As legislature reconvenes, Illinois is poised to become the first state in the Midwest to ban coal-burning power plants

Municipal investors in the massive coal burner, including Batavia, Geneva, Naperville, St. Charles and Winnetka, want Prairie State exempted from the governor’s fossil fuel phaseout. So does Springfield, which built a new coal plant around the same time even as private investors abandoned dozens of similar projects, scared off by skyrocketing construction costs and the likelihood that climate pollution would eventually be regulated.