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Oregon Set To Become First Coal-Free State (huffingtonpost.com)
New submitter daubney writes: Oregon lawmakers have approved legislation to eliminate coal from the state's electrical supply by 2035, the first U.S. state to do so. The bill, called the Clean Electricity and Coal Transition plan, commits the state to doubling its use of renewable energy, including solar and wind, to 50 percent by 2040. The bill, passed this week by both legislative branches, now heads to Gov. Kate Brown. Brown said in a statement that the legislation "equips Oregon with a bold and progressive path towards the energy resource mix of the future." Today, roughly one-third of Oregon's power is produced from coal, according to the Oregon Department of Energy. The measure makes Oregon the first state to eliminate coal by legislative action, The Associated Press reports. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Oregon is matched only by Hawaii, with a 100 requirement by 2045, Vermont, with a 75 percent target by 2032, and California and New York, with 50 percent goals by 2030.
Headline should be Oregon set to be the first HIGHEST UTILITY RATES IN THE NATION state.
AFAIK, we here in the UK are going to be Coal Free (for power generation) by 2020. If it isn't then it will be soon after.
Several of our largest Coal fired power stations now burn Bio Mass rather than Fossil Fuel.
*Yes, obviously the eventual goal is to stop with the fossil fuels completely; I just wonder if this is doing things in the right order (what can I say; this tree-hugger gets suspicious when other tree-huggers look like they might ve putting idealism ahead of reality...).
In 20 years, through some process, the State of Oregon will not buy its electricity from coal generation stations. Good thing for all the Portland hipsters, who can now get their electricity in "progressive" flavors.
But the state won't allow new hydroelectric, hates nuclear, and can't afford to build that many wind turbines. Anyone want to take bets if this gets rolled back, ignored, or if the state just buys from electrical retailers that say "Oh, no, THIS electricity isn't coal generated! *wink* *wink*"
You still need base load capacity which neither solar or wind is currently (nor likely ever will be) capable of. Unless you replace that with nuke plants, then you will simply be buying your base load from out of state, and STILL using fossil fuels.
Silence is a state of mime.
They finally decided to burn all those old tyres.
Score =1, Interesting
Wut
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
It's in the future, and wind is already cheaper than coal today.
The math recently won an award from PNAS. http://thesolutionsproject.org...
A paper published last year demonstrates you are mistaken in this. In fact, it recently won an award from PNAS, the top US science journal. http://thesolutionsproject.org...
You liberals will then blame the evil capitalist utilities for raising your electric rates to the moon.
Oregon exports a lot of hydro to SoCal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... so your generalist point misses the mark here. With SoCal burgeoning in solar, likely the intertie will reverse.
existing plants will beg/lobby/bribe for extensions, and get them.. and utilities will simply import power from out of state.
what you won't see is a huge investment from for-profit utilities and power producers in 'renewable' power. profits, executive pay, and 'shareholder value' first -- customers and environment come last.
I'm thinking if we could harness the power of white liberal smugness we could power Oregon for the next 20 years based on current levels of smuginess production and energy use.
That's going to take a lot of mining.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
That's a nice headline, but Vermont and Rhode Island currently don't have any coal plants.
Oregon only has one coal fired power plant - Boardman and it was already slated to be shut down in 2020. So being coal free by 2035 is not going to happen by government mandate. But hey, politicians always like to take credit for things they really didn't do.
There are alternatives available now. There's no excuse to be expanding, or even maintaining, coal fired plants. Put that money into building alternatives.
I was under the impression there are designs available for coal plants* that don't emit anything but CO2?
I think that's the point. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and trying to avoid pumping lots of it into the atmosphere is probably a good idea since there is an increasing body of evidence that it is impacting our climate.
The bill... commits the state to doubling its use of renewable energy, including solar and wind...
I'm not sure Oregon is the best state for Solar. I lived there for several years. Hydroelectricity gathered from rainwater would be much more productive, imho.
There is a feedback loop with all fossil fuels. As you wean off of them, the financial case for weaning off of them becomes challenging.
It's the right thing to do, but early adopters may look foolish for a few years when actually they are being wise.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I imagine on the books they can make it look like they've gone coal free, but I wonder if they can actually DO it in the real world. I'd wager that what they'll actually be doing is something like what many residential solar customers do, pump significant amounts of energy into the grid on sunny days and pull in coal/wind/nuclear/solar/hydroelectric power in at night/on cloudy days. They claim that they're running on clean power but in reality if they disconnected themselves from "undesired" power sources their homes/businesses would be without power half the time. Don't get me wrong, switching off of fossil fuels to renewables (and well designed nuclear IMHO) as much is possible is a worthy goal. However until we invent one heck of a storage medium we will be unable to get anywhere near 100%, 70% is pushing it and even that would require significant fossil fuel backups.
Rather than shooting for "0 coal" or "0 hydrocarbons" by a fixed date, I'd rather see politicians, the energy industry, and industries that use large amounts of energy (the transportation industry comes to mind) work together shoot for "50% reductions," "75% reductions," and "95% reductions" of today's values by certain target dates.
Instead of spending relatively large amounts of money going from "95% reduction" to "zero use," spend that money on other things, like creating air-scrubbers to "undo" the effects of past pollution faster than Mother Nature is doing, or creating cheaper technology so that 3rd-world and emerging-market countries can afford to reduce their use of hydrocarbon-based fuels as well.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Oregon announced today it will more than double the number of raptor-shredders and high-intensity bird cookers around the state. "Boy, it's a good thing they only enforce those idiot bird-protect laws against nukes! Otherwise we'd have to admit the bald eagle will be extinct in Oregon sometime around 2018..." one spokesman was quoted as saying, just before he was fired for too much honesty in dealing with the public.
Worldwide, just number 64...
Sorry, Oregon, but my state (MD) is going to beat you to it if I have anything to say about it. We can do it in ten years for just $15 billion by just building another nuclear power plant.
Now, when it's calm and at night, the streetlights all go out, thus making it an attractive destination for astronomers with big resistors and backup generators.
Satisfying all those hippies is just going to make it colder for everyone else - when the alternatives fail to perform.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If Oregon will be coal-free by 2035, then Washington state will be way ahead by being coal-free by 2025. There is only one coal-fed electric facility in Washington state. It has two boilers. The first will be shutdown in 2020 and the second will be shutdown in 2025. Oregon will not be the first state to go coal-free.
Less constant? Well, you could be right there. But it varies less unpredictably. We have these things called "Weather Forecasts" that are pretty damn good up to three days in advance. When is a failure at a coal plant predicted to happen? Ah, nobody knows. Takes the whole station out too. 100-0% in minutes.
Moreover, this still doesn't make it more expensive than coal, so is a complete nonsequtur, turded out by a moron who knows what they DON'T want (and it's for those damn hippies to have been right, because they're commies and unamerican and they're NOT ALLOWED to be right. EVER) because you DEMAND a "reason" for your bigotry and blindness.
But bless you for being so blatant in your idiocy. It's highly amusing. At a safe distance, of course.
So your first comment, despite being correct, is irrelevant to a complaint that doesn't make it more expensive.
Oh, and in case the morons whine, coal needs backup too. And varies not with demand unlike solar and wind, which match demand curves much better, reducing the need for "base load", a shibboleth of central unresponsive massive power generation sites.
And level high rise buildings, remove all cars from the road and cut down any pole-bourne lines for phone, power et al, since these all kill vastly more birds than wind does,right?
Or is this both a fake concern and a zombie argument that's a load of cock?
Lets look.... Don't hear of anyone who is in jail for blowing up high rises or blocking roads or cutting down poles, so it must be the load-of-bollocks thing.