While worry and hand-wringing has centered around higher food and gasoline prices, coal prices have shot skyward even faster with much less fanfare. And that increase promises to drive electricity costs much higher too. The spot price for northern Appalachian coal — which includes coal mined in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia — was $138 a ton last week, more than double the $55-a-ton price of a year ago and four times what it was in 2000. Spurred by a tight coal market made tighter by a series of extreme weather events earlier this year in China, Australia and South Africa, the spike in coal prices could add another 30 percent to electric rates that were already projected to increase more than 50 percent when rate caps for most power customers in the state expire in January 2011, said Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner Tyrone Christy. More
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