The NRG electric generating station in Dunkirk seems to be the basket in which we have too many eggs.
It is prudent to try to save the generating station, of course, but we are foolish if we count 100 percent on being successful.
A proposed project to convert NRG's coal-powered electric generating station in Dunkirk to natural gas and using new technology some day would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and would be the biggest boon to Chautauqua County since - well, we don't know when.
That proposal is one of more than 130 that were submitted to state regulators last month, and so we know the day it might become a reality is a ways off.
Meanwhile the rest of the news about NRG is bad.
As you read over the weekend, more than 70 percent of NRG's electric generating capacity in Dunkirk is not needed and will be mothballed this fall. And even worse, NRG could stop generating electricity there entirely by 2015 without hurting the reliability of the state's power supplies, says a study released late last week.
The mothballing this fall of the two big 185-megawatt units will cost 63 jobs at the plant, leaving 82 employees. Only one of the two remaining 75-megawatt units will be needed after next June, which will cost another 16 jobs. In 2015, the whole thing might be mothballed.
Those jobs are only one egg in the basket.
The rest are payments NRG makes to local governments and schools - payments that will drop as generating units are taken off line.
In all, NRG pays about $8.5 million each year to local schools and governments. That level of funding will continue next year, but then that's it.
The payments could drop to about $1.6 million by 2015.
Consider what that means to the city of Dunkirk where NRG's tax payment is an increasing portion of the municipality's revenues.
Two years ago, the city depended on NRG for about 19.4 percent of its revenue.
Today, that figure is 23.5 percent.
Right now there is an all-out effort to get the governor and state Legislature to help make the $700 million NRG natural-gas conversion and new technology project a reality by using money from the Energy Highway Task Force to help pay for it.
It seems to us it would be prudent to have an equally energetic and determined effort to diversify the property tax base in the north county so that the loss of a single basket of eggs is not so economically devastating.