6 ms·

Yes, natural gas is now cheaper than coal for power generation, and solar has become much cheaper. Even disregarding environmental concerns, it's just not a goo

by not2b 1y ago

Yes, natural gas is now cheaper than coal for power generation, and solar has become much cheaper. Even disregarding environmental concerns, it's just not a good choice any more.

ericd 1y ago
I'm curious, in case anyone knows, how much of the economic disadvantage of coal is because of environmental reg compliance versus other, more fundamental costs?
- eru 1y ago
  Well, if you want to answer that question, you probably also need to figure out the hypothetical cost of the other power sources minus environmental regulations. Nuclear would be (and used to be) massively cheaper, before regulations went wild against it. I'm deliberately saying 'went wild', because the earlier nuclear power generation that was built to saner standards also has turned out to be incredibly safe already. (Basically, anyone who avoided insane Soviet bullshit had safe nuclear power, as measured in eg fatalities per Joule of electricity generated.)
  - juliankauai 1y ago
    Except of course, Fukushima. Or any nuclear plant that gets hit by tsunami, earthquake, terrorism,or other natural disaster.
    - yobbo 1y ago
      Were there any deaths from the Fukushima nuclear disaster? A large area was evacuated and "human costs" were great. But as I recall, no deaths from radiation.
      - Gibbon1 1y ago
        People whose metabolic reserve is low often die when you stress them. I saw a study claiming 440 excess deaths from the Los Angeles fires. I'll make an assumption that permanently moving old and health impaired people from the Fukushima exclusion zone had a similar increase in mortality. And then a bit of looking leads me to this. "The evacuation itself also was not without severe consequences. The accident was in the winter, and the evacuation of 840 patients or elderly people in nursing homes and health-care facilities apparently resulted in 60 immediate deaths due to hypothermia, dehydration, trauma and deterioration of serious medical conditions (Tanigawa et al 2012) and upwards of 100 deaths in subsequent month" https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0952-4746/33/3/497 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0952-4746/33/3/49... Like the Grapes of Wrath where the family starts out for California and the grandparents both die on the way.
    - LarsAlereon 1y ago
      It looks like the top-end estimate is that the Fukushima disaster may have caused up to 500 additional total lifetime deaths from cancer. Roughly 23,000 people per year died of diseases attributed to coal power plants in the United States alone from 1999-2020. Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        500 deaths at $12M per life is $6B. This is a small fraction of the total cost of Fukushima. People say LNT overestimates deaths, but what they don't realize is that even if you take LNT at face value the cost of deaths from a nuclear accident isn't really that high. A regulatory regime where reactor operators that have accidents are charged the inferred cost of the expected deaths could work.
    - chairmansteve 1y ago
      Yes, If there were 20x nuclear power stations, there would probably have been 20x Fukushima scale incidents. Murphy's law is real...
      - eru 1y ago
        Fatalities per Joule of generated electricity is extremely low for nuclear power, even if you add not just Fukushima but also Chernobyl. So if you'd scale up, and keep that level of safety, it would be fine. Even less safety would be fine. After all, we accept much less safety in eg natural gas or even solar power. (Solar power is extremely safe once running, but if you look at casualties over the lifecycle, you get a few people falling off roofs when installing residential solar power. It's a very small number, but nuclear is so safe, that the roof-fall incidents of solar are a big number by comparison.)
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    The regulatory costs of nuclear are mostly occurred in the design phase. Those costs are sunk and mostly irrelevant for new builds of old designs. The fact that old designs like the AP1000 are crazy expensive to build has a lot more to do with the fact that the US sucks at building mega projects than anything else.
    - dalyons 1y ago
      It’s not just the US that sucks at mega projects. It’s everywhere that’s not china.
      - bryanlarsen 1y ago
        Other countries are better at building particular types of mega projects. Some are better at transit, others are better at building tunnels, others are better at building massive ships, et cetera. But in regards to nuclear, I believe you're right.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Interestingly, one of the reasons the design phase for nuclear is so onerous is the sheer amount of red tape involved due to compliance and other regulatory reasons. You wanna know something funny? You know what's really good at generating piles of convincing sounding bullshit that it's possible no one even actually reads, and looks like it's totally going to insert fuel rods into the nuclear power industry? LLMs!
      - herewulf 1y ago
        This will definitely make the nuclear industry perceptibly safer. How soon can we start?! /s
        eru 1y ago
        Nuclear power is arguably way too safe.
    - 1y ago
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    The American nuclear industry was collapsing due to spiraling costs before TMI happened. This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      It wasn't just spiraling costs, but also the collapse in the steady 7%/year growth in electrical energy demand. Without transparency on demand growth, very long term investments become risky (a risk reflected in the bankruptcy of WPPSS). The passage of PURPA in 1978 also didn't help with this as it allowed a flood of non-utility generation onto the grid, helping soak up what demand growth there was.
    - eru 1y ago
      Yes, regulations started tightening before TMI. > This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data. No, we have data about costs in those earlier times, and we know what regulations came in when.
      - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
        Given the cleanup costs of the early nuclear program maybe they learned a thing or two preventing the externalization of costs? DOE report: Cost to finish cleaning up Hanford site could exceed $589 billion https://www.ans.org/news/2025-04-17/article-6942/doe-report-cost-to-finish-cleaning-up-hanford-site-could-exceed-589-billion/ https://www.ans.org/news/2025-04-17/article-6942/doe-report-... Sellafield cleanup cost rises to £136bn amid tensions with Treasury https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/23/sellafield-cleanup-cost-136bn-national-audit-office https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/23/sellafield-...
  - ericd 1y ago
    I'm mostly curious if there's any world in which coal beats at-scale solar production, or if it's totally moot. To be clear, I'm not rooting for that so much as looking for an ironclad case against. Nuclear is a whole can of worms because of its PR problems.
- LarsAlereon 1y ago
  I think it's primarily a fundamental cost issue. It's simply far cheaper to get an equivalent amount of energy from fracking a natural gas formation than having to literally dig coal out of the ground.
- pragmatic 1y ago
  You can't put coal in a pipeline. You have to physically handle every piece of coal. Extract, load ship, unload. Natural gas is shooting out of the ground in North Dakota. You can compare to wind and solar also. The economics aren't favorable.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    > You can't put coal in a pipeline. Yes you can! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pipeline A slurry is transported in one variety of these. The trick is to induce a swirl in the flow, so even though particles are constantly falling out of suspension, they stay suspended. It's mathematically analogous to how putting a twist in magnetic field lines in a tokamak (or stellarator) prevents ExB effects from driving the plasma into the wall, as they would in just a plain toroidal magnetic field. Lots of water is needed and drying the coal before burning it adds cost.
    - myrmidon 1y ago
      Really interesting, thanks for the link! Acre-feet as a unit just made me realize how many options you get for volume with multiple base units (a foot-mile-inch is ~12m³ in case anyone was wondering). The non-metric system continues to impress (not in a good way)!
- xbmcuser 1y ago
  Coal requires manual labour and mining so even without environmental regulations it's expensive. In the US coal use decrease had very little to do with environmental factors most of it was because fracking brought in cheap natural gas and pushed coal out.
  - jhallenworld 1y ago
    Its does, but you should see the machines they use for coal mining these days, particularly in Wyoming. A giant strip mine seems to require like 20 workers, but with giant trucks and excavators. Even for underground mines, check out the massive longwall mining machines they use- it's kind of astonishing. They pretty much take all the coal. I think this is lost in the political talk about protecting mining jobs- the main original competition is more efficient mining operations. Anyway, it really says something that natural gas and solar are cheaper than coal given this context.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      You should see this one! https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow It's a bit dated (completed in 1978) and cost approximately $100 million. At one point it was the heaviest land vehicle, clocking in at 13,500 tons. It's since been succeded, but this bucket-wheel excavator needed only five people to operate. Those five people could mine 240,000 tons of coal[8] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden (rock/soil on top of the coal) per day. That's 2400 coal wagons! After totally tapping out all of the coal at the Tagebau Hambach mine, in 2001, it took a crew of 70 together to move it 14 miles to the next mine. This move cost 15 million German Marks. (Just watch the linked documentary.)
- thelastgallon 1y ago
  Thats the wrong question. The question to ask is what is the death rates per unit of electricity production: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... Coal beats everything else by a mile. We also get mercury pollution for free, so no more eating fish.
  - ericd 1y ago
    I'm not a coal proponent, just trying to understand the veracity of an argument that I think R's make sometimes (that coal isn't economically viable primarily because state regs make it too expensive).
- chris_va 1y ago
  (disclaimer that I manage a climate&energy research group) Most of the comments here are speculative. The TLDR is that coal plants have trouble ramping their production up/down quickly, unlike natural gas which can do so in minutes. So, if you have a grid that is being thrashed by variable production (renewables), this results in variable pricing and demand for baseload. Coal cannot economically compete in that market (and neither can nuclear, which has the same problem).
  - mrDmrTmrJ 1y ago
    Given that renewable power power is self correlated (all the solar panels are producing at once - or they’re not, all the wind turbines are turning at once - or they’re not) - renewable energy leads to low prices when it’s produced and high prices when it’s not. Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?
    - soni96pl 1y ago
      Once you have batteries you may do so with solar or wind
      - ericd 1y ago
        Yeah, but sometimes the intermittency is pretty extreme, and you can get away with significantly less overpaneling and storage if you have a mix of power sources. Not many experts advocate for 100% renewables.
        pfdietz 1y ago
        Right; batteries aren't really suitable for the low frequency part of the supply/demand mismatch. Daily storage, great, perhaps up to 1 week, but lower frequencies they are increasingly expensive. But there are other storage ideas that do much better for that. For example, burning an e-fuel like hydrogen, or ultra low capex thermal storage.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
monero-xmr 1y ago
https://www.eia.gov/dashboard/newengland/overview https://www.eia.gov/dashboard/newengland/overview Solar makes up 4% of New England electricity. Not much sun there. Needs nuclear to succeed
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  Unlikely. The ISO has 3.5GW of solar and nuclear capacity equally (I’m aware of capacity factor of solar vs nuclear, but the ISO also reports ~6GW of behind the meter distributed solar which only manifests as reduced demand). The ISO needs more batteries, renewables, and transmission from hydro in Quebec, Canada (1.2GW), but nuclear is not needed to succeed long term and those two generators will eventually be decommissioned, as their license only extends their operating period to ~2050. Twenty five years is plenty of time to replace their 3.5GW of output; 18GW of battery storage, 17GW of wind, and 13.5GW of solar is in the ISO’s interconnect queue or has been proposed by developers. https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2025-01-03/central-maine-power-aims-to-finish-controversial-western-maine-power-corridor-in-2025 https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2025-01-03/central-maine... (“Central Maine Power aims to finish controversial western Maine power corridor in 2025”) https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-reveal-nexteras-hidden-attempts-to-derail-cmps-transmission-line-corridor https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-re... (NextEra, which owns the Seabrook nuclear power plant in N.H., stands to lose tens of millions of dollars every year if the NECEC comes online and attempted to use political donations to scuttle the Quebec Hydro transmission line) https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/necec-project-canada-united-states-and-new-england https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/ne... (“The new transmission line between Quebec and Maine will provide 1,200 megawatts (MW) of renewable hydroelectric power to the New England power grid in Lewiston, Maine, sufficient to meet the demand of 1.2 million homes. Once built, NECEC will be New England's largest renewable energy source, saving customers $190 million per year.”) https://www.iso-ne.com/about/government-industry-affairs/new-england-regional-profile https://www.iso-ne.com/about/government-industry-affairs/new... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/northeast-heat-wave-solar-battery-benefits https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/northeast-... https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NE-ISNE/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NE-ISNE/live/fif... (Quebec, interestingly, has ~40GW of hydro generation capacity)
indymike 1y ago
Including regulatory and litigation expenses, this is simply not true. That said, coal is very dirty and is not the best choice for power generation because of pollution. Coal is pretty cheap, and it's take most of my lifetime to change the cost through regulation, litigation and lawmaking.
KevinMS 1y ago
NE is starved for natural gas. They replaced the coal plants with gas and didn't bother to build enough pipelines (and even blocked them). We are getting a lot of our gas from Tankers from Europe and even Russia before the war. So now NE has nearly the highest electricity costs in the country even though we're not far away from some of the most abundant natural gas in the planet.

by not2b 1y ago

Yes, natural gas is now cheaper than coal for power generation, and solar has become much cheaper. Even disregarding environmental concerns, it's just not a good choice any more.

ericd 1y ago

I'm curious, in case anyone knows, how much of the economic disadvantage of coal is because of environmental reg compliance versus other, more fundamental costs?

eru 1y ago
Well, if you want to answer that question, you probably also need to figure out the hypothetical cost of the other power sources minus environmental regulations. Nuclear would be (and used to be) massively cheaper, before regulations went wild against it. I'm deliberately saying 'went wild', because the earlier nuclear power generation that was built to saner standards also has turned out to be incredibly safe already. (Basically, anyone who avoided insane Soviet bullshit had safe nuclear power, as measured in eg fatalities per Joule of electricity generated.)
- juliankauai 1y ago
  Except of course, Fukushima. Or any nuclear plant that gets hit by tsunami, earthquake, terrorism,or other natural disaster.
  - yobbo 1y ago
    Were there any deaths from the Fukushima nuclear disaster? A large area was evacuated and "human costs" were great. But as I recall, no deaths from radiation.
    - Gibbon1 1y ago
      People whose metabolic reserve is low often die when you stress them. I saw a study claiming 440 excess deaths from the Los Angeles fires. I'll make an assumption that permanently moving old and health impaired people from the Fukushima exclusion zone had a similar increase in mortality. And then a bit of looking leads me to this. "The evacuation itself also was not without severe consequences. The accident was in the winter, and the evacuation of 840 patients or elderly people in nursing homes and health-care facilities apparently resulted in 60 immediate deaths due to hypothermia, dehydration, trauma and deterioration of serious medical conditions (Tanigawa et al 2012) and upwards of 100 deaths in subsequent month" https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0952-4746/33/3/497 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0952-4746/33/3/49... Like the Grapes of Wrath where the family starts out for California and the grandparents both die on the way.
  - LarsAlereon 1y ago
    It looks like the top-end estimate is that the Fukushima disaster may have caused up to 500 additional total lifetime deaths from cancer. Roughly 23,000 people per year died of diseases attributed to coal power plants in the United States alone from 1999-2020. Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      500 deaths at $12M per life is $6B. This is a small fraction of the total cost of Fukushima. People say LNT overestimates deaths, but what they don't realize is that even if you take LNT at face value the cost of deaths from a nuclear accident isn't really that high. A regulatory regime where reactor operators that have accidents are charged the inferred cost of the expected deaths could work.
  - chairmansteve 1y ago
    Yes, If there were 20x nuclear power stations, there would probably have been 20x Fukushima scale incidents. Murphy's law is real...
    - eru 1y ago
      Fatalities per Joule of generated electricity is extremely low for nuclear power, even if you add not just Fukushima but also Chernobyl. So if you'd scale up, and keep that level of safety, it would be fine. Even less safety would be fine. After all, we accept much less safety in eg natural gas or even solar power. (Solar power is extremely safe once running, but if you look at casualties over the lifecycle, you get a few people falling off roofs when installing residential solar power. It's a very small number, but nuclear is so safe, that the roof-fall incidents of solar are a big number by comparison.)
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  The regulatory costs of nuclear are mostly occurred in the design phase. Those costs are sunk and mostly irrelevant for new builds of old designs. The fact that old designs like the AP1000 are crazy expensive to build has a lot more to do with the fact that the US sucks at building mega projects than anything else.
  - dalyons 1y ago
    It’s not just the US that sucks at mega projects. It’s everywhere that’s not china.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      Other countries are better at building particular types of mega projects. Some are better at transit, others are better at building tunnels, others are better at building massive ships, et cetera. But in regards to nuclear, I believe you're right.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Interestingly, one of the reasons the design phase for nuclear is so onerous is the sheer amount of red tape involved due to compliance and other regulatory reasons. You wanna know something funny? You know what's really good at generating piles of convincing sounding bullshit that it's possible no one even actually reads, and looks like it's totally going to insert fuel rods into the nuclear power industry? LLMs!
    - herewulf 1y ago
      This will definitely make the nuclear industry perceptibly safer. How soon can we start?! /s
      - eru 1y ago
        Nuclear power is arguably way too safe.
  - 1y ago
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  The American nuclear industry was collapsing due to spiraling costs before TMI happened. This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    It wasn't just spiraling costs, but also the collapse in the steady 7%/year growth in electrical energy demand. Without transparency on demand growth, very long term investments become risky (a risk reflected in the bankruptcy of WPPSS). The passage of PURPA in 1978 also didn't help with this as it allowed a flood of non-utility generation onto the grid, helping soak up what demand growth there was.
  - eru 1y ago
    Yes, regulations started tightening before TMI. > This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data. No, we have data about costs in those earlier times, and we know what regulations came in when.
    - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
      Given the cleanup costs of the early nuclear program maybe they learned a thing or two preventing the externalization of costs? DOE report: Cost to finish cleaning up Hanford site could exceed $589 billion https://www.ans.org/news/2025-04-17/article-6942/doe-report-cost-to-finish-cleaning-up-hanford-site-could-exceed-589-billion/ https://www.ans.org/news/2025-04-17/article-6942/doe-report-... Sellafield cleanup cost rises to £136bn amid tensions with Treasury https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/23/sellafield-cleanup-cost-136bn-national-audit-office https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/23/sellafield-...
- ericd 1y ago
  I'm mostly curious if there's any world in which coal beats at-scale solar production, or if it's totally moot. To be clear, I'm not rooting for that so much as looking for an ironclad case against. Nuclear is a whole can of worms because of its PR problems.
LarsAlereon 1y ago
I think it's primarily a fundamental cost issue. It's simply far cheaper to get an equivalent amount of energy from fracking a natural gas formation than having to literally dig coal out of the ground.
pragmatic 1y ago
You can't put coal in a pipeline. You have to physically handle every piece of coal. Extract, load ship, unload. Natural gas is shooting out of the ground in North Dakota. You can compare to wind and solar also. The economics aren't favorable.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  > You can't put coal in a pipeline. Yes you can! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pipeline A slurry is transported in one variety of these. The trick is to induce a swirl in the flow, so even though particles are constantly falling out of suspension, they stay suspended. It's mathematically analogous to how putting a twist in magnetic field lines in a tokamak (or stellarator) prevents ExB effects from driving the plasma into the wall, as they would in just a plain toroidal magnetic field. Lots of water is needed and drying the coal before burning it adds cost.
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    Really interesting, thanks for the link! Acre-feet as a unit just made me realize how many options you get for volume with multiple base units (a foot-mile-inch is ~12m³ in case anyone was wondering). The non-metric system continues to impress (not in a good way)!
xbmcuser 1y ago
Coal requires manual labour and mining so even without environmental regulations it's expensive. In the US coal use decrease had very little to do with environmental factors most of it was because fracking brought in cheap natural gas and pushed coal out.
- jhallenworld 1y ago
  Its does, but you should see the machines they use for coal mining these days, particularly in Wyoming. A giant strip mine seems to require like 20 workers, but with giant trucks and excavators. Even for underground mines, check out the massive longwall mining machines they use- it's kind of astonishing. They pretty much take all the coal. I think this is lost in the political talk about protecting mining jobs- the main original competition is more efficient mining operations. Anyway, it really says something that natural gas and solar are cheaper than coal given this context.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    You should see this one! https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow It's a bit dated (completed in 1978) and cost approximately $100 million. At one point it was the heaviest land vehicle, clocking in at 13,500 tons. It's since been succeded, but this bucket-wheel excavator needed only five people to operate. Those five people could mine 240,000 tons of coal[8] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden (rock/soil on top of the coal) per day. That's 2400 coal wagons! After totally tapping out all of the coal at the Tagebau Hambach mine, in 2001, it took a crew of 70 together to move it 14 miles to the next mine. This move cost 15 million German Marks. (Just watch the linked documentary.)
thelastgallon 1y ago
Thats the wrong question. The question to ask is what is the death rates per unit of electricity production: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... Coal beats everything else by a mile. We also get mercury pollution for free, so no more eating fish.
- ericd 1y ago
  I'm not a coal proponent, just trying to understand the veracity of an argument that I think R's make sometimes (that coal isn't economically viable primarily because state regs make it too expensive).
chris_va 1y ago
(disclaimer that I manage a climate&energy research group) Most of the comments here are speculative. The TLDR is that coal plants have trouble ramping their production up/down quickly, unlike natural gas which can do so in minutes. So, if you have a grid that is being thrashed by variable production (renewables), this results in variable pricing and demand for baseload. Coal cannot economically compete in that market (and neither can nuclear, which has the same problem).
- mrDmrTmrJ 1y ago
  Given that renewable power power is self correlated (all the solar panels are producing at once - or they’re not, all the wind turbines are turning at once - or they’re not) - renewable energy leads to low prices when it’s produced and high prices when it’s not. Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?
  - soni96pl 1y ago
    Once you have batteries you may do so with solar or wind
    - ericd 1y ago
      Yeah, but sometimes the intermittency is pretty extreme, and you can get away with significantly less overpaneling and storage if you have a mix of power sources. Not many experts advocate for 100% renewables.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        Right; batteries aren't really suitable for the low frequency part of the supply/demand mismatch. Daily storage, great, perhaps up to 1 week, but lower frequencies they are increasingly expensive. But there are other storage ideas that do much better for that. For example, burning an e-fuel like hydrogen, or ultra low capex thermal storage.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

monero-xmr 1y ago

https://www.eia.gov/dashboard/newengland/overview https://www.eia.gov/dashboard/newengland/overview Solar makes up 4% of New England electricity. Not much sun there. Needs nuclear to succeed

toomuchtodo 1y ago
Unlikely. The ISO has 3.5GW of solar and nuclear capacity equally (I’m aware of capacity factor of solar vs nuclear, but the ISO also reports ~6GW of behind the meter distributed solar which only manifests as reduced demand). The ISO needs more batteries, renewables, and transmission from hydro in Quebec, Canada (1.2GW), but nuclear is not needed to succeed long term and those two generators will eventually be decommissioned, as their license only extends their operating period to ~2050. Twenty five years is plenty of time to replace their 3.5GW of output; 18GW of battery storage, 17GW of wind, and 13.5GW of solar is in the ISO’s interconnect queue or has been proposed by developers. https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2025-01-03/central-maine-power-aims-to-finish-controversial-western-maine-power-corridor-in-2025 https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2025-01-03/central-maine... (“Central Maine Power aims to finish controversial western Maine power corridor in 2025”) https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-reveal-nexteras-hidden-attempts-to-derail-cmps-transmission-line-corridor https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-re... (NextEra, which owns the Seabrook nuclear power plant in N.H., stands to lose tens of millions of dollars every year if the NECEC comes online and attempted to use political donations to scuttle the Quebec Hydro transmission line) https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/necec-project-canada-united-states-and-new-england https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/ne... (“The new transmission line between Quebec and Maine will provide 1,200 megawatts (MW) of renewable hydroelectric power to the New England power grid in Lewiston, Maine, sufficient to meet the demand of 1.2 million homes. Once built, NECEC will be New England's largest renewable energy source, saving customers $190 million per year.”) https://www.iso-ne.com/about/government-industry-affairs/new-england-regional-profile https://www.iso-ne.com/about/government-industry-affairs/new... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/northeast-heat-wave-solar-battery-benefits https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/northeast-... https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NE-ISNE/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NE-ISNE/live/fif... (Quebec, interestingly, has ~40GW of hydro generation capacity)

indymike 1y ago

Including regulatory and litigation expenses, this is simply not true. That said, coal is very dirty and is not the best choice for power generation because of pollution. Coal is pretty cheap, and it's take most of my lifetime to change the cost through regulation, litigation and lawmaking.

KevinMS 1y ago

NE is starved for natural gas. They replaced the coal plants with gas and didn't bother to build enough pipelines (and even blocked them). We are getting a lot of our gas from Tankers from Europe and even Russia before the war. So now NE has nearly the highest electricity costs in the country even though we're not far away from some of the most abundant natural gas in the planet.