The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It (opens in new tab)

> Sorry if this is nitpicky but fyi, coal in 2016 was almost exactly 40%, not 'well over'

Grandparent post was just missing a comma:

"Well, over 40% of US electricity is still from coal"

"Wind and solar and batteries are awesome, but even in very optimistic case scenarios we need an alternative to coal and the temporary surge of natgas to handle baseload between here and ~2040. It should be nuclear, but, sigh. "

Wind and solar's bigger problem isn't really the intermittency of availability of electricity, it's the distribution of availability. It needs a more sophisticated grid. America's grid operators (who also own generators) would be shooting themselves in the foot by upgrading the grid since renewables eat into their bottom line (they want to sell natgas/coal/nuclear electricity, not buy solar from your rooftop or set up windfarms that makes a razor thin profit...).

Utility operator lobbyists thus have a marked tendency to overstate the problem of renewable intermittency.

Nuclear is cost competitive with solar and wind but it's only cost competitive if the liability is capped. Remove the liability cap and mandate that nuclear insurance cover the cost of a Fukushima style cleanup and there's no point in ever building a plant ever again. Whereas if you remove all the tariffs (e.g. things like the 40% solar import taxes) and subsidies, renewable prices probably wouldn't change all that much.

Data on national scale, like the eia stuff you link to, is vital to understanding and debate.

What I realize I don't understand is the meaning of "Generation at Utility Scale Facilities" in the header of the table. What does this exclude and how meaningful is the exclusion?

According to the table, net generation at utility scale has decreased 10% over the last decade. How much of that is driven by non-utility scale generation versus decreased energy usage? (Alternatively non-utility scale generation has outpaced total growth in energy use - I'm ignorant of total consumption data so I don't know what is really going on).

Either way, the numbers do seem to suggest a case for new nuclear generation overall.

> But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three.

Currently our known natural gas reserves will last over a century. And we're still finding vast new pockets of it:

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Massive-Natural-Gas-D...

>...But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three.

Citation? Unfortunately it looks like there are large proven reserves of natural gas:

>...The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that as of January 1, 2014, there were about 2,474 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of technically recoverable resources of dry natural gas in the United States. At the rate of U.S. dry natural gas consumption in 2014 of about 26.6 Tcf per year, the United States has enough natural gas to last about 93 years.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=58&t=8

It is unfortunate because for those who care about climate change, there are inevitable methane releases from fracking and from distribution of natural gas and those are now known to be much worse for the atmosphere than previously thought:

>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...

As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947

>...It should be nuclear, but, sigh.

Yea, nuclear has so far been the safest form of base load power we have ever used. Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. What if the Alison Canyon was a nuclear storage site (instead of a natural gas storage site) and 11,000 people had to be evacuated - how much would the media have covered that? Another recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. I can't blame some for being afraid of nuclear power, but there are many who should know better.

Oklahoma is getting some answers. Try their interactive earthquake map. Look at earthquakes in 2016 vs 2010 vs the 1980s. They show disposal wells on the same map. The big problem is not the fracking injection itself, but disposal wells for all the waste fluid involved.

[1] https://earthquakes.ok.gov/what-we-know/earthquake-map/

My impression (from talking to engineers at my local electric utility here in the southwest US) is exactly that: renewables can be unpredictable, and not always available when demand is high. NG generators, unlike coal or nuclear, are relatively easy to spin up on demand. (Perhaps someone more knowledgeable out there could fill in details.)

I do think there are many experiments with different storage technologies to smooth out supply, so this particular advantage of NG could change in the next few years.

Too geography dependent, and we will probably never build another large hydro project because of the environmental impacts.

Not the OP, but usually hydro is excluded because it's "old renewable" and most potential sources have already been developed.

Same could be said for solar? The sunbelt is/was heavy on coal for energy production. Solar is a great fit for the sunbelt. The federal government subsidizing solar adoption is a direct transfer of money to southern states as well as a direct negative on WV/WY economies.

What is the relative value of marginal votes from those different areas...

I think that wind is a great fit for EV charging already. Wind power output tends to be higher in the middle of the night, when other kinds of electrical demand are lower and EVs are mostly parked and plugged in. Using EVs to absorb daytime solar peak output would require more work, like getting lots of charger ports in parking garages and parking lots.

I'd love it if you could point me to a source quantifying how much electrical energy from the grid refineries use. Refineries expend a lot of energy turning crude into motor fuel but AFAICT most of that is made by consuming some of the input crude itself (for hydrogen and process heat). None of the citations I've found so far for high refinery energy use quantify the electrical demand they pull from the grid. So while I'm sure that reduced oil refinery use will lower primary energy use I'm not sure how much electrical demand it will free up.

peat extraction is extremely harmful to the environment due to large amounts of carbondioxide and methane released by the extraction process. Calling it "semi-renewable" is highly misleading. It's a really destructive source of energy.

(As far as I'm aware most peat extraction happens not for energy usage, but for gardening and agricultural use - but the harm is the same.)

If we only need to power a dark-age "amount" of technology, windmills and water-wheels (or small hydroelectric dams if you're lucky in choice-of-location) would cover more than enough, no? And it's not like any of those are hard to build, or require any advanced principles; they get more efficient as your tech-base improves, but people living on frontiers in the 1800s were knocking them together for their family homes as soon as electricity became a thing that anyone had any use for.

And that's assuming we don't still have access to, say, the hardcopy US Patent filing records. You could get very far indeed with basic metalworking + modern knowledge of the optimal energy-collecting shapes for rotor blades.

Have you ever seen a large peat moss power plant? Ireland has some. They're gross polluters.

Most of the dissemination is digital, which isn't so helpful if there is anything that kills power supplies. Saving coal might be a good part of a global disaster recovery plan, but I think we'll need the whole plan before we can really tell if it is a useful part of one.

That falls under "rhetoric" the author takes a small unit of time "when sun is shining and wind is blowing" to then use the word "free". Thats cherry picking to the extreme and rhetoric 101. It is used to paint a picture that does not really exist. What happens to solar and wind when its night and the wind is still? By cherry picking and creating a scene which doesnt truly exist it paints a false picture of the efficiency of solar at this moment. Hence why I used "rhetoric".

I could also say that is a falsehood in the practicle sense because of what it left out but that wasnt my original intention. My falsehood statement was to include the part about shale which since shale fields are limited its simply not true.

We could further get into UV rays breakin down solar panels etc but that really wasnt my point. I dont expect people to see the rhetoric and falsehoods used in this article but it stood out to me like a sore thumb so I commented.

Nor was I somehow saying save coal or coal is more efficient etc. It was only a comment on the rhetoric and falshoods I saw in a very short span of words.

  Why do you think "essentially free" marginal
  renewable cost is a falsehood?

Unless you can control the sun, the cost for one extra kilowatt of solar power is the cost of a 1kw solar panel?

"You can have an equivalent in solar, wind + storage in less than three years."

A nuclear power plant can crank out 5 gigawatts.

There aren't any solar or wind plants of that capacity that were constructed in any amount of time, much less three years.

Solar and wind weren't all that practical until relatively recently (the past five years or so?). If you've been following this stuff a long time, nuclear really was the one hope for getting away from fossil fuels. It takes a long time for people's thinking to readjust once something like that changes.

I've noticed that too, and though I think there's maybe a tiny bit of wanting to counteract the public perception of nuclear as more dangerous than other sources, I think that it probably has other tech related ambitions.

Science fiction commonly has nuclear reactors at the core of energy for space travel. For extremely long hauls it's compact in terms of volume and weight. As far as I can tell.

So nuclear has a history of being the "future." So tech-related people like it for that reason. We're not going to get personal jet-cars for transit either, most likely. But there's that hint of a dream in tech culture.

Any reasonable carbon-neutral energy plan that I've seen uses at least a bit of nuclear. It won't be the backbone, and it's unlikely that its performance characteristics or cost will change much, but the rest of the century will likely see a consistent amount of nuclear energy, given the longevity of existing reactors.

"I wonder why the tech community has this infatuation with nuclear power."

Because it works.

"Yeah, and fusion is just around the corner..."

Fusion probably would have been if funding for nuclear fusion research had been kept at the same level as it was in the 70s. It took a deep dive after that though for reasons which most people can probably guess.

A new generation of students who grow up doing math in VR will solve the plasma containment geometry problem, which is one of the major fusion hurdles.

One was created in 1960 and ran for 5 years but was shut down under Nixon administration due to various unrelated reasons.

But it was not creating fuel itself and it had some issue with corrosion which would have been fixed. There was not one built since and a lot of documentation was lost but luckily saved by NASA.

In last 10 years more and more people are working on them, specially India and China but also USA (Bill Gates is working on similar thing among others)

Isn't this point exactly what is meant by saying that they lack the political will?

For about a century, coal has been the cheapest, most reliable fuel for utility-scale power generation. For most of the eastern seaboard, coal has only been supplanted by natural gas (slowly) over the last ten years. Competing fuel price fluctuations dictated the change. Natural gas prices before fracking were both higher and much more volatile. There have been periods of ebb and flow that many workers and their families have managed to "wait out" in the past.

Further, if you've lived your entire life in a coal town, the sheer scale of the plants, mines, railroads, and other infrastructure can make them seem permanent, reliable. It is very difficult to imagine so much specialized infrastructure simply ... going away.

Imagine if you had spent your entire life as a datacenter tech, as had your father. You knew the business inside and out, understood the network of suppliers, the customers, the hardware, everything. You've gotten into arguments about different rack configurations and which you prefer to work on. This is your career. You got into this business because it would provide a stable life for you and your family, and you were damn good at it. Then people started telling you that we would no longer need datacenters - at all - in 5 years because there were now cheaper, better alternatives. You wouldn't believe them.

You should talk to some folks involved in economic development who have experience with politics and attitudes in W. Virginia. What I've heard is the coal lobby still has the most money and power and politicians are behaving in a short sighted manner in order to appease coal and protect themselves. It would take a lot of courage and political capital to burn (no pun intended) to tell the truth to the state about the future of coal. It's part hope part cronyism.

W. Virginians are notoriously undereducated. So it will take a while but eventually the truth will be known and a day of reckoning will come.

To be fair my undereducated family in neighboring rural Virginia truly believed Trump "will bring the jobs back". They were aghast when I showed them a video of Tim Cook on 60 minutes explaining that those (manufacturing) jobs aren't coming back.

You have the luxury of not depending on it coming back in order to earn a living again.

I'm not saying it's a good thing they believe it, I'm saying the conned is still the victim: it's the conartist that should be punished, and the GOP has been conning Appalachia for decades.

Trump is really a bad example, I don't think he believes most of what he says, he just says what he thinks people want to hear. In that way he's less to blame, he's guilty because he used it as a convenient way to score points.

The ones truly complicit in the Great Lie know who they are, and I have a feeling their day of judgement is closer than they want to believe.

In British Columbia over 50 new hydro electric plants have been built in the last 30 years by private industry. People may say they are subsidized since they often get $100/MWH for the first 30 years of operation but that is the price that must be offered to mobilize investment and it isn't much higher than the projected construction cost from the site C dam which would have much better economies of scale and the Construction cost doesn't include the 30 years of studies and consultation BC hydro did whereas that is covered by the 100$/MWH for the private hydro plants.

Here is a list of Independent power producers in BC https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...