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The End of Coal Could Be Closer Than It Looks (bloomberg.com)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report on Monday saying that the world's electrical utilities need to reduce coal consumption by at least 60 percent over the next two decades through 2030 to avoid the worst effects of climate change that could occur with more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. While that reduction seems out of reach, Bloomberg crunched some numbers and found that "it's possible to meet consumption-cut targets on the current path." From the report: The conventional wisdom is that this isn't possible, as rising demand from emerging economies, led by China and India, overwhelms the switch from fossil fuels in richer countries. That may underestimate the changing economics of energy generation, though. For one thing, it assumes that Asian countries will continue to build new coal-fired plants at a rapid rate, even though renewables are already the cheaper option in India and heading that way in China and Southeast Asia. For another, the falling cost and rising penetration of wind and solar is so recent that we're only just starting to see how they damage the business models of conventional generators. Thanks to the deflation of recent years, renewables already produce energy at a lower cost than thermal power plants. That causes the overall price of wholesale electricity to fall, reducing a conventional plant's revenue per megawatt-hour. When this drops below the generator's operating costs, the only away to avoid losing money is to switch off altogether. As a result, capacity factors -- the share of time when the plant is on and producing electricity -- decline as well, further undermining returns.
The shift from an always-on "baseload" demand profile to a peaks-and-troughs one like this carries its own problems. The act of ramping up and down consumes fuel and causes the physical plant to wear out faster. Absent expensive refurbishments, that could take a decade off the 40- to 50-year life of a coal plant -- and banks will get progressively less likely to fund long-term refurbs as wind and solar further damage the economics of fossil power. Researchers at the Australian National University this year modeled the effect of this sort of scenario on that country's generation mix. Assuming that the cost of renewables continues to evolve in line with current trends, they found the average retirement age of coal plants falls to 30 years from 50 years. As a result, coal-powered generation drops by about 70 percent between 2020 and 2030. "Let's assume the addition of net new generation stops in 2020; that plant life reduces to 30 years from 40 years; and that capacity factors gradually fall from the current 50 percent to 35 percent, still well above the levels of the U.K.'s coal generators in recent years," the report says in closing. "The effect of those operating changes alone reduces coal-fired electricity output in 2030 by about 40 percent relative to the higher scenario. [...] Factor in a price on carbon or other robust government intervention and the decline would be much faster."
The shift from an always-on "baseload" demand profile to a peaks-and-troughs one like this carries its own problems. The act of ramping up and down consumes fuel and causes the physical plant to wear out faster. Absent expensive refurbishments, that could take a decade off the 40- to 50-year life of a coal plant -- and banks will get progressively less likely to fund long-term refurbs as wind and solar further damage the economics of fossil power. Researchers at the Australian National University this year modeled the effect of this sort of scenario on that country's generation mix. Assuming that the cost of renewables continues to evolve in line with current trends, they found the average retirement age of coal plants falls to 30 years from 50 years. As a result, coal-powered generation drops by about 70 percent between 2020 and 2030. "Let's assume the addition of net new generation stops in 2020; that plant life reduces to 30 years from 40 years; and that capacity factors gradually fall from the current 50 percent to 35 percent, still well above the levels of the U.K.'s coal generators in recent years," the report says in closing. "The effect of those operating changes alone reduces coal-fired electricity output in 2030 by about 40 percent relative to the higher scenario. [...] Factor in a price on carbon or other robust government intervention and the decline would be much faster."
China and India are still busily building new coal plants (despite what China sometimes claims), and you'd have to convince them - and their populations - that upward economic mobility is no longer an option.
If India tried a huge cutback, they'd have riots.
If China tried a huge cutback, they'd have a revolution.
I'll be waiting for the inevitable talking points about how the US will never get off coal and natural gas because _strawman_ won't let it.
Here's the reality, the rest of the world is moving off fossil fuels at a quick clip, the US will be left behind if we still allow industry to drive the ship (e.g. having oil company executives making energy policy that enriches themselves instead of the needs of the nation).
This ignores the possibility of coal subsidies shoring up the aforementioned losses. Laws could mandate coal even if economically unfeasible, leading to higher regional prices. Also, energy prices could go up if there were a major war involving India, China or the US. Not terribly likely in the next 10 years but you never know.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
"Assuming that the cost of renewables continues to evolve in line with current trends"
Yeah. That ain't going to be true. Even countries like Germany are having a hard time moving away from coal, which is why their carbon emissions output rose last year, and will again this year.
Natural Gas, Hydrodynamic, Coal and Nuclear can all do Peak and Base load generation. As a note, the way you do it with Hydrodynamic is through filling a resivour then dumping it when you need the energy.
Wind and Solar can only suppliment load or in the case of Hydroelectric, be used to charge a very large battery (resivour). You still have to float the cost of being able to run the full baseline load when needed, or accept brown-outs.
Of those, the only viable solution, that allows the majority of the 3rd world to achieve 1st world living standards without wrecking the planet, and believe you me the 3rd world is only starting to learn the lesson of environmentalism, by far the most dangerous and requiring the most respect, is Nuclear.
The biggest changes that we've made are a temporary improvement. We've reduced automobile weight, lifetime, and improved combustion efficiency. We've moved from Coal to Natural Gas which burns far cleaner. We've reduced power consumption of electronics through high efficiency programs. We've reduced material use through recycling programs and recycling technology. We've discovered "cheap chinese goods" often last a heck of a lot longer than anyone anticipated.
Subsidizing recycling programs and mandating higher energy efficiency is likely to be the best bet for awhile yet.
Base load problems are relatively easy to fix, price the electricity according to its availability, and sell it to industry as intermittent supply. They'll adapt their usage as best they can to take advantage of the cheaper price.
You can also install more charge points at offices for electric vehicles, and at supermarkets, so car charging occurs during the day to use up solar better.
But a lot of the problems stem from lobbying by one company and one man. This is why the airborne mercury levels are being increased (by the EPA chief, who also happens to be an ex lobbyist of Murry Energy), so they can burn dirtier coal and eek out more profit from the last of his mines. It's a generational problem that will fix itself soon enough.
Here's a link to the current state of energy consumption worldwide. As you can see fossil fuels are growing, and recyclables are not keeping up with increased demand, never mind making inroads into the fossil fuel demand
https://gailtheactuary.files.w...
Well coal's future may be uncertain but wishful thinking on the internet will likely outlive us all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
Globally, coal is even more alive. "Think the Big Banks Have Abandoned Coal? Think Again." Even a solar magazine admits: "China to add 259 GW of coal capacity, satellite imagery shows." For reference, 259 GW is more than twice the amount of power capacity that mighty Texas has FROM ALL SOURCES.
Now Asia - which accounts for close to 80% of total global coal usage - is increasingly turning to the U.S. to supply coal. We are still the world's third largest coal producer. The U.S. supplies both types, met coal to produce steel and steam coal to produce electricity. "U.S. coal exports increased by 61% in 2017 as exports to Asia more than doubled."
The U.S. has a 360-year supply of coal to bolster our expanding export market. The trade war with the U.S. however, could have China looking to expand domestic supply, and the country's coal production caps have been found to be "technically infeasible."
The fact is that both China (65%) and India (75%) are hugely dependent upon coal-based electricity, which will be needed in even bigger quantities to lift their low Human Development Index closer to those in the West, where universal electricity access has more people living better and longer. Can you really blame them? "The Statistical Connection Between Electricity and Human Development."
We shall overcome! Halley left in the nick of time. The others will not be so lucky.
endless ideas that go nowhere, we could power a city the size of Chicago!
includes government subsidies. It may cost more to keep a coal plant running, but not if the feds give them tax incentives to keep burning the coal so that people in W Virginia who work in the mines will keep voting for Republicans.
Unlike the rest of the world, when a coal-power plant is decommissioned it is abandoned, or torn down.
China has future plans for their coal power plants.
China is actively researching and developing pebble bed nuclear power generation technology, and their plan is to design their future pebble-bed nuclear power plant modules that is smaller than the space provided by (decommissioned) coal power plants
Their rationale is, by the time their design on pebble-bed nuclear power plant module is technologically feasible and safe, they can decommission their coal power plants and retrofit them into becoming pebble-bed nuclear power plants, which continues to generate electricity, without the billowing smokes
Our Strayan Proime Minsta sez youse can all garn getfucked.
Just piss off. K?
they've literally got 50 times the population but they're only adding twice as much coal capacity?
/. crowd because we're in our 40s and 50s and, well, dying. But if you're in your 20s it's a blink of the eye.
And like the article says, solar and wind are _already_ cheaper than coal. That's without factoring in the health costs from breathing the dirty air.
Power plants are big projects that take years to build. So yeah, you're gonna see coal for a while while it works its way out of the system. Maybe another 10 years or so. That seems like a long time to the
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I doubt that he goes down without a fight.
The U.S. will eventually change its mind (as soon as it can change its administration to one that's actually responsible), and then it will have to struggle to catch up. China can also exploit its enormous head start, both for profit and for strategic leverage - including inserting espionage equipment into renewable devices sold to the the U.S.
It may well take the U.S. a decade or more to catch up, including still more deficit spending. The U.S. may well find itself unable to recover, and may even experience energy shortages if it cannot get the renewable tech it needs. The end result may be a significant shift of political power among first-world nations.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Nice of China to share few technology with some Slashdot AC.
We're 40 years on from the pollution crisis media induced panic and all of those 'in the next 5 years' predictions haven't come true.....
In those 40 years we have phased out leaded petrol, leaded paint, chlorofluorocarbons, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to name just a few. We are still seeing the effects of these, despite them being banned for decades.
So the "crisis" has been reduced, but not eliminated. And it has been reduced because we did something about it, not because the media induced a panic. If anything, the media raised awareness so that we would act.
sustainable living
We are nowhere near the lower bound of resource use for solar.
Solar will get cheap enough that you simply roll it out in the desert without any frames, staking it to the ground ... maybe put pillow inflated with polymer foam under it if it can be made very very cheaply to angle it, but if not, ehh. It won't be consuming steel or glass at all at that point. Just a tiny bit of silicon and plastics (3M Ultra Barrier film last 25+ years).
We are nowhere near the lower bound of resource use for solar.
Are you willing to bet the survival of the human race on that? I'm not.
As it is right now, today, nuclear power uses far less raw material for the same energy than solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal. As it is right now, today, nuclear power produces less CO2 per energy produced than any other energy source we know of. As it is right now, today, nuclear power is the safest energy source we have. If there is a great demand that we lower CO2, with least impact on lives and the environment, and deploy this as quickly as possible, then we have no option other than nuclear power.
While we wait for this technological breakthrough on reducing the resource needs of solar power we can reduce our CO2 production by building some nuclear power plants. If the need to reduce our CO2 can wait for the development of better solar collectors then I have to wonder just how much of a threat CO2 truly poses to humanity. Whenever nuclear power is brought up here on Slashdot there's always some wiseacre that says something better will come in 5 or 10 years. Well, we just had a report from the IPCC posted on Slashdot that we don't have 10 years to wait on this. So, what should we do?
I have an idea, let's build some nuclear power plants. Lot's of them.
I know another wiseacre is already typing a response on how the nuclear waste is going to be a problem. Well, I heard that we'll have that problem solved in 10 years with a new technology that can turn all that waste into valuable radioactive isotopes that NASA and other scientific agencies are just begging to get enough of for performing their experiments and exploring the universe. Just you wait. Until then we can pile up the waste like we've been doing and when we have the technology to process this waste into something valuable then the problems will all be solved. We will have saved humanity and produced vital materials for science.
I'm not saying we should deploy nuclear to the exclusion of wind and solar, only that without also deploying nuclear power we will not be able to reduce our CO2 production in the time frame dictated by the IPCC.
Which is it? Can we wait for some new solar technology or not? If we can wait then let's wait. If we can't wait then nuclear power will have to be part of the solution.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
and that "blog" is a reputable source? no, its just personal opinion - a waste of time
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Why?
Coal is expensive, requiring hundreds of trillions in subsidies each year to be economic.
You could build a lot of solar for just one year's subsidies, at far better output per unit cost.
Why should we ask competitors to get an edge? Why not do so ourselves first and use that to force them to follow?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Most nuclear power stations don't even break even during their lifecycle due to decomissioning costs (yes, they have an extremely limited lifetime). Current designs simply aren't economically viable.
The IPCC is making objectively false claims about nuclear energy, and discouraging an effective and proven low carbon technology is inconsistent with their supposed goals. By adopting an ideological position, they call into question the credibility of their scientific claims as well, and risk damaging the cause. Pollution and environmental impact alone should be reason enough to phase out fossil fuels, but this lays a foundation for doubt of climate science, and an excuse for inaction. Similarly, advocates of renewables focus on promoting capacity and sales numbers, rather than energy produced and carbon abated, which are both small.
Attacking Nuclear As Dangerous, New IPCC Climate Change Report Promotes Land-Intensive Renewables
The planned conversion of coal fire power plants into pebble bed nuclear power plants is not even a secret in China.
It is part of the nationwide power master plan of China.
For many outside China, of course, it might sound far fetch, but then, you guys are so used to think of the Chinese as thieves that you can never comprehend what the Chinese are capable of.
AC are a problem on slashdot. Didn't know there's a problem with Anonymous Cowards all over Asia.
aaaaaaa
Retrofit a coal plant into a nuke plant ? Yeah right.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
aaaaaaa
China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan need to go first and cut their electricity generation from coal to be the same percentage or lower than the EU/USA.
No, they don't.
Everyone have to act now. You can't sit around and wait for every other nation out there to be better than you until you decide to hop up a step. (Really, your way of thinking literally means that you don't intend to do jack shit until you are the worst offender in the world, and first then you will do the work necessary to become the second worst offender in the world.)
Also, you really don't want to compare emissions in absolute numbers because that puts large countries as the worst offenders pretty quickly. There is no way the US will be able to get down to the same emissions as Belgium in absolute numbers.
What you want to do is compare the per capita numbers. (Looks a little better for the US then, they are only the 12th worst offender when it comes to per capita while being the second worst offender when it comes in absolute numbers.)
No, *Trump* did that, mostly at the behest of Murry Energy, the coal company. But he did not have any control over budgets anyway, and the USA simply went ahead without him. USA's electric car programs lead the world, and it is doing very well on renewables too.
He has very limited nuisance powers, he can misuse the "National security" claim in NAFTA, only until he faces a court challenge. He can refuse to sign reports, as if everyone is waiting for him to sign off on things. He can express opinions, but nobody listens to them. His supporters, the ones that are left, aren't do-ers, they're not out making stuff, they're sitting in front a Fox News complaining about how unfair everyone is to them, and how they're the real victim.
He's legalizing Asbestos use again, do you think anyone will suddenly start importing that Russian asbestos, just because he thinks they should? He's changing the air pollution laws to permit high levels of mercury in the air. Do you think anyone will authorize new coal power stations, if they know the law lets them pump mercury into the air in their county?
He talks a lot, and tweets a lot, but he's not in the loop on most things.
China already uses less coal electricity per person than America does you idiot.
Per person America gets more electricity from coal than China does.
Educate yourself fool.
You have got to get your energy from somewhere, and while importing nuclear/coal energy from the neighbors country is a stopgap, you need your own baseload too. Thus the expansion of coal plant in germany. it isn't about conservative or whatnot it is about closing nuclear plant and having to replace that with something. And yes baseload is king for companies, huge or not. You can't do proper manufacturing with intermitent power.
Yes, Dr. Ripudaman Malhotra is a reputable author, and the article in question is well cited. Replacing Cubic Miles of Oil @ TEAC8 is an interesting presentation by the same author, and the youtube link also references his book.
And I've heard that we'll have a power plant running on unicorn farts in 10 years. Seems like a more realistic solution to me.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And again with the blame shift and bollocks form the knuckledragger crowd. China makes new more efficient power plants and closes down more power plants that are inefficient.
Trump bleats on about how he is getting rid of red tape, yet he's signed many MANY new laws into the books. He even in his assertions about him reducing regulation that he will make new laws. Haven't heard ANY of you fucking morons whine about trump making new laws.
Why?
Because he claims to close two regulations for each one he introduces.
YET when it's from people who don't have the same nationality as you, despite having a less garishly different skin colour from yourself, you don't CARE that they close anything.
'cos chiyina has to be blamed.
Fuckwit.
30% of germany's output is renewables, up from 20% a decade ago and less than 10% two decades.
Why? Do you hate reality so much, or is it just your job?
How can you trust anything they say, when their very existence depends on terrorising the public into believing that the sky is falling in?
These cretins are going to end up causing blackouts all over the western world, on a daily basis, until they've completely destroyed our society.
There is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming'.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
So I don't see any reason why your whinge about your persecution complex being triggered should be a problem.
You deserve it as a country.
The USA has already been doing far better on this than many other nations in the world, and they aren't even trying.
That must be why you are still the second highest in the world in total, and twice as high as Europe and China per capita....
the one you gave is no better than me pointing to a slashdot posting by, for example, angel o sphere. Your "citation" is just some random asshole's opinion. I got one too. He's full of shit.
Can not happen since too many ppl consider it ok for 3rd world and China, to add new coal plants. China is ADDing, not just replacing, more new coal to China alone, than the America has by 2030. And they are adding to china/3rd world more than the entire west has has. U less we stop adding new coal, we lose. BTW, replacing old coal with new coal plants that burn less coal or new Nat gas plants, work as well. Ideally, we would replace with AE along with nukes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So, yeah, your "citation" is as useful as me linking to a guardian opinion piece. A thing YOU will never accept, no matter WHO is writing the piece.
U have it backkwards. Baseload came about because it was observed that we have a floor amount of electricity that is used. As such, it became cheap to design, add, and run 'baseload' power plants. And it still remains the cheapest to do so.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nothing more, nothing less. You, however, are a nuke fluffer.
They are probably talking about the site and it's logistics & grid connectivity.
Try look at this: https://www.gen-4.org/gif/uplo...
They are projecting the R&D to take place for another 20 to 30 years, and by then, when the technology is ready, the Chinese plan to retrofit the coal fire power plants (which are themselves almost reaching retirement / decommissioning) with modular designs of molten salt / pebble bed nuclear power plants
You know BlindSeer, every time I read your posts I think "that BS is amazing".
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
When I hiked across the northern UK in 2014, the insanity of substituting small renewables for baseload sources of power was never more apparent.
Every small village we passed through in Cumbria and Yorkshire was fighting its own NIMBY battle over its installation of two or three wind turbines. Many of the villages being in designated national parkland made the NIMBY problem worse still. At Drax in Yorkshire, the world's largest coal generating plant had just been converted, with great fanfare, to burn wood. Same vast clouds of smoke as before, only a little less carbon, but the conversion technically made Drax a renewable facility under EU standards. Hut Yorkshire doesn't have any wood, it having been logged clear centuries ago. So the wood is imported from the southern US in a fleet of diesel freighters, all so that Drax could make an empty claim of being a renewable.
Our hike started at a point near Sellafield, the nuclear reprocessing facility on the Irish Sea. The UK could have avoided the whole renewables mess by adding a few gigawatts of generating capacity at that place where the nuclear bullet had already been bitten. No need for wind turbines scattered all over the pristine viewshed, no need to have the old coal plant burn wood to make it a fake renewable. The footprint of nuclear is so small that it disappears into the landscape.
The same sort of unimaginative, bean-counting fuckheads at TEPCO were responsible for Fukushima Daiichi.
Correction: its lack of safety...
The media induces panics all the time. Remember in 2011 they scaremongered about nuclear power? Germany got rid of its nuclear plants and is digging for coal. The media induced a panic about DDT and millions have died of malaria as a result. Fear mongering is standard practice for the media and they won't stop because they don't bear the costs of their malfeasance.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Cheap natural gas makes it easy to eliminate coal.
And Nuclear.
By shutting down the reactors the turbines can be utilized to produce electricity by converting them to gas. Essentially by shutting down the reactors before the end of their service life the remaining infrastructure can be used to safely produce electricity with gas where the nuclear reactor could not. Thus avoiding the risk of a reactor meltdown by running the reactors in the highly risky part of their service life.
This gives us hundreds of sites around the world where baseload power can be produced without the reactors. That also gives us electricity and a profit motivation to run and maintain the site. Also since the spent fuel rods are hot for decades it might be possible to use stirling motors to utilize that waste heat to pre-warm the water for the gas turbine without criticality - to also keep the spent rods cool.
Additionally, accelerator technology can be built on site and utilized to destroy the nuclear spent fuel if materials technology doesn't advance enough to have safe burner reactor technology. I had great hopes in molten Salt Nuclear Burner reactors but it seems that accelerators might be more viable since the nuclear industry can't solve the problem of safely storing the spent fuel and potentially utilizing it in a hundred or so years when reactor technology progresses.
Essentially all of that Nuclear infrastructure is free to any utility that wants to make a bundle of money decommissioning Nuclear reactors and converting it to natural gas infrastructure to fill any residual gaps in wide scale Solar thermal, Solar PV, Wind, Geothermal and biomass electricity producing infrastructure. Take San Onofre for example. It's decommissioned, but why waste all that perfectly servicable turbine and electricity grid infrastructure? You could even use the waste heat to dry up liquid nuclear wastes the site produced.
As those true renewable electrical infrastructure sources increase we even have the option of taking the gas offline and powering the accelerators to destroy the spent nuclear fuel that way. That way we utilize the supporting infrastructure of the Nuclear plant and get a further return on the carbon investment in all that concrete for a very long time, while we ween ourselves off nuclear and coal.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Coal is expensive, requiring hundreds of trillions in subsidies each year to be economic.
This is pretty silly, jd. Where did you get such a crazy number?
Look up the global GDP and you will realize why it makes no sense.
Nuking China, India etc. or letting them release more CO2.
Not really. Baseload came about because coal power plants could not follow the load - it took hours to alter a coal power plant output so if possible it was always running at whatever output it was designed for. Since coal power plants have been the most common power plants for over a century, all electrical power infrastructure is built around them and their limitations.
In other words, if the most common power plant type is only able to provide a constant output, it is inevitable that the electical power generation is split into base and peak load power plants.
In countries that get their electricity mostly from hydroelectric power, that can easily follow the load, this discussion doesn't even exist.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
For many outside China, of course, it might sound far fetch, but then, you guys are so used to think of the Chinese as thieves that you can never comprehend what the Chinese are capable of.
They'll be capable of amazing things, once they get a decent government.
China and India are still busily building new coal plants
China and India are building new coal plants to meet rapidly growing demand for power.
According to the article, this is in the process of changing because solar is becoming the lower cost alternative.
If you want to reduce coal consumption, the best, most cost effective, and politically acceptable solution, is better ACs.
ACs are about as good as they can get right now, especially in developing countries. ...
But the increasing demand can only be accounted for by new AC installations. Anything old would be existing and already part of the load prior to the increase in demand that's prompting new powerplant construction.
Actually, since electrical power from solar arrays is becoming extremely low cost during the daytime, replacing air conditioning would be a great way to reduce carbon footprint, if you run it only during the daytime.
Turns out that thermal storage is relatively simple in the range of temperatures used by air conditioning: water has an enormous heat capacity, and is cheap. Cool the water during the day, use the stored thermal mass to cool during the night.
(And water has significantly more thermal capacity if you use the phase change to ice.)
This does, however, only make sense if you have either time-dependent electrical rate (if electricity isn't cheaper during the day, no incentive to buy a thermal-storage Air Conditioner), or else your residence/office building is cooling with its own solar panels.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
We were smarter in the 1950's
IQ-wise, no question.
Turns out not. IQ-wise, we are much smarter now. They have to continuously recalibrate IQ tests to keep the average at 100. (Google the Flynn Effect)
Coal is used for many reasons. Look at Germany: it is turning to coal from nuclear. Do you think this report is going to have Germany do an about-face on closing its nuclear plants by 2022? I don't. For some countries, coal is a secure source of power. They do have coal and they do not have natural gas, for example. The technology for obtaining coal is low and practical for many developing and undeveloped countries. Non-hydro renewables and nuclear are not. Also, non-hydro renewables are not 24/7 power, and the grid needs that.
Coal is estimated by the International Energy Agency to shrink 0.1% a year through 2050. So yeah, it is trending down, but not by an amount that means anything. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/a...
1) Contraction - globally environments are in a phase of reduction
2) Impact - edge conditions are the first responders stripping models through innovation
3) Stress - thrashes modes of use down to survival conditions
4) Failure - Law of Diminishing Returns for those caught in the crux
It not only spells doom for big UTILITIES but general everyday work that impacts jobs, change to part-time gig work who feel the thrash; which tolls will be taken in the future. Innovation doesn't lead people out of the crux
The media induces panics all the time. Remember in 2011 they scaremongered about nuclear power? Germany got rid of its nuclear plants and is digging for coal. The media induced a panic about DDT and millions have died of malaria as a result. Fear mongering is standard practice for the media and they won't stop because they don't bear the costs of their malfeasance.
Umm, what panic? Is panic some dog whistle for "I do not like this news, so we must suppress it"?
First, your desire apparently needed classifying Fukushima images and reporting as top secret. Deal with it, not many people are going to see reactor buildings blowing up and think - I want one of those in my town. And DDT is not some sort of majick gift from God. It is a pesticide, and as such, suffers from the same problems of resistance as other pesticides. And while you are lamenting the "millions" of dark skinned people who died because of the media (care for giving the citations presenting the evidence of multiple millions dead because of removing DDT?)
Here's some reading material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is just another pesticide, and mosquitos were turning resistant to it in the mid 1950's.
But I mean it's the fucking media, amirite?
Any panic is on your end, for reading things that don't fit your narrative and that you want censored.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There was a nearly identical report released in the 1980s warning that the Earth would become uninhabitable by the year 2010 if we didn't ban all use of coal immediately.
There's only so many times you can listen to chicken little before you start simply ignoring him.
Fukushima-Daiishi induced a panic about nuclear power in 2011, not the media. Or are you suggesting the media should have not covered the event?
Nuclear power is in decline because of economics. In most of the world, combined cycle natural gas power plants have had better economics than nuclear for some time. More recently, the same can be said of solar and wind. In the US, nuclear is particularly expensive, mostly because of corruption in the industry and regulatory bodies. Corruption goes hand-in-hand with large centralized projects, whether it is power generation or software development.
The media induced a panic about DDT
In all fairness though. DDT is a horrible chemical and shouldn't be used in places where people or animals are expected to exists in. I get your point though, people's knee jerks can bring about the end of something before a useful alternative is found. But to be devil's advocate, companies don't seem to ever want to find/use a useful alternative by themselves. It always seems like to get change to happen, it's always got to be this nanny nagging "oh no the world will end" kind of style. That's not true everywhere, granted, but for a lot of industries it doesn't seem like they want to advance until they're forced to do so. Especially in the coal industry.
How surprising to find yet another topic you know little about, but think you are an expert...
The whole idea of off peak overnight power being cheaper was solely because coal plants couldn't shut down overnight and restart again in time for the next day. It was legislated into existence as a subsidy to coal plants to give them something to do other just burning all the coal overnight just for fun.
The coal power plants that are peakers which only run a few hours a day will be the first to shutdown. There on hours will decrease and then they will eventually shutdown. The baseload coal power plants will be the last. It should be noted that coal power plants while they may last 50 years or so required major refurbishment during that fifty years life span like the retubing of the boilers. So many of them will hit a milestone where it may not be economical to refurbish them.
This is pretty silly, jd. Where did you get such a crazy number?
Perhaps it's an estimated cost to clean up the pollution from coal power. However, that cost is actually infinite, since coal plants are distributing radioactive isotopes and soot across the planet and we physically can't clean that up. Therefore, coal is effectively receiving $INFINITY in subsidies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Big Giant Orange Head has assured me that "coal is beautiful" and "the war on coal is over!"
That's all I need to hear. BGOH is the Deplorable Whisperer.
Hydro is pot luck. You either have it, in which case you can use it to follow load, or you don't, and your options (assuming you require them to be zero or low carbon) are to use sources that are not quite dispatchable.
So the hierarchy in terms of convenience is:
- Dispatchable (hydro, battery storage, gas turbine)
- Base load (coal, nuclear)
- Intermittent (solar and wind)
It's a lot easier to use baseload + batteries/pumped hydro to achieve dispatchability than to combine an intermittent source with storage as you can't be sure how much you might need to store on account of not being able to rely on any "baseload" generation.
China's coal consumption appears to be rising at a rapid rate in 2018, erasing several years of low growth and environmental restraint.
In the first five months of the year, China used 870 million metric tons of "thermal" coal, a 12-percent increase from a year earlier, the government's top planning agency said on June 21.
Until China quits ADDING new coal plants and refrains from using more coal, it will only go up.
The entire west, will not burn 12% less. America MIGHT burn 12% less coal (though trump is trying to reverse that), but I doubt it. We still have more coal plants to shut down first. The biggest is the navajo plant. Once that is shut down, it will drop America's coal use down some 1-2%.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You must have been one hell of a dirty polluting country. (and still are obviously. Being twice as bad and all)
If the country continues the 12-percent growth pace through the entire year for all coal use, consumption would tie the record mark of 4.24 billion tons set in 2013, based on calculations from National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data.
IF they increase, they will be back at 2013 levels. But you have been constantly telling us they are already at the highest levels ever? When in fact they were they more than 12% below the peak.
So why link to sites to that show your obvious lies? Are you retarded?
While the NBS has yet to release final figures on total tonnage for either 2016 or 2017, it has estimated that coal consumption rose 0.4 percent last year, posting the first increase in four years.
Havent you been lying and telling everyone it's been massively increasing the last few years? OOPS proved another lie.
Electricity consumption jumped 9.4 percent in the first half of the year, rising eight percent in June from a year earlier, the NEA said.
"It's clear the Chinese economy picked up pace early in the year which would be reflected in an acceleration in electricity demand, as the data show," said Mikkal Herberg, energy security research director at the Seattle-based National Bureau of Asian Research.
I though you lied and said they were in a downturn?
Maybe read your links before posting them so you don't appear so foolish.
If they were in a downturn, it makes predicting 12% increase will continue for the year seem quite foolish...
... the US controls a tiny percentage of coal consumption.
I'll be waiting for the inevitable talking points about how the US will never get off coal and natural gas because _strawman_ won't let it.
Here's the reality, the rest of the world is moving off fossil fuels at a quick clip, the US will be left behind if we still allow industry to drive the ship (e.g. having oil company executives making energy policy that enriches themselves instead of the needs of the nation).
Energy policy in the US is preventing more widespread adoption of alternative energy sources, period.
1. Less than one percent of US energy is produced by oil, so while "oil company executives making energy policy" is an accurate statement, it is somewhat misleading when it comes to how US politics is influenced by the energy sector.
2. Thirty-two percent of energy production in the US is powered by natural gas. Another thirty percent is powered by coal. Yes, US energy policy at the national level is being set by an ex-petroleum industry person, but at the state and city level, energy policy is being influenced primarily by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a conservative political action group that focuses on getting legislation passed at the local level.
3. ALEC was created by Charles and David Koch decades ago, and is steadily funded by them and other conservative business people. The Koch brothers derive most of their wealth from --- you guessed it -- coal and natural gas. ALEC-backed legislation has killed or severely curtailed alternative energy initiatives in dozens of states and municipalities. For what it's worth, right here in sunny Az, a Koch-backed trio of people on the Az corporation commission effectively killed private roof-top solar in Arizona by drastically altering the rates at which Arizona utilities would pay for energy placed back on the grid by private citizens, going from full retail to less than half of wholesale. New roof-top solar installations by private citizens went from over 40 a month to zero that same month, April 2015.
All politics is local, and the Koch brothers know this. That is why they pour millions and millions of their private wealth into ALEC -- to get legislation passed locally that protects their business interests nationally.
Wind and solar are intermitant. You have to build coal and nuclear plants that you can bring online in cases of emergency. As battey technolgy improves those plants will be needed less and less but you still need them available and ready at the flick of a switch.
DDT was only banned for agricultural use. It is still available for use in mosquito control in countries that need it.
The problem is that overuse of DDT allowed mosquitoes to develop a strong resistance to it. Here's a nice study on that topic, but since you won't bother reading it I will quote "We conducted standard insecticide susceptibility testing across western Kenya and found that the Anopheles gambiae mosquito has acquired high resistance to pyrethroids and DDT"
Put simply, DDT doesn't work well for controlling malaria carrying mosquitoes anymore, and that was not caused by media induced panics about DDT. If anything, the media exposure that lead to banning DDT for all other uses probably prolonged it's usefulness for controlling mosquitoes.
Coal is also Used in Steel Production.
On Wikipedia, this kind of begging prose is shot down in flames with one short word and four brace characters. For all its problems, what a godsend.
That's why you go to science. In the case of CFC's, it was predictable in the 80's that without an outright ban we would no longer have an ozone layer. It's predictable that without a ban on DDT birds like the bald eagle would be severely threatened or extinct. There's a prevailing hypothesis out there that generations of leaded gasoline plus the availability of drugs lead to the crime waves of the 1980's. But it wasn't media-induced panic over lead in gasoline that removed it. It was ground level ozone from smog that was making people sick. Catalytic converters removed the smog provided the gasoline was unleaded. It is observable that ground level ozone levels have decreased sharply since the introduction of the catalytic converter, and anyone with two eyes can see there is less smog.
One can easily prove that nuclear power can be dangerous scientifically. Placing a nuclear power plant next to the ocean in an earthquake-prone zone with backup diesel generators in the basement had very predictable results. Coal is filthy and has a major health impact, but when it goes wrong it doesn't prevent habitation for hundreds or thousands of years. Building nuclear power plants in any area of population density is a bad idea. And it has to stay that way for decades, which requires stable political leadership regarding denying building permits. This is a very hard thing to accomplish given the greedy corrupt nature of politicians.
Scare mongering on DDT eh?
For my part I'd rather have Bald Eagles and Peregrine falcons these days and continue sending mosquito nets to areas where malaria is endemic. It's not a perfect solution, but things rarely are.
-Darkelf
It's cheaper, because coal is cheaper. They are designed to run all night, because their is demand all night and it's cheaper to build the plant that way.
You have no understanding. Just clueless. I've spent decades modeling the grid for a living. My software runs on dispatch floors, giving the grid operator short term forecasts.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is pretty silly, jd. Where did you get such a crazy number?
Perhaps it's an estimated cost to clean up the pollution from coal power. However, that cost is actually infinite, since coal plants are distributing radioactive isotopes and soot across the planet and we physically can't clean that up. Therefore, coal is effectively receiving $INFINITY in subsidies.
Estimated total cost isn't the same thing as annual subsidies.
Welfare costs ~$1T annually. The cost until the end of time is $INFINITY.
kick the can down the road:
https://www.power-technology.com/features/featuregood-riddance-maintaining-nuclear-waste-maintenance-in-the-uk-4872498/
https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a67014c
https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-waste-is-there/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/21/search-area-willing-host-highly-radioactive-waste-uk-geology
thank you.
Sadly, Caffeinated Bacon/Crimson Tsunami just loves to troll here with loads of lies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you just remove all the massive systemic subsidies, quotas, tax exemptions, tax depreciation, and subsidies for fossil fuels, coal becomes outrageously expensive, even without having coal plants pay for the pollution (negative externalities) and deaths (kids) it causes.
Do that.
Renewables are already cheaper. It's 2018, not 1978.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Good point. Let's look at one example, the proposed LNG shipping terminal in BC, which literally:
1. pays zero carbon tax, while being the largest provincial GHG emitter.
2. pays no impact fees, while other energy sources have to pay them.
3. receives grants to hire workers in the north, an artificial subsidy for housing and pay that other energy sources don't get.
So, you are correct that natural gas shipped to China and India would be subsidized, just like coal is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And I see bald eagles and other raptors in my area where they were once endangered. Some things have gotten better because of the "panic" But the panic of the 1970's and 1980's was legit; rivers were burning, smog was real, and roadsides everywhere looked like the rim of garbage dumps. "Give a hoot, don't pollute" helped. Things got pretty clean by the 90's, but then the greens didn't go into maintenance mode. TV shows like Captain Planet characterized corporations as *wanting* to destroy the environment, and eco-terrorists started destroying buildings in the USA and causing forest fires.
So when there was actual pollution, yes, the green movement was good. They should move on to China where the problems are obvious and very treatable.
The media induced a panic about DDT and millions have died of malaria as a result.
Please learn about DDT.
You don't want a cure that's worse than the disease.
I'm pro-nuclear, as long as it's done correctly. The problem is, overall, nuclear is not done correctly.
The only way that nuclear will ever work is if the following problems are solved:
1. Construction and adoption headwinds and legal challenges. Good luck with that.
2. Massively improved oversight and management that positively disallows the kind of corner cutting and reactive-rather-than-proactive safety issues we've seen in the current history of nuclear power. And I'm not just talking about Fukushima - there's plenty of minor issues to point to with aging nuclear plants. Just for one example, as I can actually cite sources unlike your post: Vermont Yankee having a cooling tower collapse from corroded bolts and rotted lumber, as well as several groundwater tritium leaks that went on for months with denial of any contaminated or leaking pipes. Things like this only reinforce public sentiment against nuclear power (problem #1), and work against the nuclear industry's long-term viability in favor of short-term stop-loss corporate horseshit.
3. Disposition and disposal of waste products. You vaguely dismiss this issue with some odd and completely unsubstantiated claims including a citation of NASA that has no backing or reference whatsoever. The reality is this: the United States has no commercial waste reprocessing facilities at all, and it would take massive infrastructure spend to get them, which won't happen until #1 is solved. It's a shame too, as upwards of 95% of "spent" fuel is actually still useable fuel, mixed with neutron-absorbing waste that prevents reaction. However, any reprocessing activity is using essentially the same techniques as extraction of weapons materials, so it must be closely monitored and has been banned in the US due to "leadership by example" in the very noble efforts to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation. In addition, even though Federal law requires it under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the US Government has not been able to provide a repository for the nuclear waste from commercial reactors due to intractable political concerns (See: problem #1). Therefore any new reactors we cannot build today (again, #1) will necessarily also be places to store and secure highly radioactive material (causing part of problem #2), substantially adding to both construction costs, operational expense (leading to the corner-cutting in problem #2), and political ill-will (yet again, #1).
4. Decommissioning of aging, obsolete, and borderline-dangerous designs. The United States has 100 or so commercial reactors running right now, producing ~20% of the energy on the grid. Many of those are 1950s and 60s designs, built in the 1960s and 70s, license-uprated in the 1980s, and license-extended in the 2000s because we're not replacing them, and can't afford to do without them. These aging reactors are running longer, and harder than they were originally designed to, and they won't last forever; the longer they operate the more chance there is of failure. Plus, they still have to store all the spent fuel on-site for the extended operation due to license extension (contributing to problem #3). It would be great to replace them with something much better designed and more efficient, but it's hard to put any trust in the current designs when the nuclear industry has such a history replete with lies and exaggerations about safety, costs, and operational lifespan (problem #2). Oh, and there's still problem #1 preventing any construction of replacement infrastructure.
Fix those completely insurmountable issues (get the public to change their collective mind all of a sudden, cause the commercial nuclear industry and the US Government to start being responsible actors all of a sudden, and then wish into existence hundreds of billions of dollars of reprocessing infrastructure and waste internment sites) and I guess we're good to go?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Oh, that's because your converter is stopped up and is overheating. Add 1gal lacquer thinner to 10gal gas and burn that shit out.
That's hilarious.
You think short term fluctuations are done with coal plants, adorable.
Clearly and obviously the liar is you WindBourne. As has been repeatedly shown.
Not really. Baseload came about because coal power plants could not follow the load - it took hours to alter a coal power plant output so if possible it was always running at whatever output it was designed for. Since coal power plants have been the most common power plants for over a century, all electrical power infrastructure is built around them and their limitations.
That's not really true. Coal power plants can ramp load relatively quickly, generally around 1-2% of capacity per minute. Aside from slightly increased maintenance costs, they can easily run at 25-30% at night and ramp up in the morning. The issue is that they can't be started and stopped easily.
Nuclear power plants are a different story. They do have strict operating limitations, but the driving factor is economic- they have large fixed costs, but very low fuel or variable operation costs. Therefore it doesn't make sense for them to operate at less than 100% power, since it costs approximately the same.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
China is actively researching and developing pebble bed nuclear power generation technology, and their plan is to design their future pebble-bed nuclear power plant modules that is smaller than the space provided by (decommissioned) coal power plants
Pebble bed reactors have been proven unreliable for a few reasons. The first is the graphite fuel balls cannot be reliably manufactured to consistent sizes. The second is the fuel balls get jammed in the reactor and nothing can get them to move after that.
The third is the graphite moderator tends to catch fire and we all know how that went down for Chernobyl.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The media induces panics all the time. Remember in 2011 they scaremongered about nuclear power?
You mean when the Fukushima reactors blew up, that was really elaborate scaremongering.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Can you prove it or are you just covering for your own lies WindBourne?
OK Mr smarty pants, what is the baseline amount of electricity? What month? What day? What time of day?
Then all those other days/times it isn't baseload anymore? Next hour/day/month when the usage is higher, what's the fancy name for that? It's higher than your supposed base, does it have an imaginary name too?
"Baseload" is just an imaginary name for some low amount of power that changes day to day and month to month, even hour to hour.
Just claiming authority isn't enough, we all know total incompetents at work, you claiming to work for big coal doesn't mean anything except that you are already biased to the silly notion of "baseload power".
Wind is cheaper, but in many places coal plants contracts force people to buy the coal instead, or pay the wind not to make the power. IE coal subsidies.
So 75% of the world needs to pollute less than 15% of the world, because reasons - you even listening to yourself? It's per capita or nothing, toolbag. Otherwise the Vatican, population one thousand, is free to pollute as much as much as the United States, population 320+ million.
Putting the risk of meltdowns aside entirely, nuclear power is unjustifiable based on cost alone. It costs too damn much and time to build, too damn much to maintain and operate, and too damn much to deal with the waste for tens of thousands of years. When other power sources can be rolled in in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost, with none of the risk or long long LONG term storage problems....why even.
The amount of electricity Americans use is also far in excess of other countries per capita. They need that extra wind and solar and are still behind on % of renewable energy.
Stop trying to use meaningless statistics to hide the fact America is basically the worst country for emissions, just a smaller country than some.
http://gridwatch.co.uk/
Look at the hourly average. Basically, for the UK, 20GW is more or less the minimum which can be matched by baseload generation. It will pretty much never go below 19.
Thermal storage using water is big and expensive
Half right. It is big, but it is not expensive. Turns out water is cheap.
and results in more energy usage, not less.
Slightly more; depending on exactly how you use it. It can actually be more efficient, if the air conditioning peak is spread out over a longer time, or less efficient if you're narrowing it down over a shorter time span. Not actually a big effect, though.
It does offset the afternoon peak demand in exchange for more energy consumption at night, which saves money by increasing the use factor for those big, base-load power plants.
That's also a possible use for thermal storage, yes. Different from the one I mentioned. That application is one of the cases where the thermal storage approach is actually more efficient than using air conditioning when you need it (by running at night, you reject heat at lower temperature.) But, again, the difference is in most cases small.
Unfortunately, that is just the opposite of what you want if you're generating with photovoltaics.
No, it's exactly the same: you run when energy is cheap, instead of when energy is expensive. The time of day that energy is cheap will depend on your energy source (9am to 3 pm for solar, midnight to 6am for coal), but the basic concept, that the price of energy depends on time of day, so you use thermal storage to use the cheap energy, is the same.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"They should import solar from sunny places like Spain."
Yeah, well, someone forgot to tell Germany what Germans should do. Are you German? Probably not. Maybe you should get on that.
There are advantages and disadvantages to every energy production system. Germany has opted for a lot of solar and they don't GAF what your opinion of the merits of that choice are. If you import power from Spain there are a couple of things to consider:
1). Long distance power transmission requires transmission lines to be built and there are transmission losses to deal with;
2). Germans don't control the power source, Spaniards do. Now Germans could pay for (and therefore own) the power source, that mostly deals with that objection. Perhaps, though, Germans simply want local control and ownership of the generation capacity. Ever think of that?
3). You are implying that solar is a non-starter because of alleged "eternal cloudiness". Solar cells work with indirect light too, but more importantly, Germany isn't some nightmare of perpetual darkness. You are ginning up an objection that simply doesn't have much connection with reality. Is France too cloudy for solar? I know, Austria and Switzerland can never hope to have solar! And don't get me started on Poland, Poland is doomed to exist in perpetual twilight! The Czech and Slovak Republics are worse, it's always midnight there!!!
4). Solar is mostly used in distributed power generation designs. Your proposal forces solar into a centralized utility model. It can be made to do so but my larger point is, maybe Germany wants solar to be distributed. You are making choices about the utility distribution model without realizing it. Or your priorities are different than German priorities. Either way, seems like Germans ought to be making those choices and not you.
Germany isn't known for bad engineering, quite the opposite in fact. So what makes you more expert than they are? Looks like nothing from where I stand.
Yes, DDT has cost millions of lives in the last 3 decades. Shame it will only save billions in the next hundred, as birds eventually perish (did you know without guano there's no ecological support for humans? Do you know why guano mining, one of the richest fertilizers, had to be stopped, as a global ecological event?)
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
This was known more than 1.5 years ago
Complete fabrication. Simple logic shows it to be a lie. The story is about capacity being restarted after being stopped. 1.5 years ago it had stopped, of else how could it be restarted?