southern $133 million in federal subsidies. Mr. Zoll points out that another engineering firm, Black & Veatch, also assessed the project in 2010 and cited concerns about its “lack of contingency,” the “aggressiveness of the construction schedule,” and the project cost estimates, which were based on “outdated prices” and lacked details about quantities of needed supplies.

Southern Company filed an Securities and Exchange Commission report informing federal regulators and investors that the Kemper plant would not be completed by the end of 2014, and setting a new completion date for the first half of 2015. It was the first time Southern publicly acknowledged the plant would not be ready until 2015.

In an earnings call with analysts, Southern officials once again explain why the company had to write off millions of dollars for the Kemper project. Both C.E.O. Tom Fanning and Chief Financial Officer Art Beattie sidestep analysts’ questions about future overruns by saying any project has “unknown unknowns.” Mr. Fanning compare the project's delays to a project being slowed by a natural disaster, like a tornado or a hurricane. “When things happen that we can't foresee, we have to make adjustments,” Mr. Fanning says. “I hate that, but that is in fact the case. Every time we've given an estimate, it has been our best judgment at the time.”

Financial analysts from UBS suggest that stockholders sell Southern shares due to “major ongoing problems” at the Kemper plant. On page three of its report, UBS says the Kemper project is “facing billions of losses and an ongoing stream of disappointments.” UBS is concerned about Kemper’s schedule going forward, and, on the second page of the report, estimates the costs for delay at $25 million per month, noting that any costs above $2.9 billion cannot be recovered from ratepayers. The report cites Southern Company management’s acknowledgement that construction delays put the firm’s long-term budgeting plan "pretty close to the edge."

Mississippi Power releases a video discussing how the Kemper project has drawn interest from industry experts from other countries. The video explains that people from around the globe consider Kemper an opportunity to have a cleaner source of energy, particularly when natural gas is too expensive in their region. Karl Moor, senior vice president of Southern Company Services, says that Kemper is a “one of a kind facility in the world, and the world has been waiting twenty years for somebody to build it.” A representative from the Navajo Nation says that he sees “a bright future for the county and the state of Mississippi” with this project.

Mississippi Power releases an online video that presents the Kemper project as leading the future of the energy sector and compares Kemper to other Mississippi innovative projects like managing the Mississippi River and helping to make the moon landing possible. According to the video, the Kemper plant “will help generate electricity cleanly and efficiently using one of the world’s most abundant energy resources, coal,” and, specifically, will use “lignite coal, which is relatively untapped for electricity production.”

The video explains that, in a world with growing energy needs, Kemper “represents the type of revolutionary technology that can help meet this growing need in a highly efficient and environmentally responsible manner.” Kemper has 6,000 employees and is working toward completion of the project in 2015. The video says, “the first fire of the combustion turbines was a success and will help the facility produce electricity once fully operational,” noting that Mississippi Power “recently connected turbines to the electricity grid.”

The Kemper project is a “major milestone in the United States Department of Energy collaboration with industry to research, develop, and deploy technologies to use our abundant coal resource in more efficient ways while producing significantly fewer emissions,” the video says.

Brett Wingo is removed from his duties related to project scheduling. Mr. Wingo asks Joe Miller, a Southern Company official, to change the way he’s handling the schedule so that it can start being used as an effective project management tool. “If I did that, I wouldn’t have this job anymore,” Mr. Wingo recounts Mr. Miller saying.

Patricia Galloway, the CEO of Pegasus Global Holdings, a utilities consulting firm, testifies before the PSC on behalf of Mississippi Power Company. Ms. Galloway rejects the criticisms of the independent monitor’s report from April 15, 2014. “There is absolutely no evidence that any scheduling issue caused any delay or inefficiency,” she says, adding that delays occurred as the design of the plant developed. In response to a question about problems with the plant’s scheduling software, Ms. Galloway says, “As is typical with any new software, growing pains are common.”

Brett Wingo, in an email to Helen Nalley, a Southern official, lists his concerns about prudency, process safety, and his career at Southern Company. “I challenged this culture to prevent breaking federal laws and our name from becoming synonymous with cheating and lying to customers and investors,” Mr. Wingo writes, adding that he does not want Southern’s brand being tarnished like that of BP or some other corporations.

In an email to Helen Nalley, a Southern official, Brett Wingo expresses concerns over safety issues, including that the combined cycle documentation is incomplete, inconsistent, incorrect, or missing. He says that he believes Southern officials are retroactively filing inspection reports so that the plant can be put into operation.

In other remarks at the Wrocław Global Forum, Southern’s Karl Moor talks about the “five billion dollar” Kemper facility. Mr. Moor says that the plant will generate carbon dioxide and turn it into a high-demand commodity—he envisions carbon dioxide someday being shipped worldwide. Mr. Moor says that clean coal technology can be an environmentally responsible complement to Europe’s developing renewable energy sources, explaining that you can’t have renewables without a reliable supply of energy, as well.

U.S. Representative Tim Murphy, Republican from Pennsylvania, also speaks at the Wrocław Global Forum, alongside Karl Moor of Southern Company. Mr. Moor is highly critical of European energy policy, saying that European investment has been unbalanced, spending $1.6 trillion on renewables and only $13 billion on carbon capture—resulting in what Mr. Moor calls “the lost decade for coal in Europe.” Mr. Moor says that there were "already supposed to be ten Kempers built in Europe by now.”

Karl Moor, senior vice president and chief environmental counsel at Southern Company, discusses the future of coal at the Wrocław Global Forum in Poland. According to Mr. Moor, lignite coal, prevalent in Poland as well as the southern United States, “is the strategic fuel that could bridge the gap,” until American natural gas can be shipped to Poland and provide energy independence from politically volatile Russian fuel sources. Mr. Moor says that the U.S. Department of Energy “for over twenty years has been helping us develop a technology aimed at Poland’s coal.” He claims that Southern’s Kemper plant will capture 65 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, of which they plan to send “3.5 million tons down a pipeline to enhance oil recovery.” Mr. Moor adds, “We are meeting all environmental standards that are both applicable in the U.S. as well as Europe.”

Brett Wingo finds more documents providing evidence of what he says is a lack of quality control in the construction of the plant. Mr. Wingo believes the lapses in oversight could result in a dangerous accident. “I’ve been in that gasifier. I couldn’t imagine getting hit with a large stream of water while I’m hanging onto a ladder,” Mr. Wingo recounts in his OSHA whistleblower complaint. “Who knows what kinds of chemicals might be in that dirty stream?”

On its website, Mississippi Power Company announces that workers at the Kemper site have met two “major testing milestones”: Testing of the combined cycle unit and pressure testing of both gasifiers. Mississippi Power executive John Huggins says the success of these tests, “puts us one step closer to bringing this innovative, 21st century coal project online for our customers.”

Greg Zoll, the independent monitor hired by the state for the project, says that Southern and Mississippi Power delayed acknowledging major cost increases and delays to starting up the plant long after they knew or should have known of those changes. Mr. Zoll says that management of the project was incompetent. He also cites extensive safety issues with the plant design that were caught too late in the project. Mr. Zoll says, on the 43rd page of his report, that while engineering expenses and product purchases went up, reported construction costs and scheduling timeline went down: "These trends are illogical."

On page 37, the monitor says that, as early as November 2012, it was clear that a May 2014 completion date for the project was unachievable, a fact the utility declined to acknowledge publicly until more than a year later. The report says that Mr. Zoll highlighted a projected cost overrun as early as September 2011 but, as noted later in the report on page 42, that increase was not acknowledged by the utility until May 2012.

Mr. Zoll says that Mississippi Power did not fast-track the project because it was common industry practice. Rather, the company fast-tracked the project in order to be eligible for investment tax credits – and in fact skipped many steps that would be standard industry practice. Mr. Zoll argues that the Kemper Project's schedule was aggressive to begin with – and then was made more so by fast-tracking. This caused the project to fall behind schedule repeatedly.

Even as the utility missed deadlines and slipped behind schedule, the company reported "no impacts" to the PSC, Mr. Zoll says. The Kemper project staff were not trained to properly use their scheduling software – and ultimately the staff had to be replaced mid-project, he says. Because Southern went directly from a pilot-sized model to a commercial scale version at Kemper, and the utility had no intermediate-sized facility, there is no way to determine whether the power plant will actually work until it is fired up, Mr. Zoll explains.

He rebuts the notion that the cost and schedule escalation on Kemper was “unforeseeable” by pointing to a similar project being built by Duke Energy in Edwardsport, Ind., which Mr. Zoll says offered clear warnings about problems to expect at Kemper. The utility strongly disagrees with Mr. Zoll’s findings, saying that the delays were caused by shifts in design, that the software was glitchy, that the project used standard accounting practices, and that the utility itself was absorbing most of the additional costs.

During an earnings call, Southern Company's C.E.O., Tom Fanning, says that the the challenge with projects such as Kemper are always the “unknown unknowns.” He first used this expression in an April 30, 2014, earnings call, and will use it again in an earnings call on February 4, 2015. An analyst for the State of Wisconsin Investment Board asks, “You've mentioned first gasifier fire expected late third quarter or early fourth, where earlier it set first gasifier heat-up targeted for mid-to-late summer. So is heat-up and fire different, or are they the same, or how should I think about that?” Art Beattie, Southern Company’s chief financial officer, responds: “Yes, Dan, those are the same. And it's moved out a bit again.”

Hargrove Engineers + Constructors, a company that inspects plants to ensure that their construction corresponds to the design plans, conducted a formal inspection of the Kemper plant and were told that only a small number of prior inspection records could be found or provided.

The Sierra Club announces a settlement with Mississippi Power. In exchange for the Sierra Club’s agreement to drop ongoing lawsuits against the Kemper plant, Mississippi Power promises to retire other coal-fired power plant units and to help finance energy-efficiency programs.

The PSC votes to indefinitely suspend prudency hearings on the Kemper project. Commissioners said they want to wait until the plant is completed and operational before they review spending and make judgments on whether electricity customers should pay for the project. Mississippi Power could be forced to absorb more costs if the PSC ultimately decides not to charge customers. Critics of the project and of the state regulators cite this as a rare example of the PSC exerting limited, some would say insufficient, oversight of the project. On the other hand, backers of the project would cite this as another example of the type of regulatory uncertainty that made it difficult for Southern Company to run the project smoothly and calculate accurate cost estimates.

The natural-gas-fired part of the Kemper plant is put into service and begins producing electricity for Mississippi Power customers.

The state of Mississippi issues a Clean Water Act wastewater discharge permit for the Kemper project.

Brett Wingo is warned by his supervisor, Tim Pinkston from Southern, to stop voicing safety concerns. Mr. Wingo says he will not allow unsafe conditions and demands to see inspection records.

Facing an 18 percent rate increase on its electric bill, the city of Ocean Springs, Miss., is forced to ask local soccer clubs to pay an additional fee to keep the lights on at Freedom Field. The rate increase, approved by the PSC, goes to fund the rising costs of construction for Mississippi Power’s Kemper facility. Three local businesses step in to cover the unexpected costs and keep Freedom Field illuminated.

The Ocean Springs Board of Aldermen also considers applying for a grant to install solar-powered lights at the public field. The Ocean Springs Parks and Leisure Department is $7,000 over its power budget, a figure that could rise to $36,000 by the end of the year, city officials say. The situation in Ocean Springs is just one example of the rate hike’s impact on public institutions, small and large, across southeast Mississippi.

Administrators at the University of Southern Mississippi and Pearl River Community College cite the rate increase as one factor leading to planned tuition hikes at both institutions. The University of Southern Mississippi anticipates that the 18 percent rate bump would add more than $1 million to its utilities budget, in less than a year. Administrator Douglas Vinzant says, “That’s a lot of money to this institution.” Both schools are implementing energy conservation measures on campus, but both still anticipate raising tuition for the coming school year.

Brett Wingo calls his supervisor, Brett Wingard, to express his concerns over photographs that reveal defective pipes in the plant. Mr. Wingard dismisses the threat, saying that the pipes were not in a section of the plant that was fully operating. The pictures had been taken on an iPhone by a concerned inspector. Mr. Wingo later pulls the embedded GPS information from the photos and they reveal that the faulty pipes were, in fact, in the section of the plant already operating. “I found out on Friday they were starting it on Monday, and I had all this information that worried the hell out of me,” Mr. Wingo said during the call. “You know, it puts me in a panic mode.” Mr. Wingard says that Mr. Wingo brings a valuable skill set to the company, but he says that Mr. Wingo also needs to pass concerns to management and let them “handle it.”

In a lengthy phone conversation, Brett Wingo and Tim Adams, a chemical engineer at the plant, discuss safety concerns and a lack of accountability at the site. “They were just trying to hit milestones. They wasn’t focused on all the other stuff. That wasn’t their marching orders,” Mr. Adams says of the Kemper construction team. Later in the call, Mr. Wingo says that he wants to see the Kemper project through to the end. Mr. Adams responds: “If we get to a point where it’s obvious we’re finding things that are not going to meet the safety standards that we’re trying to all operate to, then all of us, man, all of us will leave.”

A phone conversation is held between Randall Rush and Brett Wingo. Mr. Rush tells Mr. Wingo that people are fed up with all his warnings: “You’re digging a hole.”

On a conference call, Brett Wingo tells Brett Wingard, project manager at Southern Company Services, and Randall Rush, general manager of Gasification Technologies at Southern, that he has retained an attorney and intends to sue Southern Company for retaliation, citing Sarbanes-Oxley and OSHA rules. When Mr. Rush questions Mr. Wingo about his prior fights over alleged schedule manipulation, Mr. Wingo tells Mr. Rush and Mr. Wingard, “We were about to break a fucking federal law!” To which Mr. Rush responds, “You’re not a lawyer, Brett.” They then turn to safety concerns. Mr. Wingard implies that inspection records for the Kemper project are not needed because, in his professional opinion, “the plant is safe.” Mr. Rush tells Mr. Wingo he’s the best damn engineer he’s ever had but “you wouldn’t stay in your box.”

Brett Wingo is put on paid administrative leave. In a phone call, Ryan Brown, an engineer responsible for overseeing the assembly of compressors, complains that he is routinely being handed work from the construction teams that has missing inspection records, valves, gaskets, supports, and electrical connections, or that was installed backward or not according to plans. “I’ve not taken a single package that I haven’t had to go back and do some sort of repair or rebuild on,” he says. Later in the call, Mr. Brown adds that he does not believe the plant will be fully operational until the spring of 2016. Workers in other calls have similar complaints about the quality of construction work and often attribute the poor workmanship to a rushed schedule.

Southern Company's C.E.O., Tom Fanning, sells nearly $47 million worth of his Southern shares, more than 90 percent of his stake in the company. Southern Company says in a statement that the sale was, “A routine part of his long term financial planning.” A few weeks later, Brett Wingo and his fellow engineers voice skepticism about the official reason given for the stock sale and they wonder aloud whether the C.E.O. has lost confidence in the project. “Did you know he did that because he is in the process of a divorce?” asks Donald Falletta, a plant engineer, sounding sarcastic. “Maybe he’s going to check out,” Brent Duncan suggests.

In a tense exchange by phone with Brett Wingo, Landon Lunsford, a plant engineer, says, “Nobody sees the big puzzle and grand conspiracy that you see.” He adds, “I’m concerned about you personally. I’m concerned about your family. I’m concerned about myself and getting wrapped up in a bunch of mess.” In the same conversation, Mr. Lunsford says, “There are concerns all over the place that corners are being cut.”

A Sino-American Clean Coal Technology Seminar is held in the Chinese city of Dongguan, where a coal gasification plant is being restarted. Dongguan is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy and some American high-tech energy companies to jointly develop clean and efficient coal gasification power. The translated captions of a short video from the event say that the Chinese plant is “similar to Kemper” and “will make profit from its byproducts, such as sulfur, ammonia, high-quality coal ash.” This type of coal technology dissemination has been a long-term goal of Southern Company and its federal backers. The Chinese plant will be able to gasify low-grade coal for power generation “with only half the cost of natural gas,” seminar presenters say. They add that the technology has the capacity to “achieve a near-zero carbon emission level.” The plant in Dongguan is one of more than 800 research projects supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.

Brett Wingo sends a binder, an inch and a half thick with documents detailing his whistleblower complaints and corroborating his allegations, to Kim Greene, the chief operating officer of Southern Company Services.

The Department of Energy updates its contract with Southern Company, detailing terms for providing federal funds to the Kemper project. The document specifies a number of requirements for Southern, including the filing of reports whenever delays or “adverse conditions” impair the company’s ability to meet its objectives. The problems that Southern is supposed to report to federal energy officials, according to the contract, include cost overruns and changes in the perceived environmental impact of the project. Some environmental advocates will later question whether Southern has fully complied with this reporting requirement. The contract also details the parameters of intellectual property rights related to technology used at the project. Starting in Section III, the contract clarifies that even though this project is receiving federal funding, Southern Company maintains its rights to license and sell the technology developed at the plant. This is important because Southern has assured investors that Kemper will provide the company with technology that can be marketed abroad. Indeed, in December 2015, Southern signed a letter of intent with a South Korean company for use of its technology in that country.

Landon Lunsford, a plant engineer who at various points voiced ambivalence about the Kemper project, calls Mr. Wingo. “I don’t necessarily put everything together the same way you do,” Mr. Lunsford says. “But I think you’re closer to right than wrong.” Later in the call he adds, “I can’t even believe, this is so surreal. I can’t even believe I’m involved in something so messed up.”

Southern announces that the cost of the Kemper plant has risen by $496 million.

During an earnings call, Tom Fanning, Southern's C.E.O., says that there are additional costs for Kemper of $418 million, of which $310 million was caused by schedule extensions. Dan Jenkins, an analyst with the state of Wisconsin Investment Board, asks if the syngas production would start July 2015. Mr. Fanning replied, “That's a good general date. I wouldn't get that precise, but yes.”

In a recorded phone call, Landon Lunsford, a plant engineer, recounts how workers discovered one night that a large section of outdoor exhaust pipe was glowing cherry red because 1,400-degree gases were misdirected through it. “That’s so egregious what they did,” Mr. Lunsford says. “That’s so bad that they made people all over the company stand up and say this is ridiculous.” Mr. Lunsford says that the incident cannot be considered an anomaly because it is the culmination of other safety issues at the plant. Brett Wingo and Mr. Lunsford agree that since the incident, the company has been doing more to ensure safety at the plant. “I hope it’s a change and not just a reaction,” Mr. Lunsford says.

Asked in an interview about the rising costs of the Kemper plant, a Mississippi Power official says there's no need to panic. "Anything above the cap cost as we agreed to with the commission has been absorbed by the Southern Company stockholders," John Huggins says, "Almost $2 billion worth of write-off has taken place." Kemper’s cost recovery, as approved by the PSC, resulted in an 18 percent rate increase, in effect since March 2013. Mr. Huggins says there's no additional rate increase for the cap portion of the plant, but there will be a 4 percent to 5 percent rate increase after commercial operation starts sometime in 2016. “The Kemper Plant's 65 percent CO2 capture will result in about 2 million barrels of oil produced in Mississippi,” he adds. He also says that the plant will also sell sulfuric acid and ammonia into the market, which goes to plants in Mississippi producing pulp and paper. Further, he says, countries across the world are studying the clean processes used at the Kemper plant.

Matt Nelson, a plant engineer, says in a recorded phone call, “I’m getting my resume ready, I can’t do this any longer.” Mr. Nelson and Brett Wingo joke about going to work for Home Depot or a golf course. “You know what, that’s not too bad,” Mr. Nelson says. “Sounds kind of fun.”

A news report discusses the benefits of the number of workers at the plant decreasing.

On the one hand, it says that Kemper County Economic Development Authority executive director, Craig Hitt, expects that some businesses, like new RV parks housing construction workers, will be forced to close down. But the impending decrease in population will have its benefits. Sheriff James Moore says crime has risen about 25 percent since construction started, with most of the increase from drug and property crimes. "I think crime will go back to its normal rate," he says. "Not saying that the coal plant, those employees, brought that much crime here, but with them coming here, yes, it increased crime. It brought other criminals from other places because you had more people populating Kemper County, so there was more to deal with.” The population spike also increased local tax revenues. Kemper County administrator Andrew Smith says that the county saw $8.12 million in tax revenue just from the coal plant.

Walter Davis and Rebecca Thornhill of the Jones Day law firm hold meetings with Brett Wingo, a whistleblower from the Kemper plant, to hear his concerns in detail.

In an article in a Jackson, Miss., newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger, former State Senator Tony Smith says that he applauds the PSC for capping Kemper construction costs that can be passed on to customers.

Settlement discussions between Mississippi Power and Brett Wingo break down.

During an earnings call, Southern Company reports that its 2013 results include after-tax charges of $729 million or $0.83 per share related to increased cost estimates for construction of the Kemper project. Art Beattie, Southern Company's chief financial officer, says the company is required to have proof by April 2016 that the plant can capture 65 percent of its carbon for the project to qualify for investment tax credits.

At a hearing held by the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce, Representative Edward Whitfield, Republican from Kentucky, criticizes the Kemper plant and the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon emission standards. “The Kemper plant, from which these emissions standards were developed,” Mr. Whitfield says, “is a plant that's two years behind schedule. Billions of dollars over budget.” Mr. Whitfield cites utility experts who have said that carbon capture technology cannot be done in a “commercially viable way where they can be competitive.”

The Kemper County Messenger quotes Ed Holland, Mississippi Power C.E.O., as saying that the Kemper project’s cost increase “will not impact our customers.” He adds that the utility expects to have the plant in operation in the first half of 2016. “Employees are focused on start-up testing of systems and equipment; work that requires precision and takes time. We will not compromise safety to bring the plant online sooner," he says. “Safety is a core value at Mississippi Power and nowhere is that demonstrated more clearly every day than with the Kemper project which has an exemplary safety record, close to seven times better than the national average for a construction project.”

The Mississippi Supreme Court rules that prior PSC-approved rate increases for Mississippi Power – of 15 percent in 2013 and 3 percent in 2014 – were unjustified. The court decision, which would require Mississippi Power to refund utility customers roughly $377 million, is a rebuke to the PSC, and a major blow to Mississippi Power and its parent, Southern Company, who had been relying on state regulators to help spread out the cost of the Kemper project. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., federal Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz appears before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to discuss his agency’s 2016 budget. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican from Louisiana, cites a 30 percent cost overrun at the Kemper plant and asks whether the ratepayer or someone else should pay for it. Mr. Moniz replies that agency provided the project federal funding early. “My understanding is that the cost overrun is being shared between ratepayers and Southern Company,” Mr. Moniz adds.

Brett Wingo files a retaliation claim with the U.S. Department of Labor through OSHA. In the filing, Mr. Wingo writes that there is “willful deception” occurring at the plant. “There are decisions being made, shortcuts being taken, concessions being granted, issues being ignored (some that might classify as safety related-like the measly time allotted for operator training), too many to list, all in support of a schedule that many of us know to be a sham,” he writes. Mr. Wingo alleges that Southern Company paid millions of dollars in unnecessary expediting fees and that the company published incorrect information regarding the schedule.

Southern Company files a lawsuit against Brett Wingo because he would not agree to a settlement that was negotiated between Southern’s lawyers and his counsel. The company’s lawyers say that they have no other way to remedy their situation and ensure that Mr. Wingo agrees to “keep certain matters confidential.” In a separate filing, the company asks for a temporary restraining order against Mr. Wingo to prevent his violation of an alleged confidentiality agreement while the larger dispute is settled. In their primary suit, Southern alleges that Mr. Wingo agreed to a settlement in which he would be paid to keep quiet and leave his job, but that he had failed to comply with those terms. The company’s settlement offer was over $900,000, according to court records. Mr. Wingo says he never agreed to the settlement.

Documents obtained through open-records requests by Greenpeace, an environmental group, reveal that over the past decade, Southern Company Services, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, paid at least $409,000 to fund the research of Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming, according to an article in The New York Times. Widely viewed as one of the foremost researchers denying the risks of global warming, Mr. Soon accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers.

The Meridian Star reports that the Kemper plant is expected to "pump $12 million of tax-based revenue into Kemper County." The story says "this figure should hold for the first 10 years the plant is operational. Mississippi Power officials said the plant will generate $75 million in state and local taxes, and once operational, $30 million annually to state and local taxes over the life of the plant."

In a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency budget request for fiscal year 2016, Representative Tim Murphy, Republican from Pennsylvania, says that the Kemper project is $3 billion over budget. At the hearing, Administrator Gina McCarthy is harshly questioned on clean coal technology. Mr. Murphy is especially critical. “In all the projects that I just went over that are cited by the E.P.A.,” he says, noting the Kemper plant as one example, “They haven't been completed. Some haven't been started. One has been discontinued. One isn't even in this country and none of them are large scale.” In a news release following the hearing, Mr. Murphy adds that there are no commercially viable large-scale carbon capture and sequestration plants. He also emphasizes that the Kemper project, cited by the Environmental Protection Agency in its proposed mandate, is unfinished.

Investigative reporter Eddie Curran is among the first to write about a lawsuit between Southern Company and whistleblower Brett Wingo. Mr. Curran also writes on his blog, mrdunngoestomontgomery.com, about the extensive lobbying that former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has done for Southern Company. Steve Wilson of Watchdog.org has also reported extensively on the Kemper project.

In a phone call, Mr. Wingo and his colleague, Eamon Hogg, discuss the lawsuit Southern Company has brought against Mr. Wingo. “It’s pretty crazy,” Mr. Hogg said. “To me it seems like David versus Goliath.” They also address the attention Mr. Wingo has received from the media and environmental groups. “I’m getting friends that I don’t want,” Mr. Wingo says. “I’m not necessarily into Greenpeace and all those. My enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend. That’s not what I want this to turn into.”

Donald Falletta, an engineer at the plant, says in a phone call that he believes plant managers were being told to lie about the pace of progress at the plant. "I think they are all doing what they’re told to do, that they were told to lie, that they were told to be politically correct and paint a pretty picture and all that stuff that they still do all the time,” Mr. Falletta says.

Brett Wingo asks Brent Duncan, an engineer at the plant, if he believed at the beginning of 2014 that the plant would be finished by the end of that year, as Southern Company had been stating publicly. “I didn’t think it was doable back then,” Mr. Duncan says. Mr. Wingo then says, “You knew it wasn’t doable. And I knew it wasn’t doable."

Tim Adams, an engineer at Kemper, calls Brett Wingo to say that he is frustrated with how the project is being run. He says that he is considering leaving the project and taking a job elsewhere. He asks Mr. Wingo if he is legally allowed to speak publicly about the plant after he leaves. “Once we resign,” Mr. Adams asks, “do you think they will try to silence us?”

Brett Wingo’s colleague, Donald Falletta, calls Mr. Wingo to warn him against representing himself in court. “You’re outgunned buddy. You’re outgunned, and I told you that when we started down this road.”

Mississippi Power issues a news release saying the Kemper plant reached “one of its most significant milestones to date,” the successful first fire of the plant’s gasifiers. The "first fire" term has a very specific engineering definition, and should have involved the "controlled circulation of sand and/or ash inside the various parts of the gasifier." A "first fire" should also involve, among other steps, heating the gasifier to temperatures suitable for gasification of coal, which is about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. These steps did not actually occur, even though the company said publicly that they did, according to comments from gasifier engineers from the plant during the recorded calls. Joe Miller, Kemper's startup manager, is quoted in a press release saying, “It is exciting to see more than 20 years of engineering and testing now taking shape at this first-of-its-kind facility.” Later that day, in a phone call, Brett Wingo and his colleague, Brandon Davis, joke about the news release, saying the “significant milestone” was something far less. Mr. Davis says, “Yeah, we burned natural gas in a pilot. I accomplish that every day in my garage.” Later in the call he adds, “Matt and I were joking this morning there would probably be a press release.”

Mississippi Power Company files an application to the Mississippi Supreme Court for a rehearing. In its filing, Mississippi Power Company asserts that the PSC appropriately used its authority under state law and that the PSC and the legislature are vested with the authority to set rates, not the Supreme Court. This is just one of many chapters of a broader fight between regulators and the judiciary over who should control the project and whether they were imposing enough oversight to ensure that it remained affordable.

Southern Company Services withdraws its lawsuit against Brett Wingo, without prejudice. Mr. Wingo calls his friend and colleague, Donald Falletta, to share the news. “I’m happy for you on this small victory, I hope it all culminates rapidly, man,” Mr. Falletta says. Later in the call he adds, “Hug that wife. She’s been through a damn roller coaster ride.”

Troutman Sanders, the law firm representing Southern Company, sends a letter to OSHA refuting Brett Wingo’s whistleblower claims.

The Meridian Star reports that, in addition to the Kemper plant, there is a lignite coal mining operation led by the North American Coal Corporation. The mine has been operational since July 2013 and at that time has 117 full-time employees, the story says. The newspaper also reports that Mississippi Power C.E.O. Ed Holland has said that if the utility has to borrow the money for court-ordered rate refunds, that cost along with interest on the loan would force the company to seek a rate increase between 35 percent and 40 percent. In response to the fight over rate increases, the newspaper says that three of Mississippi's biggest business groups have filed friends of the court (amicus curiae) briefs in support of the utility’s position. They included the Mississippi Economic Council and the Gulf Coast Business Association. They all agree that a 24 percent power rate increase is much better than a 40 percent increase.

Southern Company issues promotional materials that detail benefits of the project and claim the Kemper plant is expected to be operational in the first half of 2016.

Designing the carbon-capture technology was difficult enough. Funding the Kemper project was perhaps harder. It has long been dogged by questions of how much it will cost, how much is too much, and who should pay. During an earnings call, Southern officials describe a recent Mississippi Supreme Court ruling that ordered the company to refund customers for prior rate increases and threw out a 2013 consent agreement that capped the amount ratepayers could be charged for construction. When read together over time, Southern’s earnings calls highlight the long debate over who should pay for the plant. In this earnings call, Tom Fanning, Southern’s C.E.O., says that the company is attempting to revive the 2013 consent agreement in talks with the state. “The settlement would essentially preserve the structure, which would mimic what was approved in 2013,” he says when asked if “pre-funding” is no longer a possibility.

In a blow to Mississippi Power’s plans, the South Mississippi Electric Power Association, often called SMEPA, backs out of a plan to buy 15 percent of the Kemper plant, citing a study predicting that electricity from the Kemper plant would cost more than previously projected due to escalating construction costs. In later conversations with critics of the plant, South Mississippi Electric Power Association officials cite Southern’s attempt to scale up from the pilot project in Alabama that was only a hundredth of the size of the Kemper plant as the project’s original and biggest mistake. The officials say that normally projects jump just ten-fold between model and commercial demonstration. The association’s withdrawal, which comes three months after the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered the utility to refund ratepayers for prior rate hikes, adds even more financial pressure on the utility.

In a phone call, Brent Duncan, a plant engineer, and Brett Wingo discuss problems with management and the schedule at Kemper. “There is so much non-accountability on all the construction timeline and wasted money there.” Mr. Duncan says, “The way this whole project site has been run is just terrible.” He adds later that he is “burnt out.” Mr. Wingo compares Mr. Duncan to “Atlas” for thinking he can “hold the whole weight of the world” on his shoulders.

In a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, uses the Kemper plant as an example of a struggling carbon capture project saying, “They can’t afford to commercialize that program.”

The Mississippi Supreme Court reaffirms its earlier decision to reject the 18 percent rate increase that the PSC had approved on behalf of Mississippi Power. In this latest order, rejecting Mississippi Power’s motion for rehearing, the Justices harshly fault the PSC for sealing thousands of pages of documents. "The commission's decision to govern in a cloak of secrecy and to grant confidentiality to rate-impact information was arbitrary and capricious."

Mississippi Power asks the PSC for rate relief to help avoid a financial crisis and pay for Kemper project costs.

Mississippi Power Company issues promotional material touting the plant's partnerships with "540 Mississippi companies, with contracts worth more than $1.6 billion" and the college scholarships it has given to local students. In a phone call, Brett Wingo asks a plant engineer Brent Duncan if he believes that the plant will be shut down due to losses. Mr. Duncan responds, “Oh yeah, I’m worried.”