Slashdot Mirror
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."
Coal is dead. Helping coal MINERS makes sense, but trying to resurrect something that is dying because of market forces (and good riddance) is the most retarded incarnation of "conservatism" since trickle down economics.
and coal is going to die, why the worry and fret about coal deregulation (as opposed to subsidies)?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Trump knows there is no future in coal and it's not coming back. He's basically keeping a campaign promise. People in coal mining country were told by Hillary Clinton what they didn't want to hear, namely that there was no future in coal and, in a much quieter voice that apparently nobody heard, that they'd supposedly be retrained for new jobs. Trump simply told coal miners that their problems were somebody else's fault and he would remove restrictions on coal. In the short term it will probably save enough jobs for the over 50 crowd that they can retire from the mines, but there's no future for younger people in the field and Trump knows it. He's not going to say it out loud as the coal miners prefer to live in the delusion that they can turn back the clock here and they voted Republican and he wants their votes in the future, but I'm sure he knows it.
With climate change, there's more energy in the atmosphere than before, so pulling a tiny amount out with wind turbines will help, not hurt. That said, the sort of wind power being installed now can't be taking more than a fraction of a rounding error of energy out of the atmosphere so it's only theoretical.
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
Coal isn't coming back. It's something that sounded good to Trump's fans on the campaign trail, that's all. The coal industry employs fewer people than freaking Arby's. Fixing the coal industry would be like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking Titanic. Middle America has far bigger problems that the dwindling coal industry.
Only reason why it's an issue at all is because it sounded good on the campaign trail for Trump's supporters. It's dog whistle politics, not an actual energy plan. To everyone else it sounds like Trump is saying "Coal is the future and will meet our energy needs cheaply and effectively!" Which it absolutely won't. But to his fans, it sounds like this: "Rust belt and former mining communities will get their jobs back and be prosperous again!" Sadly, it doesn't actually mean that either. Deregulate all you want, wind and solar are still going to be cheaper.
I feel bad for those folks in coal country counting on this guy to fix things for them. He isn't going to. He isn't able to. It'll be pretty bitter when they realize that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You're missing the point of a carbon tax. The tax is meant to speed the end of fossil fuel use. And really it's natural gas that killed coal, so you're going after the wrong target.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your understanding of these things seems to be rooted in the 1970s. What you said used to be true, back then - but it's not today. The technology is improving rapidly, as is our ability to store and distribute that energy.
It's like the old notions about electric cars. All the prototype ones from 20 years ago were terrible on so many levels, in terms of power, range, recharge time, etc, not to mention cost. But as we're seeing now, that's changing radically. Go look at Tesla for instance. We may not yet be at the day where electric is 100% better in all areas, but it's now only a matter of when, not if.
The governor is a billionaire coal barron, and he's doing his best to revive coal as well. One major problem is that natural gas has taken over and the coal market just isn't there now. Aside from that, the cost to mine coal is way higher than it is for natural gas. To mine coal, you have to hire hundreds of miners, buy or lease really expensive equipment, dig a hole a couple of miles into the ground, then transport the product via truck or rail car to the buyer. To get natural gas, you drill a hole in the ground, insert a pipe, and connect it to other pipes.
Then, you have to factor in foreign competition. I used to work in IT for a coal company at the beginning of my career (mid '90s), and in spite of doing $160 million in business per year, we went bankrupt. It was cheaper then to mine coal in China and ship it to our local power plants than it was to mine it locally. I'm not sure that the coal market it to that point yet, but I expect to return to those days. Coal truck drivers here were making over $70k per year while their foreign counterparts were doing that for a fraction of the money.
Ironically, my office is in what used to be the headquarters for Columbia Gas Transmission in Charleston, WV, but that was bought out last year by TransCanada and several people were laid off. However, I don't work in the gas industry.
I'm running out of armchairs to sit in while I solve all the world's problems!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Coal accounts for over 40% of electric generation in the US
That was once true, but no longer is . "Coal-fired electricity generators accounted for 25% of operating electricity generating capacity in the United States and generated about 30% of U.S. electricity in 2016." - https://www.eia.gov/electricit... . If you look at this graph you can see that coal has been replaced by natural gas and non-hydro renewables. Since the renewables are only getting cheaper as the technology improves, there is no reason to suspect that their trend will not continue to accelerate upwards.
There is so much more coal, natural gas and oil for us to mine. Just because it's there doesn't mean we should mine it. Technology has made us too good at surveying and finding coal and oil fields. If we wait until we run out before we stop, we have perhaps hundreds of years to go. And there are going to be dire consequences, if we try to continue mining and burning coal and oil in large amounts for that long.
Now is the time to wrap up our use of some of these old energy sources and to invest in new energy sources. There are lots of proven options, and the technology around them keeps getting cheaper. It will be engineers and tech companies that are making the big bucks in the energy industry and not mine operators. (coal miners never made big bucks, I would say they got the shaft but that's an insensitive pun)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You're missing the point of a carbon tax. The tax is meant to speed the end of fossil fuel use. And really it's natural gas that killed coal, so you're going after the wrong target.
The current market forces point to a direction of renewables, natural gas, and whatever nuclear remains operational (with no new nuclear plants). That's not a bad plan for the US for right now. However, natural gas in the US is currently 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of any other natural gas in the world. It is exceptionally, and historically cheap. Various people estimate that this low-pricing situation will last between 15 and 100 years. My personal opinion is that it is difficult to make estimates on that kind of timeframe.
Regardless, if natural gas in the US ever approaches the cost of natural gas elsewhere in the world, US consumers would be in for a very rude awakening on their utility bills. My personal opinion is that we should not eliminate these plants entirely. It isn't wrong to let market forces dictate our choices, but we should hedge against unfavorable market changes in the future.
Disclaimer- I'm "in the industry", my customers are roughly 60% gas and 40% coal.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
You mean like this, or perhaps this? Or perhaps this, which has been operating for decades?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
Were you paid to write that? Because it's not true and any honest person would acknowledge that unsubsidised renewable energy source are being installed now, even in oil rich countries like Dubai.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
At issue is a government that ignores them and ignores good things (like the keystone pipeline) in order to appease a portion of the electorate.
Explain how the Keystone pipeline will help all Americans.
You know everything about it, and that is good to have an expert in here, so we'll wait for your informed post.
I don't think this is quite what you think it is.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The problem is Slashdot, Reddit, and the rest of the world are all full of assholes; and people like to claim reasoned, weighted analysis of facts are "opinions" rather than something like "conclusions". That lets people claim their so-called opinion is as valid as yours and, specifically, not capable of being wrong.
Take a minimum wage argument. Minimum wage has some complexities if you have a firm enough grasp of economics and money in economics.
Minimum wage increases because the amount of money increases faster than the amount of people, which requires more spending on the same products, which can only happen if prices increase. That means a fixed minimum wage starts to fall as a wage; with a given positive rate of inflation, that means these people's buying power and standard-of-living falls. To avoid minimum-wage workers becoming poorer and poorer, you have to raise the minimum wage along the way.
At the same time, wages are paid from revenue. That means spending. Spending comes out of income, which means it's a periodic cycle. Higher wages for everybody (proportionally) means inflation; higher wages for a subset means fewer things bought, which means fewer jobs. As minimum wage falls in purchasing power with inflation, additional jobs are created in this lowest-class; and when we true it up, those additional jobs are lost.
So a minimum wage increase 1) is necessary to meet the specific goals of minimum wage; and 2) has consequence of reducing the number of jobs, largely due to artificial increase in jobs available by lowering wages and thus allowing price lowering. Those are real, verifiable impacts largely agreed upon by economists across decades of publications, with a few dissenters who published papers with murky conclusions, weak assertions, and flawed methodology. That's a similar pattern to anti-vaxxer and climate-change debates, to which we tend to default toward consensus.
This draws all kinds of asinine responses everywhere. Most of it is people arguing economics from their own ideals instead of reasoned thought or a survey of consensus. To be fair, people argue a lot from often-repeated but factually-inaccurate ideals not supported by science, like that minimum wage increases are paid for almost 100% by the rich, or that a $1 increase in a minimum-wage income becomes $6 of spending and jogs the economy 6 times as hard. Most of the things we talk about are things we haven't personally been able to verify.
One of the enormous red flags, though, is the reasoning of "opinion". Someone, recognizing they've lost the reasoned argument because the facts stacked in front of them are too obviously-correct to attack, will claim that their "opinion" that raising minimum wage increases the number of jobs available (via minimum-wage spenders being able to spend more--never mind that they're only getting money that now isn't spent elsewhere, and will have to spend a larger chunk of that money on things produced by minimum-wage workers) is just as valid as your "opinion" that raising minimum wage decreases the number of jobs available.
You might notice these things can't be opinions. They're causal outcomes. Action X gives result Y.
Opinions are great. We can discuss opinions all day. Where will technology take us? Is Uber or Lyft better? Is Bullet for my Valentine as good as Iron Maiden? Is Final Fantasy 7 or Ocarina of Time more overhyped? Opinions are not facts, and conjectures occur in the absence of sufficient underlying reasoning and historical trends--and even conjectures have some factual basis, largely suggesting the form of what's missing. At a point, we're discussing what some of us understand better than others--and much of the world is filled with children who have less knowledge than the people who they're arguing with, and insist they must be right even though the other guy once thought the same thing, and was wrong then.
Welcome to a world full of assholes who care less about facts than about furthering their social position by either being right or being allied to a group of peers with the same imaginative fantasy about how the world works.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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-...
To the extent that America is involved, it is mainly a device to reduce American exports of oil, by replacing American exports with cheaper Canadian exports.
Opinions are fine, but facts are better. An informed opinion is supported by facts or logic and therefor has some value.
Opinions without anything to support it can also be valuable in that it can open a dialog, but people have to be willing to change their opinions when presented with overwhelming evidence.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Coal is only cheap when you ignore the environmental damage it does. Even disregarding the CO2 issue. Once you factor in all the measures you need to take to protect the environment from the radioactive waste, the sulphur and other nice byproducts of burning coal, well, it's not that cheap anymore.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Good for all Americans? 1. Jobs for the people building and maintaining the pipeline.
Most of this will be temporary.
2. Tax revenues on their incomes and the incomes of the companies building the pipelines.
See #1
3. Moral for people who are ignored by coastal elites and are told that "they need to be re-educated." Not to mention the inflow of consumer dollars to hard hit communities.
Valid topic, keep reading.
4. Stop sending money to religious fanatics who then send money to radicalize mosques (you, as an educated person, should be quite aware of this).
This, while sounding true, is more blind than short-sighted. Think of the people that stopped investing in horses and shifted to automobiles.
5. Stop sending money (and jobs) to other the middle east and Russia.
Ok, you probably need more information to understand #4. Go read about how Germany made a law guaranteeing a good price for consumers that produced solar energy, back in the 90's. Out of nothing, it created an industry. Companies were born to build and install the panels. The country instantly became a global powerhouse for a growing industry (despite the same amount of sunlight as Seattle), and it led to a stock market boom. The real estate sector grew too - owners with roofs all of a sudden gained unexpected value in their investment. After so decades of profitability, the effects of a policy going too well are starting to set in and they do face issues, like China subsidies have been killing them, and they now have so much power they have to sell it to their neighbors. So they're tweaking a few things with the laws, maybe no more subsidies are needed anyway. But overall, it's been a huge success, and there's even been less power outages (granted, some work went into achieving that). So, moral of the story is that there are UUUGE profits in being the leader of a technology for the world, as long as you're willing to work.
6. Reduce the need to "protect" dangerous areas - hence less military presence, less potential for engagement.
The bad guys would rather blow up a huge oil refinery than a few houses with solar panels, or a couple wind turbines.
7. Money will flow to Canada and Canadian companies (as opposed to Saudi). This is a general plus dovetailed with points 4 and 5.
And at what cost?
Opportunity.
Not environmental.
Yes, environmental too.
The re-education is a red herring here. You're pushing politics into an issue that is not really political. The basic facts are that some jobs have gone away permanently, and retraining is a good way to get a different job. Anyone who says they already know how to mine coal and refuse to learn a different set of skills for a new job are their own enemies, the people on the coasts are not causing the problems. The reasons the jobs are going away is because the coal companies are automating the jobs, they don't need as many workers per unit of coal. All the political wrangling in the world won't change this, you cannot force companies to hire workers that they don't need.
The "coastal elites" comment again shows that youre trying to make this political, and implies you believe in the silly idea that there's literally a cultural war going on. If you live on the coasts you will see that they are not full of elites, there are a few of course, and there are elites in Kansas and Wisconsin too. California is a state full of liberals and conservatives both, you will find any and all political views represented. When you make this a fight about "us" versus "them", then you are a part of the problem in creating divides. I know this is easy to do, we're sort of hardwired to always have an enemy to direct anger towards.