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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.
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...).
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...
Headline should be Oregon set to be the first HIGHEST UTILITY RATES IN THE NATION state.
Oregon has electricity rates below the median for America. Their rates are much less than I pay in California. Although in California we are almost coal free, at 0.5% of production.
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...
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.
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?
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.
California pays extra for building nuclear plants on seismic faults and then closing them because the retrofit won't work.
California pays extra for building nuclear plants on seismic faults and then closing them because the retrofit won't work.
And then pays for building them again in Arizona.
Oregon Lawmakers to go to Environmentalist Heaven
Environmentally virtuous lawmakers secured a place for themselves in Environmentalist Heaven today, as they sacrificed inexpensive and reliable coal electricity generation to signal good vibes to Mother Earth. "I'm looking forward to an eternity of drum circles, flaxseed, and all the granola I could ever want!", exclaimed the euphoric Representative Geet Amundsen (D - Salem). "Fossil Fuels are dead!" Representative Amundsen had to hurry to catch a flight to Switzerland for a 10-day ski vacation, so he was unavailable for further comment.
Oregon's electricity rate payers were all unavailable to be interviewed, but we did manage to contact several Oregonians who received electricity through government-paid energy assistance programs. None of them seemed worried that electricity rates might increase.
You forget Humboldt Bay.
Oregon already has half their electricity production from renewable. It's the advantage of living in a place with lots of rain, hydro gets a lot easier. So it's likely Oregon can actually achieve this.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Eastern Oregon qualifies as a desert. But rooftop solar, even in the rainy season, would probably be far more productive than a tiny amount of power generated by rainfall. .
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Open Source Sysadmin
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.
Yes, yes. We'll just build more and more dams! I'm sure the environmentalists won't have ANY PROBLEMS AT ALL with that plan.
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.
Yeah, but think of the cleanup costs that it won't have to pay when they are swallowed up by the earth in the next quake!
The Pacific Northwest gets a disproportionate share of its electricity from hydro. And hydro is the only power source cheaper than coal.
Shouldn't you be paying attention to the buggy-whip production line?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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.
And hydro is the only power source cheaper than coal.
...except for natural gas, geothermal and wind.
=Smidge=
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.
Oregon has electricity rates below the median for America. Their rates are much less than I pay in California. Although in California we are almost coal free, at 0.5% of production.
What is this supposed to mean? It sets forth facts but has no conclusion.
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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.
They didn't try to keep track of the spent fuel....
Actually, nuclear is cheaper than coal as well. But, yes, hydro is the cheapest.
Now, going "coal free" may not shut down any power plants. It is bloody easy and doesn't cost a whole lot to convert a coal burner into an oil burner. Although, #2 bunker fuel is more expensive than coal.
NRRPT/RCT
The number you are citing is only for electricity produced inside California. Since California imports electricity made in Arizona, New Mexico, and even Wyoming that actual number, per the State Energy Commission is 6.4%.
FTFY