Slashdot Mirror
Coal Plants Get New Lease On Life With Natural Gas
HughPickens.com writes Christina Nunez reports in National Geographic that in the past four years, at least 29 coal-fired plants in 10 states have switched to natural gas or biomass while another 54 units, mostly in the US Northeast and Midwest, are slated to be converted over the next nine years. By switching to natural gas, plant operators can take advantage of a relatively cheap and plentiful US supply. The change can also help them meet proposed federal rules to limit heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, given that electricity generation from natural gas emits about half as much carbon as electricity from coal does.
But not everyone is happy with the conversions. The Dunkirk plant in western New York, slated for conversion to natural gas, is the focus of a lawsuit by environmental groups that say the $150 million repowering will force the state's energy consumers to pay for an unnecessary facility. "What we're concerned about is that the Dunkirk proceeding is setting a really, really bad precedent where we're going to keep these old, outdated, polluting plants on life support for political reasons," says Christopher Amato. Dunkirk's operator, NRG, wanted to mothball the plant in 2012, saying it was not economical to run. The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable, a problem that could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity—at a lower cost than repowering Dunkirk. Meanwhile the citizens of Dunkirk are happy the plant is staying open. "We couldn't let it happen. We would lose our tax base, we would lose our jobs, we would lose our future," said State Sen. Catharine M. Young. "This agreement saves us. It gives us a foundation on which to build our economy. It gives us hope. This is our community's Christmas miracle!"
But not everyone is happy with the conversions. The Dunkirk plant in western New York, slated for conversion to natural gas, is the focus of a lawsuit by environmental groups that say the $150 million repowering will force the state's energy consumers to pay for an unnecessary facility. "What we're concerned about is that the Dunkirk proceeding is setting a really, really bad precedent where we're going to keep these old, outdated, polluting plants on life support for political reasons," says Christopher Amato. Dunkirk's operator, NRG, wanted to mothball the plant in 2012, saying it was not economical to run. The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable, a problem that could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity—at a lower cost than repowering Dunkirk. Meanwhile the citizens of Dunkirk are happy the plant is staying open. "We couldn't let it happen. We would lose our tax base, we would lose our jobs, we would lose our future," said State Sen. Catharine M. Young. "This agreement saves us. It gives us a foundation on which to build our economy. It gives us hope. This is our community's Christmas miracle!"
Since steam power in the 1800's, man has relied on reacting carbon with oxygen to provide power. We need to transition off this carbon-oxygen reaction to have any chance of stopping climate change and the devastating effect that it will have. Burning gas instead of coal is simply not enough.
Apparently environmentalists themselves. Perfect is the enemy of good. If one were to be cynical one would suggest that environmentalists only want sources of energy that are expensive and unreliable because the availability of abundant energy sources won't strike a stake through the heart of capitalism and consumerism.
No shit.
Envirowackos are never happy.
Telephone call? Telephone call? That's communication with the outside world. Doctor's discretion. Nuh-uh. Look, hey all of these nuts could just make phone calls, they could spread insanity, oozing through telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all these poor sane people, infecting them. Wackos everywhere, plague of madness.
There's the television. It's all right there all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we for then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally ill. Fact, Jim, fact if you don't buy things toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, servo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers...
plenty of butter, I have plenty of butter to shove up my turkey's ass.
it's ready and i'm waiting, as i rub my spoons together and tap them on the turkey's ass
i'm ready and it's waiting as i spit into the turkey's ass and eat it raw.
One community's "Christmas miracle" is another community's environmental and tax burden, another private company's windfall at the expense of the public interest, another and apparently another generation's problem.
The European EPR reactor has over 4 reactors in varying stage of construction. They've made big mistakes on the first in Finland, less mistakes in France, and even less for the two in China. Eventually, the bugs will be worked out of that design, and wide scale construction will begin. Construction will be faster, and costs will fall somewhat. As for uranium mining and enrichment not being carbon neutral, maybe if you're using ww2 era enrichment technology, but with centrifuges, like the ones Iran is building, that is laughable.
What is it about Liberals that makes them want everyone but themselves to live in the dark ages? We see this all over the world - leftist dictators all over the world live in palatial resorts while their peasants live in abject poverty.
New England liberals want power plants to shut down, but no doubt still expect an unlimited and cheap supply of energy for themselves. So, what is going to give in that case? As usual, it will be the poor who must do without as the price of energy increases beyond their reach.
Natural gas is better if you use a combined cycle gas turbine plant, where the natural gas is burnt in a what amounts to a jet engine and then the exhaust is used to heat water for steam turbines.
If you just replace coal with natural gas in the same plant to heat the water it is not significantly less CO2, though it will likely be less other pollutants.
Saying stuff like this is why I would hang politicians by their intestines.
Hopefully, a GOP President will switch them back to green coal in 2016. It costs less.
motive = results....poisoned then lied to... we must like it because we keep paying for all of it.... like the 'weather'?
, said the addict.
"We couldn't let it happen. We would lose our tax base, we would lose our jobs, we would lose our future," said State Sen. Catharine M. Young. "This agreement saves us. It gives us a foundation on which to build our economy."
It seems to me that if they were going to use the local power plant as a foundation for building the local economy, they might have gotten around to that by now. The plant has been there for decades, right? Looks to me like they squandered their chance as diversifying their tax and employment base - why should they be given a second chance to squander?
This is a temporary Measure at best. I see alot of anti-liberal and pro-conservative posts here. Let me make myself absolutely clear:
I'm not pro-development, I'm anti-living-in-the-past and reactionary-ism.
I don't think that cars are a bad thing in and of themselves. I think that cars burning petroleum is a bad thing. We should have cars, everyone needs cars, modernity is built around people having cars. But our cars should not be burning Petroleum. They should run on Electricity or some other Fuel source. There are companies working on that very idea.
Another idea is generating electricity in general. Electricity should be everywhere. We should use many methods to generate it as possible, Hydro Electric damns, Fusion plants, Solar panels, Next Generation Nuclear Fission Plants (not necessarily unsafe ones where the fuel can be weaponized to make an Atomic Bomb.) Wind Turbines, and any number of things, the one thing we shouldn't be doing, is mining and burning Coal.
I never thought Slashdot would become a Michael Savage Bastion of Conservative Clap-traps but it has.
The cold hard truth is that we are due to have a comet or massive meteor slam into the planet soon. I say burn all the fossil fuels and line our pockets with fiat currency while the getting is good, screw the next generation.
just guessing here - Fracking?
Get up!
the problem is none of us disagree with you
We disagree with the speed in which you expect it to be done. It will take time to bring the price of all those other things down to be affordable for the masses. a tesla model S, while I would LOVE to own one is simply out of my, and most others price range at this time. Not to mention if we all switched to electric cars overnight, what does that do the the power grid? increased demand means increase in energy needed to be produced. how do we get there?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Not everyone needs cars. Just pointing that out. Where I live many people don't have or need cars, because public transportation is so well developed. The public transportation uses electricity, which reduces the amount of pollution in the city center, and the electricity itself is created through environmentally-friendly means.
I think if you said "everyone needs transportation" that would be more accurate, but we could point out people that don't need transportation, and get nowhere :) No pun intended, of course.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... ...and then formulate your opinion. It seems you're coming to your conclusions without inputting any facts to guide you....
And yet there are news stories all over the place about how BECAUSE OF the mass switch to natural gas, my electricity bill is going up double digits...
Around here (Western New York) much of our natural gas is obtained through fracking. How do we factor the unknown long term effects on the groundwater supply into the cost/benefit equation? Not just unknown, but unknowable, because the extraction companies refuse to divulge the chemicals they use. But the issue is a $150M conversion of an antiquated power plant from coal to natural gas. After conversion it's still antiquated, still prohibitively expensive to operate, and still has environmental impact. The only reason the conversion is moving forward is politics: the community wants to keep the jobs and the tax base, and they seem to have the political muscle to push it through. And the reason this power plant has so many jobs is the obsolete technology it utilizes.
"I never thought Slashdot would become a Michael Savage Bastion of Conservative Clap-traps but it has"
It hasn't, but the batshit liberals are so fucking over the line that everyone can't take it anymore and the rest of us just seem ultra conservative by comparison.
Did you miss the election?
Low-density, high-impact shit like solar panels and hydroelectric dams? Sure, let's bulldoze the environment.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
You sure do have problems with those damn prepositions, don't you...
Natural gas produces just as high a greenhouse gas effect as coal.
http://environmentalresearchwe...
This gas fever needs to get real.
Your claim that nuclear is the best solution we have now is made without proof and solely because you know you're wrong.
Lead times: nuclear build up takes decades
Proliferation: we won't let some countries do it, so it's not a solution for the global problem
Expense: not one company wants to build it unless they get a guaranteed over-the-market-price sale of power and government underwrite of the risks.
First things first please. Jobs and the economy are not even a consideration. In essence we have created a system that heads itself towards termination of human life. Pollution. contamination, the murder of all things natural are at the toggle point at which many millions of people are likely to perish. Yes we need to shut down coal. We do need to limit the pumping of natural gas. Nuclear power is a proven horror story. The disaster in Japan as well as the meltdown in Russia which has contaminated a large area for the next 250,000 years is proof enough that no current form of nuclear power is safe enough to deploy.
Solar, wind and wave and tidal power are the only decent power sources currently deployed to any large extent and they are working out quite nicely.
Sometimes I think some of the enviro-nutjobs, won't be happy until we are all back living in caves, eating sticks and berries.
There are now much stricture environmental limits on metals emission like toxic mercury. Not having to add expensive scrubbers is as much of motive for converting to natural gas as cost. 40% less CO2 emissions per megawatt is not a primary motive but a beneficial side effect.
Low-density, high-impact shit like solar panels and hydroelectric dams?
Hydroelectric dams I'll give you. Insofar as there is anything to give. All useful rivers that can be dammed for power already have been, on this continent. There will be no more hydroelectric dams built in North America.
But solar panels? Solar panels are not high impact, despite being low density. There are 100 million roofs in the US. Factor in all the deficits and that's still a monstrous amount of power. We just have to use it. And the roofs are already there, so the deployment impact is zero. Manufacturing impact isn't zero, but it's basically the same as all those electronic toys people love so much, and Intel's chip fabs operate in the US, under US environmental regulations, and there's no big disaster happening there. They're primarily made out of sand. We've got lots of sand. Silicon is the second most abundant element the Earth is made of, after oxygen. Nobody will notice the bulldozing required to get enough of it. It's a very tiny drop in a very large bucket.
Them and their China Syndrome. And then the commies tried to top that with operating a nuke with a lunacrous design that just HAD to blow up some day.
Yucca Mountain is the best we've come up with, and it's a disaster any way you look at it. And plan B is...what exactly?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
There are plenty of ways to make cars better without going all-electric-all-the-time. Firstly they need to close all the loopholes in the fuel economy regulations that give free passes to big gas guzzling SUVs and crossovers (like the one that doesn't count them for fuel economy purposes if they happen to be capable of running on E85 even though most of them will never see a drop of E85 in their lifetime or the loophole that made the ugly-as-sin PT Cruiser count as a truck when it clearly wasn't or the regulation that allows big pickups and SUVs to gain weight to avoid fuel economy regulations and guzzle even more gas)
Solar, wind and wave and tidal power are the only decent power sources currently deployed to any large extent and they are working out quite nicely.
What about when the sun is not shining on those panels? How about during no wind or times when the wind is to strong that the turbines must be parked? I will admit that I don't know the current state of tidal, but I don't see how that will help inland areas.
The only workable solutions are a mixture of all power technologies or going back to washing your clothes by hand in the river which has a different set of problems for the environment.
the issue is that most crossovers and suvs are not much more fuel efficient. Hell our kia sorento gets over 30MPG and my pontiac grand am barely gets 20 for example
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Managing a distributed solar infrastructure is a nightmare. The companies that do so charge as much as your main utility.
Support my political activism on Patreon.