Comments on: Coal Is On Its Way Out

By: eastvillagechick

eastvillagechick — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 15:45:00 +0000

this:

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/09/28/5-7-trillion-worth-renewables-added-grid-costs/

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 17:15:00 +0000

A natural gas turbine has a lower capex than any other type of generation. And they are quick to install along with easier to site than pump-up hydro.
The price of gas generation is higher than wind, but it’s not likely higher than stored wind (the cost of wind-electricity plus the cost of storage).

The ‘what we use’ decisions will be driven mostly by cost. As long as we put no price on carbon utilities will, generally, use gas turbines over more expensive storage.

By: AegysLTS

AegysLTS — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 16:48:00 +0000

Its quite unlikely for gas to play complementary role for intermittent problem considering the money put in for a turbine and the cheap gas, utilities would want to extract the most at the lowest cost. I do think pump hydro will be an excellent idea.

Natural gas may be cheap for now because it is domestically produce and domestically consumed, once exports start, the price will go up, thats a different story though….

Its true that many of our factories produce plenty of waste heat, and the industries is moving too slow to adopt waste recovery equipment even though we now have plenty of manufacturers producing Organic Rankine Cycle equipment. Waiting for federal incentives perhaps?

By: AegysLTS

AegysLTS — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 16:42:00 +0000

Fossil fuel

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 16:10:00 +0000

Natural gas.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 16:09:00 +0000

We install more wind and solar. Push gas from an ‘always on’ role to one of filling in around wind and solar (which produce a lot more hours than I suspect you assume). We also use hydro, load-shifting and the 21 GW of storage we have to fill in the gaps.

That will take care of things for several years. We’re only at about 5% wind and solar on our grids. We can take that percentage to 30% to 50% (grids differ) before we will need grid storage.

In the meantime we will be adding more EVs and PHEVs which allow an even higher penetration of variable renewables.

In the years we have before we need large scale storage we’ll likely have much better options than we do now, but we could go with what we have and be fine.

Plus, it looks like we’re on route to reduce demand by 10% to 20% via efficiency.

Efficiency could replace half of the coal we burn.

By: tmac1

tmac1 — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 10:56:00 +0000

Peat, wood, whale blubber,coal.

Next????

By: JimBouton

JimBouton — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 08:29:00 +0000

I don’t think the plan is to shut down all of the coal all at once. The idea is that as we retire some of the older plants that we will replace those with renewables. I would think that even if we could keep a building 5 GWs of renewable every year that we could make a pretty good dent into the coal percentage. With efficiency, we continue to march in the right direction.

By: Aegys87

Aegys87 — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 07:58:00 +0000

There’s no such thing as “clean coal”, its an oxymoron. The latest generation coal power plant may be relatively ‘clean’, but the mine isn’t.

But I do have a burning question though, coal still represent a whopping percentage of our energy mix, if we were to shut down all the coal, what are we replacing them with?

Wind and solar still have a loooong way to go before it can fulfill our need, that is without considering demand going up. I’m not a fan of hydro, as it means sinking entire counties. Not pro-nuclear nor gas either, just pro-arithmetic, the numbers have to add up.

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 01:06:00 +0000

Ain’t going to miss you when your gone.

By: JamesWimberley

JamesWimberley — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 23:28:00 +0000

The coal industry has for years been hiding behind the ¨CCS someday¨ bluff. Now Obama has called it. There is no working CCS solution. Goodbye coal, about time.