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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."
Get it from https://www.scribd.com/document/390521673/The-Good-Censor-GOOGLE-LEAK#from_embed
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
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.
75% of the world's population should not get a pass for another 20 years while the EU/USA take all of the economic penalties.
Also, how accurate were the pollution and warming predictions by the the UN from 10 years ago.
The 'In X years, if we don't act now, there will be a crisis' headlines need some accuracy from historical predictions to be taken seriously.
Consider, the CBO budget predictions in the USA. They are little better than throwing a dart at a dartboard, yet taken seriously as if there is real news and accuracy in the predictions. I agree with the predictions, therefore it's a newsworthy crisis. I disagree with the predictions, therefore they are made up with substance to back the numbers up.
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.....
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.
Solar and wind power take orders of magnitude more material resources for the same energy output compared to nuclear.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-i-favor-nuclear-power.html
There simply is not enough industrial capacity to build out this much solar and wind in any meaningful time frame. I'm going from memory here as I can't find the source right now but as I recall the steel and concrete go towards current building of coal, natural gas, or nuclear power. To create the same energy output from wind and solar would mean taking all current steel and concrete produced now and putting it all towards just those, and we'd still not have enough to keep up with growing demand.
Could we simply double our steel and concrete production to meet this demand? I guess, since we've obviously grown our ability to produce both. Just think of the environmental impact of that though. That's a lot of digging up earth for raw materials.
There's also the data point from the graphs on that article I linked to above, the CO2 output. Wind and solar are a considerable improvement over coal and natural gas but nuclear is better yet.
Say what you will about the problems of nuclear power but they are far more easily solved than CO2 output. Safety issues of nuclear power are nothing compared to the deaths caused by industrial accidents from wind and solar. Waste problems from nuclear are far more easily solved than finding enough glass and concrete for solar and wind. Also, it's not like solar and wind don't have waste issues to solve.
When it comes to the cost of nuclear this gets back to the problems of the resources needed for wind and solar. As demand rises so do costs, you think that the costs of silicon and steel won't rise as people demand more wind and solar power? We know what the cost of materials for nuclear cost because the material needs for nuclear are the same as coal, because the material needs are nearly identical for a coal plant as they are for a nuclear power plant of the same output.
This is a basic fail of economics in the fine article for failing to consider even the most basic of needs to support such a switch from coal to wind and solar. Prices will not remain static for such wildly differing demands for materials.
Nice of China to share few technology with some Slashdot AC.
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
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.
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
Deny, deny, deny overpopulation, googles censored search engine, and the chinese spy chip in the servers.
The same sort of unimaginative, bean-counting fuckheads at TEPCO were responsible for Fukushima Daiichi.
Correction: its lack of safety...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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?