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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.
Men are bad (especially white ones) and Japan is brilliant.
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.
Obama brought down the price of gasoline with CAFE standards, just as promised.
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
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.
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.
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
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...
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/...
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.
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
Dear White People,
We're all sorry your collective butt hurts.
Signed,
The Internet
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.
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.
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.
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.