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The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won't Cut It (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Wind and solar are about to become unstoppable, natural gas and oil production are approaching their peak, and electric cars and batteries for the grid are waiting to take over. This is the world Donald Trump inherited as U.S. president. And yet his energy plan is to cut regulations to resuscitate the one sector that's never coming back: coal. Clean energy installations broke new records worldwide in 2016, and wind and solar are seeing twice as much funding as fossil fuels, according to new data released Tuesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). That's largely because prices continue to fall. Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity in the world. But with Trump's deregulations plans, what "we're going to see is the age of plenty -- on steroids," BNEF founder Michael Liebreich said. "That's good news economically, except there's one fly in the ointment, and that's climate."
We have given them medical coverage for their black lung disease through the ACA (in the past coal industry provided doctors had to make the diagnosis, and surprisingly nobody had black lung disease, now they are being recognized and treated) and they voted for a candidate who promised to kill the ACA
We have offered them job retraining and a future in solar energy and they voted for a candidate who promised to keep sending them underground to die by promising further deregulation to coal mine owners who regularly turn off methane detectors
Give 'em what they want, and when they get tired of being abused, send them back down because they have already rejected our offers
If I seem cold, it is because all of my ancestors were coal miners and WE figured this out decades ago.
1) It produces more radioactivity than all other energy sources, including Nuclear power. (A small percentage of coal is thorium, which settles around wherever you burn the coal.)
2) It takes more work to mine it than all other sources (including uranium - though it does require less processing).
3) It takes more work to ship it from it's source to the plant than all other energy types.
4) It produces more carbon pollution than all other sources. Coal is basically pure carbon plus some nasty impurities. Oil and gas are Carbon + Hydrogen + some other stuff. Carbon burns to Carbon Dioxide (or worse, monoxide). Hydrogen burns nice and clean, turning into water.
5) Coal contains trace amounts of mercury, which when burned makes it's way into the atmosphere, then rains down into the oceans. Nasty stuff. No other energy source has this problem.
6) Coal mining has some nasty problems, including black lung disease and sometimes starts underground fires we literally can NOT put out.
No sane person mines coal for energy if they have any other energy source. All others are safer and better. Burning oil, gas, or wood are all better. Nuclear is better. Tidal, wind, solar, hydro, are all better.
Coal mining should only be used after you have burned all your forests up, mined all your uraninum, pumped all your natural gas and oil, and the sun has gone out.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Because a dying industry that is dumping toxic crud into creeks and rivers is still an industry that is dumping toxic crud into creeks and rivers?
Because just because something is in the process of dying doesn't mean it is harmless... quite the opposite usually...
Another solution are distributed batteries at each substation. This has the dual advantage of helping with small transients on a branch and, when scaled out, adding substantial reserve capacity for the grid as a whole. The value to the grid in transient mitigation is cheaper than adding more transmission capability so the grid level storage is a free benefit.
Perhaps the best way of handling renewables is Demand Response. Many functions can be shifted as power becomes more plentiful, such as cooling can be moved from real time (daytime) to making ice at night when it is cooler (and more energy efficient anyway as the outside air is cooler) and then that ice can be used during the day to cool a building.
The problem is that even if coal is completely deregulated, it's not miners who are going to be doing the extraction. The future of mining is automated. At best this will just give the coal barons a few more years of profit and do dick for the miners.
But it's not even going to be that good. Natural gas is killing coal, so there isn't even going to be a coal industry by the time renewables dominate. This is a classic "buggy whip" problem, in that there ain't gonna be no more horse-drawn carriages, so there ain't gonna be no more buggy whips. Whatever you think of Clinton, she was telling the miners the truth, their jobs are quickly becoming obsolete.
And the same goes for lots of other industries. Manufacturing is rapidly automating, so that even mass repatriation of US industrial capacity is not going to deliver the same level of employment that was there even thirty years ago. There's nothing the US government can do about it, short of outlawing automation and renewables, which would be sheer madness.
Christ, no less than Rick Perry himself has admitted the US needs to stay in the Paris Accord. Even the most pro-oil of pro-oil politicians know full well the jig is up. Oil isn't coming back, and as the price falls away it's impact on the economy diminishes. Coal was the first because it's the most expensive and most obviously harmful, but it applies to all the fossil fuels.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
For a change of pace, how about we talk about the fact that everything the article had to say about the deregulation was quoted in the summary? I actually read through the article to get more details, but none were to be found.
The rest of the article provides some (quite interesting and informative!) graphs and analysis about the current and future state of energy both globally and in the US. Nowhere in the article did they talk about what form the deregulation would take, when it would start, when Trump approved it, or any of the other salient details you'd expect in an article that was ostensibly about coal deregulation.
I have no reason to doubt that Trump is doing exactly as Bloomberg said, but I'd love to see some information about it, rather than the bait-and-switch they pulled with their lede that has nothing at all to do with the rest of the article. Alternatively, Bloomberg could have just shown me the graphs, since they're good in their own right and shouldn't be buried under a lede that has nothing to do with them.
Which is to say, as you see the comments filling up with people arguing about deregulating coal, enjoy a nice laugh at the fact that they're taking sides based on an article that has nothing to do with the topic they're arguing about.
Sarcasm aside, that is exactly why coal jobs are not coming back. Coal production is in fact very close to an all-time high in the United States-- we're mining about 900 million tons a year, more coal now than we did in 1990 (or any year before then).
But we're doing it with machinery now, not with coal miners. Even if coal production increases, the jobs ain't coming back.
Graph: http://www.insidenergy.com/wp-...