14 ms·

The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

186 points by neuralFatigue 9y ago

FussyZeus 9y ago
Coal was dead long before Trump was elected. The fact that he and the majority of the GoP continue to lack the political will to tell their people the truth does not change this. The worst victims of all of this are of course the people being told that coal is coming back, that the way that their fathers made a solid living will someday return so they continue sitting in a pit of addiction and despair, waiting for their ship to come in while the politicians get ever fatter.
- arnon 9y ago
  I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    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.
    - bdavisx 9y ago
      The real solution is how do you get the people being conned to recognize that they are being conned and quit voting for the people conning them. If there wasn't a payout (e.g. people being (re)elected), then it wouldn't be happening.
      - FussyZeus 9y ago
        I mean one could make a very similar argument between the displaced coal miners and the people who still work for a failing startup. You want to believe the good times are coming again and that desire to believe can override a lot of really good logical thinking. Americans are hopeful, it's our single greatest strength and the source of our most disastrous failings.
        iamatworknow 9y ago
        I think that comparison is a little weak. Most startups fail but some still succeed, and those working for the startups that are failing can look at the success stories and aspire to that, and it's not completely unreasonable for them to do so. Meanwhile there's no coal mining company that's booming while others flounder. The whole industry is shrinking. It'd be more like if cell phones were becoming obsolete in favor of cranial implants or something, but you were still working on a social app for Android.
        FussyZeus 9y ago
        Well I mean staying at that specific startup. Obviously the industry is fine. Maybe you really like the company, maybe you really like the coworkers, maybe the coffee's real good, maybe you just hate change. Whatever the reason that attachment can keep you at a place long after you know you should've left.
      - bryanlarsen 9y ago
        Oh, they know they're being conned, they're not stupid. It's just that they believe that both sides are conning them, and they vote for the most appealing set of lies.
        AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        Or for the side that displays some empathy along with the lies.
    - ska 9y ago
      As far as I can see everyone with half a chance for it has been conning Appalachia, or trying to, for pretty much as long as it's been recognizably a place.
  - ryanmarsh 9y ago
    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.
    - matty22 9y ago
      I grew up in West Virginia. You could not get elected in that state if you told the truth about coal jobs never coming back. So our politicians continue to pay lip service to the idea that "if we just de-regulate the coal industry, we can put WV miners back to work". I didn't grow up in the coal mining regions of the state and I've since moved away, but it is depressing watching the citizens of my home state consistently vote against their own interests due to outright fabrications and lip service paid to them by gutless politicians who lack the backbone to tell them the truth. West Virginia has a lot to offer and I do believe the people there could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they accepted the fact that coal is the past and the state needs to move forward into new industries/the future.
  - dangerlibrary 9y ago
    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.
    - shuntress 9y ago
      Why shouldn't I believe them? Assuming they are pointing to the datacenter equivalents of wind/solar/nuclear energy as the reason why datacenter use is shrinking. Edit: Did you mean to imply that Coal is not actually going away because the 'cheaper alternatives' are fake?
      - dangerlibrary 9y ago
        Wind and solar are non-starters. They're more expensive than coal and they can't cover base load. Nuclear could cover base load but is orders of magnitude more expensive (up-front) than coal. Huge investment, huge regulatory burden, huge political risk. Until recently, we hadn't built a new nuclear plant in the country for decades. [0] Coal is cheap and reliable. Always has been. What's killing coal is low, non-volatile natural gas prices from shale fracking. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/17/the-u-s-is-powering-up-its-first-new-nuclear-reactor-in-decades/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
- Tanegashima 9y ago
  Not defending Trump, but what you expect? "We are backing nuclear" "This time it will be good" Can you see a populist saying that?
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    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.
- delecti 9y ago
  I don't think they lack the political will, they just realize that paying lip service to the coal communities keeps them as their constituents, rather than letting those people come to the realization that their needs would be much better served by the other guys.
  - hjdivad 9y ago
    Isn't this point exactly what is meant by saying that they lack the political will?
    - delecti 9y ago
      I see "political will" more as the motivation to actually do things. I don't see the GOP really doing anything on the front of advancing coal, they just say they're in the coal communities' corners. In that sense, being honest or not on the subject isn't an issue of political will.
- sfifs 9y ago
  >> The fact that he and the majority of the GoP continue to lack the political will to tell their people the truth does not change this. The end incentive of a politician is to win and retain power. The means to the end this is to take popular positions and be seen to do something about issues voters care about. They're doing precisely that.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  "Coal was dead long before Trump was elected." Coal still accounts for 28% of total world energy production (behind only oil, at 31%) and about 41% of the world's electricity production (way ahead of natural gas, at about 27%). It's not going anywhere, dude.
mirko22 9y ago
More and more people are turning to Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors, like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders, If Kirk Sorensen and others are right this will revolutionize energy (and probably not just energy but mining, water desalination etc.) as we know it unlike wind or solar ever could. Natural gas and coal should die once and for all as they are as dirty as it gets. I strongly believe we are ready for truly nuclear future.
- tdb7893 9y ago
  Are there any of these types actually created yet?
  - mirko22 9y ago
    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)
- epistasis 9y ago
  "more and more" There's lots of talk, and boy would I ever love to see these actually happen! However, there's stuff that a utility can design and install toady, and there's stuff that's decade out. For nuclear, deployment of "understood" designs can take a decade, easily. The other thing about these new nuclear reactors, I don't ever hear anybody talk about them being much cheaper than current reactors. That should be one of the key selling points. They need to be cheap enough that they can run at, say, 50% capacity over the course of a day to follow the demand curve. Right now nuclear runs continuously at near maximum in order to be economical. Wind and solar are getting cheaper. Storage is getting cheaper. These new nuclear technologies don't need to compete with natural gas and coal, they need to compete with the cost in 20 years of renewables with 30%-50% of that energy getting stored. In any case, I'd love to see these technologies enter production so that we have a more diverse energy pool. But I don't think it does them any favors to pretend that they're further along than they actually are.
Mendenhall 9y ago
Was hard to get through the rhetoric and falsehoods like "When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the marginal cost of that electricity is essentially free" I read on until "The natural gas that comes out of these wells is practically free" Then I had to give up because its obvious propaganda with no real interest in the truth. I am all for clean energy, but unfactual propaganda isnt good for anyone.
- loeg 9y ago
  > When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the marginal cost of that electricity is essentially free The marginal cost for additional GW is essentially free. The marginal cost totally ignores capital cost and just involves operational costs, which are (?)nothing for solar and (?)low for wind.
- epistasis 9y ago
  Could you explain why you think that's a misrepresentation? Why do you think "essentially free" marginal renewable cost is a falsehood? The difference between lettings the electrons flow and not letting the electrons flow on an installed plant is what, exactly? That's what's being referenced. Though there's lots of data to support the article, they do leave out the cost of extracting natural gas from the "practically free" wells. What is that cost? >unfactual propaganda isnt good for anyone. As I see it, the article's thrust is true. I'd love to be proven wrong though, with some facts, if you can provide them.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelt 9y ago
    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?
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
marcgcombi 9y ago
#FakeNews title and all. This is not flamebate, so please do not flag me. I would like to point out that the average cost of production for wind was found to be $80 - $129 / MWh when you include subsidies, transmission, base load challenges, etc. From Newsweek (arguably a progressive-leaning publication): "The best estimate available for the total cost of wind power is $149 per megawatt-hour, taken from Giberson’s 2013 report." http://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480 http://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480 Also from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/wind-power-producers-find-profits-as-elusive-as-a-summer-breeze https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/wind-powe...
- phaemon 9y ago
  From the Newsweek link: "Editor's note: The author of this piece, Randy Simmons, is the Charles G. Koch professor of political economy at Utah State University. He's also a senior fellow at the Koch- and ExxonMobil-funded Property and Environment Research Center. These ties to the oil industry weren't originally disclosed in this piece. " Might have known as soon as you used the "#FakeNews" tag...
strictnein 9y ago
I'm glad we're leaving a lot of coal in the ground, but for different reasons. If society as a whole ever slides backwards (due to global war, horrific disease, etc), it leaves a lot of fairly easily extractable energy for the future generation that survives. Dark way of looking at it, I know.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lettergram 9y ago
  There are actually things like peat moss[1], which are a semi-renewable energy, which I see being far more useful in a "dark age" scenario. Not to say, it's not good to keep coal in the ground for the same reason. Just thought I would share another tid-bit lol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphagnum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphagnum
  - derefr 9y ago
    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.
    - FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
      True, but the condensed energy of fossil fuels would allow for tansportation and communication between otherwise isolated settlements, and greatly increase mining efficiency. As I recall the first steam engine was used to clear out leaded mines using steam pressure. Keeping existing people networked together allows for the exchange of people, ideas, services, goods, etc, drastically accelerating development
philipkglass 9y ago
Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can't reverse it. Investors in new generating plants expect them to operate for decades. The regulatory pendulum is going to swing back against coal within a decade. The optimal thing to do if you own an old coal plant is to run it as much as you profitably can right now, don't invest in major upgrades for the future, and be ready to scrap it whenever the EPA resumes actually protecting the environment. The Chekhov's gun waiting to go off in electricity demand is electric vehicles. When they become a non-trivial part of transportation they'll be the biggest new demand driver for electricity in two generations. Hopefully they'll arrive in a big way shortly after the big wave of coal retirements is finished; otherwise they could keep marginal coal units lingering for a while longer.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  >>Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can't reverse it. He doesn't want to reverse it. He doesn't give a shit about coal. He only wants their votes, and the votes of similar industries who will view him as a defender of old-school industry.
  - keebEz 9y ago
    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...
    - WalterSear 9y ago
      This isn't about the votes from coal miners. It's about what coal stands for in the minds of rural white voters.
      - yessql 9y ago
        Exactly right. Coal mining as a job has declined much more than coal as fuel. It's just easier to blame regulations and outsourcing than to admit that people can't compete with machines in energy production and manufacturing.
Animats 9y ago
Well over 40% of US electricity is still from coal. Despite all the hype, renewables other than hydroelectric are only 3% in the US. What's driving energy prices is cheap natural gas. Natural gas is cheap to extract and can be extracted fast. But after a while, it's all gone. Britain's North Sea Gas boom is over.[1] Gas fields also drop off faster than oil fields. The cheap natural gas boom won't last forever. It's created the illusion that the energy problem is over. Nuclear is discouraging. After Fukushima, nuclear plants are scary. Fukushima was a reasonably good plant which got hit by a larger than expected tsunami and lost site power. That was enough to cause a major disaster. Nuclear now looks like a technology where every decade or two you lose a city. The small-nuclear enthusiasts are a bit scary; some argue they need fewer safety precautions because their reactors can't melt down. What could possibly go wrong? Big, expensive containment vessels are a good thing; when Three Mile Island failed, the containment held it in. Battery technology will help. Wind and solar are intermittent, and can't carry too much of the load until there's more storage. But it's going to take a lot of batteries. [1] http://www.crystolenergy.com/assessing-future-north-sea-oil-gas/ http://www.crystolenergy.com/assessing-future-north-sea-oil-...
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Natural gas is great as an energy that can be used "on demand", combined with wind and solar, there is a lot of synergy (use NG when wind and solar can't meet demand). We could build out renewables so that we don't deplete NG for just routine energy uses.
  - kkylin 9y ago
    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.
- cagenut 9y ago
mrfusion 9y ago
Solar appears to be on an exponential. If true, no one is prepared for where that will take us in just two to four years!
jankotek 9y ago
The coal is waiting on hot standby when wind stops blowing and there is no sunlight. Until there is battery technology which can replace powerplant, coal is not going anywhere.
xutopia 9y ago
I disagree with the metrics here. In the US Hydro power is not considered renewable yet it powers roughly a third of Canadians. Quebec's Hydro Power also powers a large part of New York, Vermont and Massachusetts.
- pc2g4d 9y ago
  I think they're focused on newly-built renewables rather than hydroelectric which was built decades ago by massive government subsidy and seems unlikely to see real expansion given environmental concerns re: fish spawning, etc.
  - snowwindwaves 9y ago
    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/documents/corporate/independent-power-producers-calls-for-power/independent-power-producers/ipp-supply-map.pdf https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...
finid 9y ago
And yet his energy plan is to cut regulations to resuscitate the one sector that’s never coming back: coal. Wait! Hold it right there! Are you trying to tell me that "clean coal" is not coming back? </sarcasm>

186 points by neuralFatigue 9y ago

Coal was dead long before Trump was elected. The fact that he and the majority of the GoP continue to lack the political will to tell their people the truth does not change this. The worst victims of all of this are of course the people being told that coal is coming back, that the way that their fathers made a solid living will someday return so they continue sitting in a pit of addiction and despair, waiting for their ship to come in while the politicians get ever fatter.

arnon 9y ago
I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  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.
  - bdavisx 9y ago
    The real solution is how do you get the people being conned to recognize that they are being conned and quit voting for the people conning them. If there wasn't a payout (e.g. people being (re)elected), then it wouldn't be happening.
    - FussyZeus 9y ago
      I mean one could make a very similar argument between the displaced coal miners and the people who still work for a failing startup. You want to believe the good times are coming again and that desire to believe can override a lot of really good logical thinking. Americans are hopeful, it's our single greatest strength and the source of our most disastrous failings.
      - iamatworknow 9y ago
        I think that comparison is a little weak. Most startups fail but some still succeed, and those working for the startups that are failing can look at the success stories and aspire to that, and it's not completely unreasonable for them to do so. Meanwhile there's no coal mining company that's booming while others flounder. The whole industry is shrinking. It'd be more like if cell phones were becoming obsolete in favor of cranial implants or something, but you were still working on a social app for Android.
        FussyZeus 9y ago
        Well I mean staying at that specific startup. Obviously the industry is fine. Maybe you really like the company, maybe you really like the coworkers, maybe the coffee's real good, maybe you just hate change. Whatever the reason that attachment can keep you at a place long after you know you should've left.
    - bryanlarsen 9y ago
      Oh, they know they're being conned, they're not stupid. It's just that they believe that both sides are conning them, and they vote for the most appealing set of lies.
      - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        Or for the side that displays some empathy along with the lies.
  - ska 9y ago
    As far as I can see everyone with half a chance for it has been conning Appalachia, or trying to, for pretty much as long as it's been recognizably a place.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  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.
  - matty22 9y ago
    I grew up in West Virginia. You could not get elected in that state if you told the truth about coal jobs never coming back. So our politicians continue to pay lip service to the idea that "if we just de-regulate the coal industry, we can put WV miners back to work". I didn't grow up in the coal mining regions of the state and I've since moved away, but it is depressing watching the citizens of my home state consistently vote against their own interests due to outright fabrications and lip service paid to them by gutless politicians who lack the backbone to tell them the truth. West Virginia has a lot to offer and I do believe the people there could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they accepted the fact that coal is the past and the state needs to move forward into new industries/the future.
- dangerlibrary 9y ago
  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.
  - shuntress 9y ago
    Why shouldn't I believe them? Assuming they are pointing to the datacenter equivalents of wind/solar/nuclear energy as the reason why datacenter use is shrinking. Edit: Did you mean to imply that Coal is not actually going away because the 'cheaper alternatives' are fake?
    - dangerlibrary 9y ago
      Wind and solar are non-starters. They're more expensive than coal and they can't cover base load. Nuclear could cover base load but is orders of magnitude more expensive (up-front) than coal. Huge investment, huge regulatory burden, huge political risk. Until recently, we hadn't built a new nuclear plant in the country for decades. [0] Coal is cheap and reliable. Always has been. What's killing coal is low, non-volatile natural gas prices from shale fracking. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/17/the-u-s-is-powering-up-its-first-new-nuclear-reactor-in-decades/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
Tanegashima 9y ago
Not defending Trump, but what you expect? "We are backing nuclear" "This time it will be good" Can you see a populist saying that?
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  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.
delecti 9y ago
I don't think they lack the political will, they just realize that paying lip service to the coal communities keeps them as their constituents, rather than letting those people come to the realization that their needs would be much better served by the other guys.
- hjdivad 9y ago
  Isn't this point exactly what is meant by saying that they lack the political will?
  - delecti 9y ago
    I see "political will" more as the motivation to actually do things. I don't see the GOP really doing anything on the front of advancing coal, they just say they're in the coal communities' corners. In that sense, being honest or not on the subject isn't an issue of political will.
sfifs 9y ago
>> The fact that he and the majority of the GoP continue to lack the political will to tell their people the truth does not change this. The end incentive of a politician is to win and retain power. The means to the end this is to take popular positions and be seen to do something about issues voters care about. They're doing precisely that.
Turing_Machine 9y ago
"Coal was dead long before Trump was elected." Coal still accounts for 28% of total world energy production (behind only oil, at 31%) and about 41% of the world's electricity production (way ahead of natural gas, at about 27%). It's not going anywhere, dude.

mirko22 9y ago

More and more people are turning to Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors, like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders, If Kirk Sorensen and others are right this will revolutionize energy (and probably not just energy but mining, water desalination etc.) as we know it unlike wind or solar ever could. Natural gas and coal should die once and for all as they are as dirty as it gets. I strongly believe we are ready for truly nuclear future.

tdb7893 9y ago
Are there any of these types actually created yet?
- mirko22 9y ago
  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)
epistasis 9y ago
"more and more" There's lots of talk, and boy would I ever love to see these actually happen! However, there's stuff that a utility can design and install toady, and there's stuff that's decade out. For nuclear, deployment of "understood" designs can take a decade, easily. The other thing about these new nuclear reactors, I don't ever hear anybody talk about them being much cheaper than current reactors. That should be one of the key selling points. They need to be cheap enough that they can run at, say, 50% capacity over the course of a day to follow the demand curve. Right now nuclear runs continuously at near maximum in order to be economical. Wind and solar are getting cheaper. Storage is getting cheaper. These new nuclear technologies don't need to compete with natural gas and coal, they need to compete with the cost in 20 years of renewables with 30%-50% of that energy getting stored. In any case, I'd love to see these technologies enter production so that we have a more diverse energy pool. But I don't think it does them any favors to pretend that they're further along than they actually are.

Mendenhall 9y ago

Was hard to get through the rhetoric and falsehoods like "When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the marginal cost of that electricity is essentially free" I read on until "The natural gas that comes out of these wells is practically free" Then I had to give up because its obvious propaganda with no real interest in the truth. I am all for clean energy, but unfactual propaganda isnt good for anyone.

loeg 9y ago
> When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the marginal cost of that electricity is essentially free The marginal cost for additional GW is essentially free. The marginal cost totally ignores capital cost and just involves operational costs, which are (?)nothing for solar and (?)low for wind.
epistasis 9y ago
Could you explain why you think that's a misrepresentation? Why do you think "essentially free" marginal renewable cost is a falsehood? The difference between lettings the electrons flow and not letting the electrons flow on an installed plant is what, exactly? That's what's being referenced. Though there's lots of data to support the article, they do leave out the cost of extracting natural gas from the "practically free" wells. What is that cost? >unfactual propaganda isnt good for anyone. As I see it, the article's thrust is true. I'd love to be proven wrong though, with some facts, if you can provide them.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelt 9y ago
  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?
  - Dylan16807 9y ago

marcgcombi 9y ago

#FakeNews title and all. This is not flamebate, so please do not flag me. I would like to point out that the average cost of production for wind was found to be $80 - $129 / MWh when you include subsidies, transmission, base load challenges, etc. From Newsweek (arguably a progressive-leaning publication): "The best estimate available for the total cost of wind power is $149 per megawatt-hour, taken from Giberson’s 2013 report." http://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480 http://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480 Also from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/wind-power-producers-find-profits-as-elusive-as-a-summer-breeze https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/wind-powe...

phaemon 9y ago
From the Newsweek link: "Editor's note: The author of this piece, Randy Simmons, is the Charles G. Koch professor of political economy at Utah State University. He's also a senior fellow at the Koch- and ExxonMobil-funded Property and Environment Research Center. These ties to the oil industry weren't originally disclosed in this piece. " Might have known as soon as you used the "#FakeNews" tag...

strictnein 9y ago

I'm glad we're leaving a lot of coal in the ground, but for different reasons. If society as a whole ever slides backwards (due to global war, horrific disease, etc), it leaves a lot of fairly easily extractable energy for the future generation that survives. Dark way of looking at it, I know.

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lettergram 9y ago
There are actually things like peat moss[1], which are a semi-renewable energy, which I see being far more useful in a "dark age" scenario. Not to say, it's not good to keep coal in the ground for the same reason. Just thought I would share another tid-bit lol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphagnum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphagnum
- derefr 9y ago
  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.
  - FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
    True, but the condensed energy of fossil fuels would allow for tansportation and communication between otherwise isolated settlements, and greatly increase mining efficiency. As I recall the first steam engine was used to clear out leaded mines using steam pressure. Keeping existing people networked together allows for the exchange of people, ideas, services, goods, etc, drastically accelerating development

philipkglass 9y ago

Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can't reverse it. Investors in new generating plants expect them to operate for decades. The regulatory pendulum is going to swing back against coal within a decade. The optimal thing to do if you own an old coal plant is to run it as much as you profitably can right now, don't invest in major upgrades for the future, and be ready to scrap it whenever the EPA resumes actually protecting the environment. The Chekhov's gun waiting to go off in electricity demand is electric vehicles. When they become a non-trivial part of transportation they'll be the biggest new demand driver for electricity in two generations. Hopefully they'll arrive in a big way shortly after the big wave of coal retirements is finished; otherwise they could keep marginal coal units lingering for a while longer.

enraged_camel 9y ago
>>Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can't reverse it. He doesn't want to reverse it. He doesn't give a shit about coal. He only wants their votes, and the votes of similar industries who will view him as a defender of old-school industry.
- keebEz 9y ago
  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...
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    This isn't about the votes from coal miners. It's about what coal stands for in the minds of rural white voters.
    - yessql 9y ago
      Exactly right. Coal mining as a job has declined much more than coal as fuel. It's just easier to blame regulations and outsourcing than to admit that people can't compete with machines in energy production and manufacturing.

Animats 9y ago

Well over 40% of US electricity is still from coal. Despite all the hype, renewables other than hydroelectric are only 3% in the US. What's driving energy prices is cheap natural gas. Natural gas is cheap to extract and can be extracted fast. But after a while, it's all gone. Britain's North Sea Gas boom is over.[1] Gas fields also drop off faster than oil fields. The cheap natural gas boom won't last forever. It's created the illusion that the energy problem is over. Nuclear is discouraging. After Fukushima, nuclear plants are scary. Fukushima was a reasonably good plant which got hit by a larger than expected tsunami and lost site power. That was enough to cause a major disaster. Nuclear now looks like a technology where every decade or two you lose a city. The small-nuclear enthusiasts are a bit scary; some argue they need fewer safety precautions because their reactors can't melt down. What could possibly go wrong? Big, expensive containment vessels are a good thing; when Three Mile Island failed, the containment held it in. Battery technology will help. Wind and solar are intermittent, and can't carry too much of the load until there's more storage. But it's going to take a lot of batteries. [1] http://www.crystolenergy.com/assessing-future-north-sea-oil-gas/ http://www.crystolenergy.com/assessing-future-north-sea-oil-...

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Natural gas is great as an energy that can be used "on demand", combined with wind and solar, there is a lot of synergy (use NG when wind and solar can't meet demand). We could build out renewables so that we don't deplete NG for just routine energy uses.
- kkylin 9y ago
  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.
cagenut 9y ago

mrfusion 9y ago

Solar appears to be on an exponential. If true, no one is prepared for where that will take us in just two to four years!

jankotek 9y ago

The coal is waiting on hot standby when wind stops blowing and there is no sunlight. Until there is battery technology which can replace powerplant, coal is not going anywhere.

xutopia 9y ago

I disagree with the metrics here. In the US Hydro power is not considered renewable yet it powers roughly a third of Canadians. Quebec's Hydro Power also powers a large part of New York, Vermont and Massachusetts.

pc2g4d 9y ago
I think they're focused on newly-built renewables rather than hydroelectric which was built decades ago by massive government subsidy and seems unlikely to see real expansion given environmental concerns re: fish spawning, etc.
- snowwindwaves 9y ago
  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/documents/corporate/independent-power-producers-calls-for-power/independent-power-producers/ipp-supply-map.pdf https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...

finid 9y ago

And yet his energy plan is to cut regulations to resuscitate the one sector that’s never coming back: coal. Wait! Hold it right there! Are you trying to tell me that "clean coal" is not coming back? </sarcasm>