Utilities Vote To Close Largest Coal Plant In Western US (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At 2.25 gigawatts, Arizona's Navajo Generating Station is the biggest coal-burning power plant in the Western U.S. The plant, and the nearby Kayenta coal mine that feeds it, are located on the Navajo Indian Reservation, and the Navajo and Hopi peoples have had a conflicted relationship with coal since the plant opened in the 1970s. Almost all the 900-plus jobs at the mine and plant are held by Native Americans, and the tribes receive royalties to account for large portions of their budget. Negotiations were underway to improve the tribes' lease terms, which expire in 2019. But on Monday, the four utilities that own most of the plant voted to close it at the end of 2019. They decided that the plant's coal-powered electricity just can't compete with plants burning natural gas. A press release from Salt River Projects, which runs the plant, explained, "The decision by the utility owners of [Navajo Generating Station] is based on the rapidly changing economics of the energy industry, which has seen natural gas prices sink to record lows and become a viable long-term and economical alternative to coal power."

Comments

Lots of Sunshine there

[wardk]

massive Solar plant?

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[Two99Point80]

Hope so - that'd provide a bunch of jobs quickly, and the transmission infrastructure is already there...

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[EndlessNameless]

Except you can't scale solar production up or down to handle fluctuations in demand. Or produce solar at night. Or control the weather.

But aside from that, sure.

Solar will always be a second-rate option for utilities until storage becomes cheap and plentiful.

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[HornWumpus]

322 kW panels?

You lost a 10^3 and are ignoring capacity factor.

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[Smidge204]

Except you can't scale solar production up or down to handle fluctuations in demand.

You can scale it down, absolutely.

Or produce solar at night.

You don't need nearly as much power at night, and if they go with solar thermal you get quite a bit of storage "for free."

Or control the weather.

It's Arizona. They basically have two types of weather; Sunny and Night.
=Smidge=

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[TWX]

One of my uncles works on control systems and environmental systems for coal plants. He's had to travel to visit that plant several times. It's truly decrepit and the plant is dangerously lacking in written procedures. Some of that comes from being on Tribal land, so State of Arizona laws do not generally apply. If I remember right it's been a known cause of pollution affecting the Grand Canyon and other parks and monuments too.

That part of the Colorado Plateau is pretty sunny. It does snow from time to time but it's not the kind of climate where the snow just builds up all winter, so it probably would be practical to keep the panels snow-free.

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[rtb61]

All renewables will struggle with high energy power requirements, industry, commercial and high density residential. Suburban power in suitable climes will not be a problem but beyond that simply can not achieve the required energy out comes.

That does not even touch the concept of substantially increasing recycling of all material via high energy industrial processes. So using energy to eliminate waste and minimise resource use, a double plus but it will take a lot of cheap energy to achieve it. We should be starting to push into zero waste societies which is possible through effective industrial recycling, turning waste into useful matter to be used again. Even sewerage when properly treated can be turned into high value fertiliser and of course energy, 'natural gas' (tee hee).

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[Uberbah]

Pedant fail.

Here is an example of a coal plant that can ramp in less then days.

Irrelevant. The whole point of the Baseline Power Canard is that wind and solar cannot bridge the power gap on a dark, windless night. Do tell how a coal power plant ramping up generation "less than days later" manages to fill that overnight hole.

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[Uberbah]

All renewables will struggle with high energy power requirements, industry, commercial and high density residential.

Err, not so much. You simply build your generating capacity to meet expected demands - no different than you would for coal or nuclear power, only in less time for less money. Most of the overwrought concerns over wind and solar power may be answered by simple technology from the '70s. The 1870's.

There are water towers and hydroelectric dams functioning today that were constructed more than a century ago. For an up front investment - which is required by coal and nuclear power to a Biblical degree - you can build water reservoir batteries to store excess energy to be used when needed, by releasing water to move a turbine. And before you dismiss that idea, the whole point of a
$10 billion nuclear power plant is to heat water - to move a turbine to generate electricity.

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[jabuzz]

Yeah right, Dinowic (a pumped storage in Wales) can go from zero to 1800MW in 75 seconds. If the turbines are pre-synchronized (aka spinning in free air for a small power draw) they can go from zero to 1800MW in 16 seconds.

Re:Lots of Sunshine there

[AmiMoJo]

Solar PV is trivial to scale down, just rotate or shade the panels. In practice you would probably use the excess to charge batteries or pump water or use for some kind of non-time-critical process like desalination or refrigeration.

Market Forces Kill Coal

[ClayDowling]

This demonstrates exactly how empty the campaign promises to bring back coal were. Nobody wants to burn coal when it's so much more expensive than everything else.

Re:Market Forces Kill Coal

[MightyMartian]

Natural gas killed coal, and by the time natural gas is on the decline, coal will be even less viable. It's done. Besides, why in the hell would you even want to burn the stuff? Apart from CO2 emissions, so much effort has to be put into keeping it from ruining the environment and poisoning everyone around it that it's a good thing they're erecting its tombstone.

Re:Market Forces Kill Coal

[MightyMartian]

Well, unless you're using the Invisible Hand as a sort of religious icon masking the fact that you want to take part in short term profiteering regardless of any long-term effects your business may be causing. Those that want to keep doing nasty things like selling cigarettes to children or vomiting sulfur dioxide and CO2 into the atmosphere will often decry any attempt to limit the harm their business cause by praying to the Invisible Hand, declaring that any attempt to interfere with this deity will lead to Communism or some other sort of ideological bogeyman to scare Rust Belt types into believing that America will only be great so long as a few rather rich people accrue even more money.

Re:Market Forces Kill Coal

[DickBreath]

Coal NEEDS to choke under regulations before it chokes us all and destroys our climate.

Giving tax breaks to promote future progress is not a bad thing to do.

The switch to getting as much clean energy as possible won't be cheap, and won't happen over night. And other forms of energy will have to be available when clean sources may be unable to produce. But every bit helps.

We've tackled other huge projects. Rural electrification. Roads to support modern cars replacing horse and buggy. The interstate highway project. Electric street lighting and traffic signals literally everywhere -- and these things are friggin' expensive. But it was worth it for the benefits we collectively get from it.

It is inevitable that we will use electric cars. It is inevitable that we will stop using fossil fuels as they become ever harder to find. Coal isn't going to make our environment any better, so we should be minimizing its use to the extent possible. New technologies bring new jobs.

Re:Market Forces Kill Coal

[Layzej]

By market forces you mean the immense pressure Obama put on the industry, choking it under regulations while giving huge tax breaks to other energy producers? The "market" had nothing to do with this.

You think coal got the short stick over the last decade? Try finding a decent video rental shop these days. Thanks Obama.

Re:Market Forces Kill Coal

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true, natural gas combined cycles are far more efficient, produce much less CO2, require fewer operators and maintenance techs, and can be dispatched more easily with faster ramp rates. Design and construction times are much shorter, and the equipment is very robust after decades of optimization. They also require much less land and water (but that depends on whether they are air cooled or not). Modern control systems can be programmed to start up the plant at the push of a button with little operator interaction, or even operated remotely for some natural gas simple cycle plants.

There are drawbacks - modern heavy industrial gas turbines do have unique problems requiring extensive outages during major inspections (and often more unplanned outages depending on the design of the unit and age). Natural gas is more variable in price than coal, but operating companies and owners have gotten better at dispatching combined cycle plants to coincide with demand (some plants start up twice a day). Flexibility is important where natural gas power plants operate.

There will always be some fossil fuel plants in operation for the next century, if at a minimum to maintain voltage and VAR support. But coal has definitely seen its last decades. Few engineers I work with have done design work on a coal plant now, and those that have are all in their 50s or older. At some point that knowledge is going to be lost.

Re:Market Forces Kill Coal

[Ranbot]

It's true, natural gas combined cycles are far more efficient, produce much less CO2, require fewer operators and maintenance techs, and can be dispatched more easily with faster ramp rates. Design and construction times are much shorter, and the equipment is very robust after decades of optimization.

Another big advantage of Natural Gas is it can distributed more efficiently through pipelines.

Re:Market Forces Kill Coal

[KiloByte]

No, coal still receives massive subsidies. It gets to ignore the pollution costs, medical costs, causing up to 1/3 deaths, and so on.

For comparison, nuclear, beside all the regulation coal doesn't have to cope with, is required to store every bit of its waste for hundreds of years. Please tell me when coal plants have to put condoms on their chimneys that collect all the CO2, sulphur, nitrogen oxide and even radioactive isotopes, and instead of dumping them into the air stores them underground. Only then you can talk about a fair competition.

Re:Market Forces Kill Coal

[DickBreath]

I have never choked on the other issues, nor do I worry about them when I am thinking of them. And some of those other issues you mention are large indeed. Even though coal or the oxymoronic clean coal may be easier to swallow, it is still an unnatural abomination which needs to be minimized, and hopefully eventually eliminated.

Re: Market Forces Kill Coal

[MightyMartian]

Unless you have ready access to rather cheap wood, buying properly seasoned wood is fairly expensive, and even where you have access to a ready supply of firewood, cutting, splitting and stacking is a LOT of work. I know, when I was a kid we had a wood furnace in the basement and a fireplace in the livingroom, and in the spring I'd be helping my grandfather and my cousin get firewood, either from clear cuts where my grandfather had a firewood license, or on his own property. To get enough firewood to last through the winter was a fairly significant amount of work, and I remember my old man observing that if we were all being paid minimum wage for the amount of work we were doing (even back in the mid-1980s), it wouldn't have been that much more for oil or electric heat.

Make Gasoline instead

[avandesande]

We have lots of both...

http://www.wvcoal.com/research...

No long term stratergy

[del_diablo]

So based on this article:
1. Price on gas lowers
2. Gas plants gets built
3. It turned out once built en mass, that gas plants was cheaper than coal before price collapse, but nobody knew until economy of scale kicked in
====
That said, the statement in the article do not have to ring true at all.

Then again, per Wikipedia, Owners:
-U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (24.3%)
-Salt River Project (21.7%)
-LADWP (former) (21.2%)
-Arizona Public Service (14.0%)
-NV Energy (11.3%)
-Tucson Electric Power (7.5%)
So 4 out of 6 want it shut down, in the mid term future. Which one? And why?

There's also a nuke plant out there....

[sconeu]

About 60 miles west of Phoenix. The Tonopah plant.

Re:There's also a nuke plant out there....

[Packgrog]

My understanding from my stepfather (who works in the nuclear power industry) is that the low price of natural gas, and low price of startup on the requisite power plants, is killing the nuclear power industry as well. Renewables (solar, hydro, wind) are taking over, with natural gas plants as the back up for lag times.

No more Haze in Grand Canyon

[rahvin112]

This plant is one of the worst polluters in the west. It was exempted from the mercury limits rule when they went into effect and it's responsible for 90% of the air pollution and haze in the Grand Canyon. This plant should have been shut down as soon as viable alternatives existed and market forces are finally doing it in.

Re:No more Haze in Grand Canyon

[MightyMartian]

If market forces were allowed their way, the Great Lakes would still be a toxic soup. Sometimes a government has to step in to prevent industries from fucking things up. I may remind you that that great conservative lion Ronald Reagan did a helluva lot of the initial work on what is, or was until a few weeks ago, the government's push to try to clean up polluting industries.

Re:No more Haze in Grand Canyon

[rahvin112]

More propaganda, you people will blame Obama for everything, even things he had nothing to do with. This plant is going to be shut down because gas is cheaper, it has very little to do with Obama era regulations. It should have never been exempted from the Mercury rule for more than a decade (the exemption goes away in 2018 so they'll need the scrubbers in 2 years). The CO2 regulations Obama added on top had very little impact to this, it was driven primarily by costs, in particular the combined phase gas plants that are super efficient compared to this awful 50's era coal plant and have cheaper fuel.

The utilities were going to pay the costs to upgrade the plant until gas prices cratered and with wind/solar dropping so fast if they authorize it for another 20 years they'll be losing money on it for 18 of those years. Navajo generating station was dead when gas prices fell and it's about fucking time. It's poisoned two generations of people in the southwest with heavy metals and put haze in the grand canyon since it was built.Good riddance.

Oil Gets Subsidies Too

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't look for crony-free capitalism in big energy. It won't and can't exist. Like capital itself, energy is too important to leave to the whims of the market. And where you don't see in-your-face subsidies (like Ethanol/corn producers), there's back-end subsidies like tax breaks, easements, or permits for getting rid of toxic waste for free. Coal ash is a particularly nasty nasty toxic waste, for example, full of heavy metals and even radio-active materials, that has to be dumped in horrid "ponds" that look horrifying from the air and that the companies promise will NEVER leak into the ground-water while there are ANY family-members of the board of directors still living within 1000 miles of there.

Re:Negiotiating tactic

[MightyMartian]

Sure there is! They have this magic smokestacks that take coal smoke and turn it into magic rainbows! It's true. It works on much the same principal as cigarette filters do, filtering out the nastiness and leaving only the cool, sweet smoke that leading chiropractors have determined is actually healthy!

Re:What do you know the invisible hand acts

[gtall]

Yeah, just like cleaning up the smog that cities used have. Yep, the invisible hand of the Ghost of Ayn Rand did that.

Re:Negiotiating tactic

[MightyMartian]

That are at the best 90% effective. It doesn't reduce all the sulfur dioxide and other noxious compounds, and does little or nothing to reduce CO2 emissions.

Burning coal is just plain bad.

Re:Just one market force - Fracking

[amicusNYCL]

No-one said they would be coal jobs

The only argument you could possibly have for that statement to be true is to argue that Trump's speaking style is so vague as to be meaningless. He did say this:

"We're gonna open the mines"

And this:

"Let me tell you: the miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week and Ohio and all over, they’re going to start to work again, believe me. You’re going to be proud again to be miners."

He told the miners to get ready to "work their ass off". He made several statements like those after Clinton said that, if she were elected, a lot of coal miners would be out of jobs. Naturally, Trump sensed a weakness and attacked. And people responded to him with statements like this:

One of [West Virginia's] delegates, donning a coal miner's hat, used the state's time to complain about how President Obama has wrecked the state's economy: "It has been devastating what has happened all across Appalachia and this country," the delegate said. "Tens of thousands of coal miners have lost their jobs over the last seven-and-a-half years under this administration - it's time we change course with a man named Donald J. Trump."

And this:

"I did vote for Donald Trump," Moeller says. "It's really hard to even say that because I so dislike his rhetoric. But I voted for him on one singular issue, and that was coal."

And this:

"I voted for Trump - I mean, a coal miner would be stupid not to," Hathaway says.

And this:

"He is a whacko; he's never going to stop being a whacko," Hathaway says. "But I mean, the things he did say - the good stuff - was good for the coal mining community. But we'll see what happens."

And this:

“I have said to Mr. Trump on a couple of occasions, 'Please temper your commitment to my coal miners and your expectations of bringing the coal industry back.' It cannot be brought back to what it was,” said Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy Corp., the nation's largest coal producer. “The destruction is permanent,” said Mr. Murray, a Trump supporter.

So, SuperKendall, why do you think all of those people would say things like that if Trump never promised to bring back the coal industry? Do a search for "Donald Trump coal jobs" and go and look at all of the articles going back to last May. Notice him standing on stage with a sign saying "Trump Digs Coal". He's got the CEO of the largest coal producer telling him to temper his promises to bring the coal industry back.

Re:wow... just that?

[amicusNYCL]

The largest coal plant in the country is 3.5GW. The largest nuclear plant is 3.9GW. That will power around 4 million homes, it's not that insignificant.

Re:What do you know the invisible hand acts

[skam240]

Personally, I do. He did it in a wonderfull past in which conservatives actually did things that helped tue country

Not unexpected - newest unit in 1976

[dbIII]

This story has been "spun" in all kinds of directions, but when it gets down to it the newest unit was built in 1976 and it's getting increasingly expensive to replace parts piecemeal and keep it running. The lease on the land has come up and the choice was to either pay that new expense on top of the ongoing increasing running costs or give up.
A lot of units of that type from that time were designed for a 20 to 25 year life.

Re:What do you know the invisible hand acts

[Smidge204]

Just like the liability of all those oil spills devastating the environment have destroyed the oil companies, right?

I'm sure BP will be filing for bankruptcy any day now after paying out $50-some-odd billion for cleanup, fines and lawsuits. Aaaaaany day now...
=Smidge=

Re:Just one market force - Fracking

[amicusNYCL]

Yeah, I did read what you wrote, you wrote this:

No-one said they would be coal jobs

That's an alt-fact, SuperKendall, Trump did promise to bring back coal jobs. But, just like Trump himself, if the facts on the ground start to look different the easiest way out is to just claim that you never said that, right?

And to boot, you seem to have an absolutely terrible grasp of geography....

I would question how that statement has anything at all to do with whether or not Trump promised to bring back coal jobs, but I'm sure you'd like to move the goal posts and distract from the fact that your statement is factually incorrect.

So it goes these days, impossible to have rational debate when the left area only about talking points regardless of facts.

I like that alt-statement, because I responded with a bunch of quotes from Trump and Trump supporters. Apparently those are left talking points in your alt-world.