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Xcel Energy Says It Will Close Two Coal-Fired Power Plants a Decade Early
- Causality1 7y agoGood, leave it in the ground where it belongs. Here in the US coal plant closures are more due to the rise of natural gas plants rather than renewables, but even natural gas only has half the carbon emissions and doesn't produce toxic coal ash.
- jpollock 7y agoAmerican coal won't stay in the ground any more than Australia's does. There are plenty of coal burning power plants in the world, and while it may not be economic to burn it for electricity in the US, there are countries which import a lot of coal. https://www.worldcoal.org/coal/coal-market-pricing https://www.worldcoal.org/coal/coal-market-pricing
- Brakenshire 7y agoWe have many hundreds of years of reserves, coal will certainly cease as a source of electricity before the reserves are used up. Many of those reserves are held as assets on the books of multinational coal mining companies. Just look at the stock prices for those companies and the rolling process of bankruptcies to see the market judgment of the value of those assets, and the demand for coal in the immediate future.
- duxup 7y agoAmerican coal mining companies seem to be cutting back or shutting down as it is. I'm not sure what the long term outlook is for them.
- zrobotics 7y agoSpeaking as someone who has recently driven through the powder river basin in WY, there is definitely coal that is staying in the ground. Mining co's are going bankrupt, and are cutting jobs and production; this is a severe enough reduction that the BNSF railway is also suffering in the area due to decreased tonnage exported.
- pastor_elm 7y agoEnvironmentalists should buy the coal, artificially inflate the price, and store it permanently so it never gets burned.
- esarbe 7y agoThat would just increase demand, raising prices only until the coal mining companies caught up with their production. No, the only solution is to get away from coal consumption.
- Causality1 7y agoEven so, and I may be a selfish bastard for saying it, but I'd rather they poison their rivers and groundwater with containment pool breaches and toxic runoff than we poison ours.
- janj 7y agoNatural gas might not be much of an improvement. A leak rate of greater than 3% could potentially be more destructive to the green house effect than burning coal. http://theconversation.com/the-us-natural-gas-industry-is-leaking-way-more-methane-than-previously-thought-heres-why-that-matters-98918 http://theconversation.com/the-us-natural-gas-industry-is-le...
- space_fountain 7y agoIt falls put of the atmosphere a lot faster than CO2 though right?
- janj 7y agoI believe that is right. I'd recommend Falter, it covers a lot of ground, including this piece. https://www.amazon.com/Falter-Human-Game-Begun-Itself/dp/1250178266 https://www.amazon.com/Falter-Human-Game-Begun-Itself/dp/125...
- mac01021 7y agoIt actually decays into CO2 in the atmosphere and then that CO2 remains there for the normal period of time.
- Symmetry 7y agoYeah, the half life is somewhere between 10 to 15 years.
- opo 7y agoFor the first 2 decades or so, methane is about 86 times worse than CO2: >While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2. >In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. >But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential (GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC. >There is no scientific reason to prefer a 100-year time horizon over a 20-year time horizon; the choice of GWP100 is simply a matter of convention. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-greenhouse-gas-is-methane/?redirect=1 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...
- atonse 7y agoImagine how much faster we'd go if we actually had the help of the federal government (via grants, etc) instead of fighting these utilities tooth and nail and forcing them to make these upgrades under court settlements and to wait until they haven't exhausted every penny of profits before moving to renewable energy?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mschaef 7y ago> wait until they haven't exhausted every penny of profits before moving to renewable energy? XCel is a regulated energy company. Their profits are defined by their state regulators and they are granted a right to a specific rate of return through the regulation process.
- dclowd9901 7y agoThere's not even case here for Greenpeace style bootstomping. a Green New Deal legislation could redirect funds from carbon taxes back into renewable energy reinvestment, turning an externality into a mechanism to fund the cleaning of that externality. Hell, the very companies that would be paying that tax could turn around and open their own renewable energy arms and take that money right back as reinvestment. I don't know why this wouldn't get bipartisan support.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y agoWould that be before or after all planes are grounded and every building in the US is retrofitted or rebuilt to be more energy efficient in ten years?
- frankbreetz 7y agoDo you have a source for all planes being grounded? And retro fitted can mean a whole spectrum of things from very cheap things to very expensive things.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoThis was a legal settlement to shutdown two old coal plants earlier than expected so they could buy a large natural gas plant. With the promise that they will build solar and wind too. But keep the coal plants on the books until 2035-2037, but I expect the truth of the matter is those plants would be cost ineffective by then anyhow. A lot could change in their plans. I only read the legal page briefly but my guess is if you are looking at this as entirely Hope and Change, you should probably be more a little more skeptical.
- josefresco 7y agoLinked legal agreement: https://www.eenews.net/assets/2019/05/21/document_ew_01.pdf https://www.eenews.net/assets/2019/05/21/document_ew_01.pdf
- mschaef 7y agoGermany made a similar announcement recently, and I have the same questions here as for there. Although there has been progress to use coal plants as variable output plants, they tend to be used base load plants that run all or most of the time. The same thing is true for Nuclear plants, and to the extent that power prices occasionally go _negative_. (This essentially means that the utility is willing to pay people to take their power for a brief time at low system loading, so that they can avoid turning a plant down or off.) Renewables are used differently, in that there's a lot less ability to rely on them to generate power. So they're not really a replacement. This makes me think the ability to shutter these coal plants is a lot more dependent on the decision to extend the life of the nuclear plant and buy the NG plant than it is to do with the renewables they're adding.
- _bxg1 7y agoThere have also been great gains made in energy storage lately, which is what's needed to make renewables a true replacement.
- mschaef 7y agoAbsolutely. This has to be viewed holistically, as a combination of greener generation, better efficiency, storage, lifestyle changes.... The problem's too big to solve otherwise.
- pm24601 7y ago> Renewables are used differently, in that there's a lot less ability to rely on them to generate power. I am confused on your reasoning here. Solar energy covers the daylight hours. Wind power covers the evening / night time hours. Storage technologies smooth out the bumps. Nuclear plants tend to experience long down times for maintenance - which hardly makes them 'reliable'. Xcel is based in a part of the country with easy access to wind energy. I suspect that that calculation is playing a much larger role than you are considering. Specifically, if Xcel can site wind farms close to the customer, there can be a significant savings in power loss due to transmission. Windfarms can be built in smaller units of generation power and built in the airspace over farms. (This is why conservative Kansas really like renewables - farmers see them as a backup source of revenue.)
- duxup 7y agoNatural Gas prices have done a great deal to reduce coal usage. Shutting down a plant is no easy decision. It is clear coal is just being priced out of the equation.
- Iwan-Zotow 7y ago"and add 3,000 megawatts of new solar capacity" And what people supposed to do during evenings/nights/no sun? Fornicate?
- esarbe 7y agoThat's a splendid idea. Oh, wait. There exists such a thing as batteries. Dang!
- antisthenes 7y agoNote that a decade early is pretty misleading in this context, because the headline gives no baseline - someone could erroneously assume that this means they're shutting it down now, instead of in 2030. Since no baseline is given, it's up to the reader to look at the content of the article. In reality, it seems they were planning to shut down the big plant in 2040, and will now do so in 2030, which means it'll still be polluting for 10.5 years. Any progress is better than no progress though.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoThis headline should be changed to "Will Close Its Coal-Fire Powered", as the announcement is really just for 2028 and onwards. They haven't shut down the coal-fired power yet, thus the present form of the verb is overly charitable.
- umeshunni 7y agoThe headline is clearly clickbait and follows common clickbait patterns - "a major US utility" instead of naming the utility and location in the title - "is closing" as a major mischaracterization of the reality of "will actually close"
- dang 7y agoOk, we'll put that above. Edit: actually, let's change the URL from https://e360.yale.edu/digest/a-major-u-s-utility-is-closing-its-coal-fired-power-plants-a-decade-early https://e360.yale.edu/digest/a-major-u-s-utility-is-closing-... to the press release it points to, which is actually more informative. Being less informative than a press release is maybe not the greatest quality for an article...
- umeshunni 7y agoIn the spirit of saving you a click to find our the name and location of the "major utility": Xcel Energy Inc. announced it will close its remaining coal-fired power plants in the Upper Midwest a decade ahead of schedule and add 3,000 megawatts of new solar capacity by 2030.
- dang 7y agoOk, we'll put that name in the title as well.