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2015's Electricity Retirements: 80 Percent Coal Plants (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo writes: In the US, electricity demand is growing very slowly, which means that capacity additions don't have to exceed retirements by much in order to keep the grid functioning. Tracking the comings and goings from the electric grid can help provide a picture of the country's changing energy mix. The Energy Information Administration, which provides data on the US' electric grid, says 18GW of capacity were retired this past year, more than 80 percent of it coal-fired. More than 27GW of utility-scale projects will replace that this year. Note that much of the new generating hardware is wind and solar, but the plants being replaced often had low capacity factors due to their age and high pollutant output.
Has never been higher. Additionally because my state (Colorado) has decided to replace the coal plants with natural gas, increasing the price to heat my home as well.
cease fire shut it down in the moms we trust...
The Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign has really helped in getting this going. http://content.sierraclub.org/...
Your bills are higher - all of them, not just energy - because the Bush/Obama governments have catered to Wall Street, which is socializing costs and privatizing profits, and because your local regulatory authorities are both incompetent and corrupt.
The market is rigged, and you are the sucker. Energy has rarely been cheaper, in absolute terms, but the paper IOUs that you get for your labor and then use to pay your bills have their values manipulated as best serves the short-term interests of the boardroom social class.
Vote third party if you want a change. Or if you're too weak to do that, at least vote for either Trump or Sanders... let the Party tools in Washington know that their decisions have consequences in the voting booth. Vote for good regulation or no regulation, stop voting for bad regulation!
Anything hurting the Koch brothers is good news.
Brought to you by the coal industry.
Another thing we've exported to China. Thanks, Obama. Ron Paul 2016.
And I was just getting worried that we haven't had an mdsolar anti-nuclear article yet... but it's only 9:30. Thank god we had this to fill in the gap. I'm sure this oversight by the /. shift supervisor will not go unpunished.
"...but the plants being replaced often had low capacity factors due to their age and high pollutant output."
This isn't news and power companies are still in business to make money. Anyone with a minuscule of business knowledge knows operating costs are worshiped on the corporate alter. Core, efficient coal and nat gas plants will exist for a long, long time.
With 7+ Billion people and a large chunk of them in China and India in poor areas with little to no electricity, what happens when they start demanding access to the conveniences of the modern word?
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Nice sarcasm. The increased supply from the Middle East to harm the US's oil industry is the reason prices have gone down. Our stock market is really taking a pounding from that economic attack.
large and powerful companies can buy off some of the people in congress, enough to block any real reform. so the new tactic is to fight them everywhere which companies are not prepared to fight because it means you have to buy off all the little people which would be quite expensive and the little people can't always be bought. i think you will find that after much of the coal industry has fallen, only then will congressional reform be possible.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Interestingly, electrification is now proceeding as an appliances service. Phone, light and radio come with solar and battery. Don't pay your bill? The devices won't work. http://www.economist.com/news/...
I wonder when the fossil/nuclear/hydro vs wind/solar ratio will tip us over into regular Brownouts. Wind and solar are not the future, unless you want to have to turn on your less efficient plants every night. Nah, the real future is in nuclear, hydro, and limited fossil fuels (mostly natural gas). Solar will go away after the Federal subsidies end, and wind is more expensive than either alternative anyway.
In the US, electricity demand is growing very slowly,
Prove it.
which means that capacity additions don't have to exceed retirements by much in order to keep the grid functioning.
Good thing too, because we all know that the highest capacity output is Nuclear... erm... Coal. Yep, good old Coal. Gotta love it.
Tracking the comings and goings from the electric grid can help provide a picture of the country's changing energy mix.
Too bad we con't do that with any real accuracy.
The Energy Information Administration...
An agency of the Federal Government with methods and equipment so out of date as to render the majority of its findings suspect...
... which provides data on the US' electric grid, says 18GW of capacity were retired this past year, more than 80 percent of it coal-fired.
In 2012 the US produced 1,643,000 GWh of power from Coal, putting us at #2 world-wide after China which had 3,785,000 GWh of Coal power. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants
More than 27GW of utility-scale projects will replace that this year.
Less Coal is always good, but dependable, centralized power is preferred to as-hoc systems and wide-spread wind farms. Sometimes Coal is the solution.
Note that much of the new generating hardware is wind and solar, but the plants being replaced often had low capacity factors due to their age and high pollutant output.
So, this article says that the US 'retired' some out-of-date Coal plants that probably would have been shut down due to an assumed lower demand and told us that the power was 'replaced' by wind and solar. But this isn't true. The plants were taken off line and can be restarted if needed, and the grid isn't set up to distribute the wind and solar power across the nation. When you shut down a Coal plant in Tennessee, and build a wind farm in Minnesota, Tennessee does not get it's lost power back.
I'm all for less pollution, but please be real when you talk about closing Coal plants.
You know, if ole Bill had managed to control his pecker he'd quite possibly have been the best President in many decades. I didn't agree with everything he did by any means but he did have a pragmatic view of the world. Unfortunately by the sordid act of screwing around with bimbos, particularly in the oval office itself, he managed to give his political enemies the ammo they needed to nullify his later years in office. The way he managed to work with a hostile Republican congress to accomplish the rebuilding of the US economy was an amazing feat. Too bad the current President lacks those skills.
Even if electricity demand were growing very quickly, capacity additions don't have to exceed retirements by much in order to keep the grid functioning.
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they were more expensive to run. The utilities don't really care whether or not the plants pollute. What they care about is how expensive they are to run. Old power plants tend to be less efficient in converting fossil fuel to electricity. The general dispatching rule is that the cheapest power plants go online first until you satisfy the demand. Which means that old power plants only go online during peak demand periods. In fact some may only be on during the weekdays of the summer months. Since you still need them you have to maintain them and they are old so that can get expensive. There comes a point where that does not make sense anymore.
New TED talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/al_go...
Starting at 13:40 he shows graphs of the exponential growth of wind, solar, and batteries that are driving the move to renewables.
What the heck does this have to do with the Koch brothers or Koch anything? Koch doesn't deal with coal and they don't own any electricity generation companies (that I know of).....so this doesn't appear to have anything to do with them or their companies. Are you so blinded by hatred and ignorance that you can't take 2 seconds to learn something about them?
It's hard to take the Koch haters seriously when they can't do basic research or differentiate between the different kinds of "energy". Hint: It ain't just electricity...
I think it's more the fact that the current Republicans would rather see things go down in flames than cooperate with Obama
I think it's more the fact that the current Republicans would rather see things go down in flames than cooperate with Obama
Dream on. Obama's deliberately divisive. Read up on Critical Race theory - where EVERYTHING is about race.
Wasn't this closure supposed to make China take all the coal now it's cheap and they'd pollute even more than the west?
Because that doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Don't tell me another denier prediction failed...
Relentless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Lol, no. Ole Billy simply lucked into being in office during a massive economic boom. The internet was getting big while the eastern bloc was wide open and ripe with opportunities. He had no hand in that. (Unless you actually believe he invented the internet.)
What you're saying is no different from Putin apologists going on about how he brought Russia back up from its knees; in reality he did jack shit, a huge spike in oil prices after 9/11 is what helped Russia, and Putin was too busy building huge mansions for himself to interfere too much and fuck it up. (And he still managed to completely fuck Russia over for the future because he didn't invest anything into infrastructure or modernization. It's 2016 and Russia is still dependent on exporting oil most of it *crude*, they're so ass backwards they can't turn even a half of it into *products* with way higher profits because they don't have a way to make them. And now that oil price is down again, they're completely screwed.)
We are all going to die from Global Warming!!
If you own your roof it will lower your bill no matter how you do it (pay cash, lease, solar installer becomes your power company).
It may lower your monthly bill but that doesn't mean it's cheaper to you. I've done the math and for what it would cost me to cover my roof in solar panels I would break even in somewhere between 8-12 years. That's presuming that the panels still work at the same efficiency and require zero maintenance and that I'm still living there a decade from now, none of which is certain.
Don't get me wrong I'm a big fan of solar but the ROI for solar is anything but simple and certainly isn't quick. Its a big up front cash outlay with a (hopefully) long term payback that isn't always realized by the person spending the cash.
The vast majority of new oil production added to the global market over the past 10 years is from the US. Saudi production is up 7%. US production is up 60%.
Without massive government subsidies, exclusions, and tax exemptions for coal, it's way too expensive to use, even without counting the 259,000 kids killed by coal.
Time to adapt.
Note that some of the coal plant retirements are for older end of cycle power plants, but more recent power plants may be retrofitted for more efficient use as coal cogeneration power plants, where we trap the waste heat and use it for other purposes, at the same time as outfitting the stacks with pollution scrubbers. This does end up increasing total power generation by 20-80 percent above original specs, but you need a process that can use the waste heat appropriately.
So not all the "retired" coal plants are gone forever, as business analysts incorrectly surmised when China retrofitted their coal plants for pollution scrubbing cogeneration coal plants. They just go away for a while as their internal processes are optimized for the 20th century instead of the 18th century.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Are you trying to tell me my zero emmissions vehicle... actually produces emmissions?!?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The info I can find says that while Coal is on its way down Natural Gas is what is fast on its way to becoming our primary electrical generating source. Ah, someone is foolishly using "capacity" again with generating methods (solar/wind) that seldom if ever actually reach their full rated capacity because they're dependent on environmental inputs. I'm happy that we're making renewable a significant part of our energy portfolio, but have no illusions for the foreseeable future fossil fuels are still going to be more than half of our electricity. And that unfortunately won't change until we create one heck of a battery technology.
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=21072
I never thought I would call Newt Gingrich "the reasonable one"!
Dear White People,
We're all sorry your collective butt hurts.
Signed,
The Internet
So your point is Bill Clinton doesn't get credit for fixing the economy because Putin demanded credit that he fixed his? WTF?
The fact is, both economies improved under the stewardship of those two leaders. Either they assisted in the economic improvements, or they did not, and if they did not, the president really has no power to affect the economy either way.
Out here in Maryland, I'm not convinced that going solar makes a whole lot of financial sense. We're one of the states where it's pushed heavily, but we have quite a few days that are cloudy, rainy, snowy or just partially overcast, where panels just don't generate much power.
I purchased a 7.84 KWh PV system with a combination of South and East facing panels (all SunPower branded equipment which does cost a premium, but also means I've got panels with a little greater efficiency per square foot and hopefully backed by a warranty I can have more faith in than some).
The total cost with installation for this system, back at the end of 2014, was around $32,000. And yes, tax credits promised me 33% of that cost back -- but the way my taxes have worked out, I only got about $3,000 of it back the first year. (Not a tax expert or anything, but I'm assuming it's because I had enough other deductions so there wasn't enough earned income left to allow deducting more than that, for that tax year.) Anyway, on this year's return, I believe it was the same way.... I got a few more thousand of it back, but not the whole thing. This was rather unfortunate since the installer convinced me to take out a 1 year long 0% interest "bridge loan" for $10K to help finance the initial purchase, with the promise that "your first tax refund will let you pay it off before you owe any interest on it". Nope.... not so. I had to scramble to come up with money to pay the thing down.
One thing readers should pay attention to and one trick the unscrupulous should stop pulling is talking about the capacity factor of units that are mainly used to cover a peak. Of course it's going to be low. It's low because demand is not constant and you only being things on line when you need them.
Comparing windmills and large thermal units (coal, nuclear, some others) is like comparing a bicycle to a locomotive - while they both move they are intended for different roles.
I'm not accusing the above poster of pulling the trick but since it seems to come up every time this topic comes up I thought it was worth mentioning before the slimy salesfolk slithered out.
Out of date - a lot of the US production has shut down due to the Saudi price war.
Turns out that Bush's special friends are not so friendly.
You know, if ole Bill had managed to control his pecker
Seriously, so fucking what. Bill got his dick sucked by a young saucy intern - welcome to the world of having testosterone. If I was Bill I'd have looked the camera in the eye and said "Fuck yeah I had sex with her, I'm only human - I'll apologize to my wife but the rest of you can get in line and suck whatever is left. Next question."
If you wanted a reason to impeach Clinton it should have been for not taking a case of the finest Kentucky Bourbon whiskey he could find, presented it to Boris Yeltzin and said "Sign this Nuclear Disarmament treaty motherfucker and you can have this to get you started"
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
He's made zero attempts to work with them. His idea of working with them is for him to send them shit to pass and they need to shut up and rubber stamp it. I'll admit they're some sad fuckers but to say he's tried to work with them is an absolute, total lie.
Not an Obama fan but that's really not true. He plays along with the liberals on race but he's not leading the pity pack on that.
Listen fool. I don't give a shit if he got his dick sucked and shoved a cigar up her cunt either. Still and all, he serves the American public and if the majority or even just a significant portion of them don't think it's right for him to be getting his jollies on the job then he should maybe think about the ramifications of what he's doing. He got caught, which is a cardinal sin, because he wasn't discrete and he didn't cull shit. He'd stick it any bitch any time no matter where or how ugly and fat. Seriously, what's with that? He ruined his presidency because he couldn't control his dick. Just because you and I don't care doesn't change that fact.
Even here we are being astroturfed by what is pretty much American far right fascisism. I miss having Republicans in the GOP.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's pretty meaningless to say 80% of shutdowns were coal, especially if coal is 80% of installed base....
Yeah. It says I'm using the system the way it was intended from the top down, not from bottomfeeding which you are implying. The idea of introducing externalities in your cost analysis in a negative way would completely offset the whole purpose that government subsidies have in the first place: drive policy via financial incentives.
In that regard I absolutely do not nor will ever take into account subsidies I get on my solar panels, just like I don't take into account the tax I pay on fuel when I fill up my car. The point of these is to push a certain technology paid for by taxes that will get taxed regardless of whether it gets pumped into environmental initiatives, donated to oil companies, spent on healthcare, or spent on warfare. If you disagree with any of those then the place for those discussions is in the political realm, not in a cost benefit analysis of something you're purchasing.
This post brought to you by the NBN, a $45bn network funded by my taxes.
So, you are implying that total cost benefit analysis should not include total cost. And the reason is that the government spends a lot of money in a lot of places. I'm not sure I buy that. I think its very important to look at real cost when we are charting our energy future.
Still and all, he serves the American public
My point was that he could have delivered an arms treaty that would have made the world a better place and been a great man for doing so.
Just because you and I don't care doesn't change that fact.
Well my point was that people care more about what his cock was doing and forget that a great opportunity was lost. You pretty much proved my point.
Listen fool.
I wasn't actually directing Seriously, so fucking what that at you, just at the general situation. I should have made that clearer.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
impeachment, you completely propagandized dolt. Let me mansplain it to you:
1. Bill Clinton signed a bill into law that made it so any American man accused of sexual harassment could be dragged into court and ordered to testify under oath about his entire sexual history. This made Bill popular with the feminist wing of his party, because if meant any woman could go on a fishing expedition through any man's entire life, rather than just anything related to a specific accuser's accusations.
2. One of Bill Clinton's many victims came forward with a harassment lawsuit against him and her lawyers cleverly decided to use the law Bill himself signed, requiring him to testify about his entire sexual history. Bill, both a lawyer AND the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government, chose to lie under oath in a situation where the government he was leading would not hesitate to jail any other man.
This was a blatant violation of the most basic principle and American law, a part derived from British law, which historians remember (and schools USED to teach) as The Magna Carta which established the idea that a king (and now a President) must be subject to the very laws he would enforce against those he rules. This was and still is one of the landmark achievements of civilization.
THAT fundamental violation of the basic rule of government is what was at the core of Clinton's impeachment and the outrage of Constitutional conservatives. Everybody knew that JFK was fooling around, but nobody tried to impeach him for it. People in DC knew LBJ and FDR and been getting action on the side, but nobody went after them, even though their opponents despised them. The thing that put Clinton into impeachment territory was the perjury contrary to the very law he signed. The Democrats, desperate to save him, worked very hard to keep complaining that it was all "about sex", even though one would normally have expected them to try to suppress that aspect, and did everything they could to keep the talk about sex, because the actual focus of the impeachment (the perjury, and leader violating a law he himself signed and enforced against everybody else) was so very politically dangerous.
Bill eventually lost his law license over the institute and is no longer able to act as a lawyer, which of course is not penalty for an ex-president sitting atop a mountain of cash poured into his foundation from interests all over the world.
Current Democrat talking points make the Koch brothers responsible for everything bad. Nearly every Democrat official and politician singles-out the Koch brothers when they call for people to contribute cash of go to the polls to vote.
In the 1990s, the demon that the Democrats blamed everything on, raised funds and motivated voters with as a boogeyman, was a guy named Richard Mellon Scaife. Every Democrat whined and complained about the man. Hillary and Bill spat his name out with venom, and every politically active democrat stooge knew his name.
When Richard died, Bill Clinton was one of the people who eulogized him and it turned out he had contributed money to them. It was all a ruse that was politically-useful to the Clintons and all their fellow Washington Democrats. Now days its the Libertarian, gay-friendly, Koch brothers who are the designated devils for Democrat fundraising. In ten or fifteen years, it will be some other person or persons.
Grow up and stop being so easily manipulated. Show some initiative and learn to think for yourself instead of being the silly putty for some politician.
Too bad he didn't get shot, then he could have airports and high schools named after him all over the country, and everyone would reminisce about him wistfully.
No I'm arguing that the total cost benefit analysis should cover only costs which are directly applicable and controllable.
Here's my scenario. I pay x number of taxes per year. I buy a solar panel from my roof. I still pay the same x number of taxes per year if I don't build a solar panel on my roof. That money has been given to someone else. That someone else is in control of directing country policy. The country policy in this case subsidises solar panels. Not buying solar panels won't change that.
Actually when I look at it now the result is even more in favour of going for subsidised options since I'm not only gaining benefits of the subsidy but I'm actually reclaiming some money I spent using that method.
Don't agree with the subsidy? That's politics, not project cost-benefit analysis.
You pay X amount of taxes relative to others. Your share changes with the tax credit, which is essentially taxpayers paying part of your power bill. You can rationalize it however you like.
Yes, subsidy amounts are political and area separate argument, but that doesn't mean they don't factor in to real cost. I don't think you care about real cost, you are focused on yourself. I care about the systemic cost, which is key to our energy future.
Oh, so now you are attacking another poster to get at me because you think I am on the same "side" instead of a discussion based upon reality?
This empty ideologically motivated shit of dismissing an energy source merely because the party donors have another is annoying, depressing and makes you look like a complete and utter idiot.
impeachment, you completely propagandized dolt. Let me mansplain it to you:
You are also missing the point, and being a douchebag at the same time. The bigger picture was the opportunity for international nuclear disarmament treaty was lost which highlights the dysfunctional nature of two party politics. No steps forward, one step back.
1. 2.
It's was a good explanation. I wasn't aware of that, however it changes *nothing* about what I have said. The opportunity in history to make the world better was lost, as you mansplain, by Clinton's own folly which mansplains why his language in interacting with the press used specific legal terms. I would like to understand that part of history better however it is still irrelevant in terms of the point I have made.
The Magna Carta
Due process of law has been bypassed in the US by the Bush administration that appointed him the wartime powers to pass various terrorism acts. It was not restored by Obama so this apolitical issue is unlikely to ever be rectified.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.