Big Coal Plants Begin to Close

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/and-now-the-really-big-coal-plants-begin-to-close/

by artsandsci • 7 years ago

289 163 7 years ago

rossdavidh4• 7 years ago

The coal industry is, over the next decade, going to go the way of Venezuela, and the parts of America still dependent on it economically will go with it. We are not ready.

CydeWeys• 7 years ago

It feels like it's already mostly gone this way; the vast majority of the coal-associated jobs (those involved in mining) are already gone. Automation plus large closures already gutted the industry.

JauntTrooper2• 7 years ago

Yeah.

There are only ~80,000 coal miners in the US now, which is 0.06% of the full-time employee population.

rkimmel• 7 years ago

I’m ready to breathe clean air though.

isostatic• 7 years ago

the parts of America still dependent on it economically will go with it. We are not ready.

And you'll never be. You didn't learn from the lessons in the UK of the 60s through 80s when output dropped dramatically. It's taken decades of EU investment for places like the Welsh valleys to begin to recover.

adrianN7• 7 years ago

Time to retrain the coal workers to build wind turbines instead. We'll need a lot of those in the next ten to twenty years.

StavrosK2• 7 years ago

Better yet, nuclear plants.

godtoldmetodoit2• 7 years ago

Arby's already employs more then the coal industry. Coal is already dead, and they are already dealing with it (poorly).

thinkcontext3• 7 years ago

There are going to be big bills to the taxpayer. Pensions, retiree health care, site cleanup, etc. The Black Lung Fund which operates off of a coal tax already has a ballooning deficit, we're going to be paying for those people for decades.

perfunctory• 7 years ago

Comparing industries to countries is absurd. What do you even mean by that?

m23khan• 7 years ago

this is great news -- proud of USA and Americans! Americans truly teach the World when it comes to technology and advancement.

Also, it is great to see more and more usage of coal in products ranging from toothpaste all the way to food products.

mav3rick• 7 years ago

Such a cynical take. Things need to start somewhere. It can't be all or nothing.

alanbernstein• 7 years ago

Are you talking about charcoal?

PhasmaFelis• 7 years ago

What?

hsbaut76• 7 years ago

Yeah, not in Australia though.

jasoncartwright• 7 years ago

From the UK... "A decade ago, coal plants generated almost a third of the UK’s electricity, but in the first half of this year they have provided only 3%."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon...

https://electricityproduction.uk/from/coal/?t=8y

maxk42• 7 years ago

In the US it's approximately 30%.

philipkglass• 7 years ago

That was true a few years ago. In 2018 it was down to 28%. Now it's about 24%:

"Short Term Energy Outlook -- 2019-08-06"

EIA forecasts that the share of U.S. generation from coal will average 24% in 2019 and in 2020, down from 28% in 2018.

EIA expects electric power sector demand for coal to fall by 2% in 2020, compared with an expected decline of 15% in 2019. However, planned coal plant retirements will continue to put downward pressure on overall electricity demand for the fuel. Almost 13 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity generation capacity has retired this year or is scheduled to retire by the end of 2020, accounting for 5% of the capacity existing at the end of 2018.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php

scarejunba• 7 years ago

In California, it's 3.3% and that's all imported power that's on existing contracts. We will be free of this very soon https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...

chrisseaton• 7 years ago

Wow really? I would not have guessed anywhere near that high.

nathell• 7 years ago

Meanwhile in Poland it's been 78.2% in 2018, "down" from 78.4% in 2017. And the Polish government has made it clear that coal will remain the basis of energy production here.

I'm frustrated as I'm writing this on a train from Berlin to Warsaw. One of the reasons why I chose to travel by train rather than fly was the carbon footprint journey, and I'm cutting it down much less than I should be.

gambiting4• 7 years ago

And don't forget that there's still a huge number of private homes which use coal fired boilers. Even if all coal power plants closed tomorrow, Polish towns would still be consuming huge amounts of coal just to stay warm in winter(and there's practically no regulations about emissions from those, it just goes straight up your chimney).

rossdavidh4• 7 years ago

Different places change at different rates. One thing that will happen, however, is that as some of the big coal customers switch, the economies of scale for coal production change, and it becomes even more expensive. So, coal will eventually become too pricey even for places like Poland, even though "Poland" does not bring to mind "summer skies where solar would be competitive" (I may be biased as I've only ever visited Poland around Christmastime).

c2h5oh2• 7 years ago

To be fair Poland started with that number being over 98% when communism fell.

It's estimated Poland would have to spend >5% of GDP for 20+ years to replace it with nuclear or renewables and it's not a popular idea when you have a populist, global-warming skeptic government and close to 100k people working in coal mining (not that far from 1% of all employed in Poland)

tl;dr; unless there is external pressure & funding it's not changing.

lukasm• 7 years ago

Any yet average person in Poland has a similar carbon footprint.

nineteen9992• 7 years ago

Here in Australia, our current Prime Minister proudly brought in a lump of coal into the Parliament to show how not scary it is.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-m...

chewz• 7 years ago

Coal is cheap and available in Poland why not use it? It is a bit hypocritical for Western European countries to move their industrial base to Poland first and then push for green energy as a mean to decrease competitiveness of Polish economy.

On the good side Poland is big time afforesting for the last 70 years from 20,8% in 1946 to 30% in 2020. Show me another country in Europe who did so much to sequester CO2 over last 70 years.

Also Poland and Czech Republic had decreased its CO2 production by 50% since 1990s - most in the world. Sure, EU money helped a lot but it was Polish jobs and life choices that paid for closing factories and reforming its post-communist dirty heavy industry, sewage treatment plants, agriculture etc.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

So not all bad.

PS. Plans for Polish nuclear power plant in Żarnowiec had been abolished post Chernobyl. You never know..

And I wish Poland got rid of coal and better yet cars. But be realistic.

tialaramex2• 7 years ago

It's weird though, if you look back at this week, yesterday for a few hours it was sunny _and_ windy in the middle of the day. That ought to depress the hell out of prices, most of the gas plants were idled. But for some reason a cold plant was fired up.

Did they lose money running that plant? Is there some setup where running the plant a certain amount (maybe on windy days when pollution effects in the vicinity are smallest) is just treated as a good thing even though we really ought to be burning less fossil fuels not more?

I don't understand the economics of coal versus gas in this space in a market like the UK. It seems as though with gas being cheaper it would just never make economic sense to burn coal when gas plants aren't 100% flat out. But clearly I am wrong somehow.

pjc503• 7 years ago

I wonder if that's related, directly or indirectly to the grid trip: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49302996

ehnto• 7 years ago

Gas is quicker to start up and meet demand usually as well.

It could well have been a maintenance thing. Maybe it was a test fire of some new equipment or configuration. It could also have been a contractual thing. A minimum supply they agreed upon with the organisation who manages the grid.

acta_non_verba• 7 years ago

This was Cottam Coal Power Station burning its remaining coal at a loss (so you are correct, not profitable when renewables doing well) in time for its impending closure in September.

Source: Final paragraph of https://limejump.com/the-week-in-flexibility-mid-week-intrig...

benj1112• 7 years ago

As a Brit I could point out many idiotic brain dead things that the political class of this country does. But the switch from coal is quite frankly astonishing, and then you take a look at the biggest offshore wind farms [1] and you see what's replacing it, and then you look at the size of the planned wind farms [also 1] and you start to believe maybe our carbon reduction targets can be met.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms

tialaramex2• 7 years ago

Auctioning off Contracts for Difference seems like a really smart way to make government subsidy stretch further too.

The auction allows them to attract low bids by a simple and understandable competition. If you bid higher than other entrants you won't get a contract, but if you bid lower than your operating costs you'll lose money (or more realistically, you won't pay back investors for the capital on the construction fast enough to make sense).

The CfD setup means the government's subsidy only manages the uncertainty. If prices collapse, the government picks up a big difference, but if prices sky-rocket the wind farm operator ends up paying the government instead of receiving a subsidy at all.

One thing I'm told, and hope to see, is that the taller the wind turbine the more often it runs. At high altitudes it's basically permanently windy, the winds we experience as so variable are a low phenomenon, so in principle as the turbines get taller some of the intermittent production problem goes away by itself. That would be almost bigger than just offshore wind power being cheap enough to justify building it on purely economic grounds with no subsidy and no additional carbon taxes.

NikkiA• 7 years ago

We don't produce enough coal to run coal plants anymore, that's why we've dumped coal power. Almost all of the remaining handful of coal mines in the UK are 100% allotted to our (also near gone now) steel industry.

lifeisstillgood3• 7 years ago

One of the great ironies of political life in the UK is that we are now celebrating generating electricity for "X days without Coal".

This is of course a positive thing, but it was arrived at by the politically motivated near-total destruction of UK's mining industry in the 1980s (the then right wing Tory government wanted to destroy the heartland support of its left wing Labour opponents).

What was a socially divisive, bitter class struggle for years and years, that nearly brought down the government, is now a strategic masterstroke of climate change planning.

Life is odd.

[#] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984%E2%8...

_bxg13• 7 years ago

Here in the U.S. the right wing has instead managed to convince the Labor demographic that it's on their side.

AnimalMuppet• 7 years ago

Here in the US, the party that corresponds to Labour has abandoned labor.

Marazan• 7 years ago

The shift from coal in the UK wasn't caused by the miners strike.

Britain kept on using coal post strike and pit closures, it just bought foreign coal (not even necessarily cheaper) instead.

The Dash for Gas is what killed the use of coal for generation.

lifeisstillgood3• 7 years ago

It's a lot easier to stop using imported foreign coal over the last decade than to stop using unionised voting coal mines in your home country - just ask Mr Trump.

The decline in home coal use was directly correlated to the strike - and the decline in imported coal use is as much old plant and expensive marginal costs as the shift to gas.

At some point replacing the coal fired infrastructure stopped making economic sense - and with no political leverage the whole thing collapsed really quickly.

Something we might be happy to learn when looking at oil and gas generation - once solar prices and volume are there the industry just vanishes.

_bxg13• 7 years ago

Unfortunately it's not as big a win as it sounds like. Per the article much of the economic force can be attributed to natural gas, which is better but not much, and most of the really huge coal plants have just adapted to regulation and don't show signs of imminent closure.

wpasc• 7 years ago

I was under the impression that natural gas was twice as good as coal[1]? 50-60% less CO2. not perfect but far from "not much better" in my opinion

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fu...

DebtDeflation• 7 years ago

Don't forget the heavy metals (lead, arsenic, mercury), radiation (coal ash is literally more radioactive than some nuclear waste) and particulate matter releases that come from burning coal. Natural gas isn't optimal but it is FAR better than coal.

WhompingWindows• 7 years ago

It's not just the CO2 picture for emissions, keep in mind methane is a far more potent GHG and there is going to be some amount of leakage in the workflow of getting gas from fracking to the turbine. Colorado has the gold standard regulation for methane emissions, check it out:

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/04/24/colorado-regulators-ne...

ZeroGravitas• 7 years ago

It also has some potential for being gradually replaced, like mixing in renewable hydrogen, using methane captured from closed coal mines that would otherwise leak, methane from food and farm waste etc. and those then transition into being carbon neutral or negative ways to store energy for rarely used peaker plants to support the grid.

rossdavidh4• 7 years ago

Coal is really, really bad from an environmental standpoint, even compared to natural gas, even with the methane issue factored in. Coal is really bad.

EarthMephit• 7 years ago

The good thing about natural gas plants is that they complement renewables well

They can start up in around a minute to provide base-load at times when renewables are not able to provide enough energy

40acres• 7 years ago

Great to see coal phasing out but I feel like the risks of natural gas have not been well publicized, data regarding methane leaks from natural gas is sketchy at best and fracking has almost certainly caused more frequent earthquakes (albeit small on the Richter scale) at sites.

Big oil pushes natural gas as a bridge energy, and despite lots of skepticism towards them I think they're correct. The window where natural gas is a plurality of global energy consumption has to be as small as possible.

mhh__• 7 years ago

Has there been any earthquakes which are actually significant? No matter how bad fracking is, coal is much worse (the goal needs to be to get China and India onto Natural Gas and then renewables)

gibolt• 7 years ago

The Methane leaking is a huge unknown. It isn't regulated, but is known to be quite high for any given site and along pipelines.

As it is a very potent greenhouse gas, the effects could be significant.

To be clear, both are bad and I hope renewables eat their lunch, breakfast, and dinner in short order.

thinkcontext3• 7 years ago

Oklahoma put restrictions in place after earthquakes threatened critical infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–19_Oklahoma_earthquake_sw...

I believe the Netherlands is phasing out its industry because of concerns. I also recall reading about problems in China as they begin trying to frack.

avip2• 7 years ago

Wat? Both China and India are years ahead of US in terms of renewables. Not only they are already ahead, they also invest more.

pkaye• 7 years ago

the goal needs to be to get China and India onto Natural Gas and then renewables

Is there much natural gas in China and India? China can possibly get it from Russia and a few other neighboring countries? What about India?

sumedh2• 7 years ago

the goal needs to be to get China and India onto Natural Gas

There is plenty of coal in India but not so much natural gas. Economically speaking in the short term it does not make sense for India to go with imported natural gas.

JTbane• 7 years ago

Fracking also causes significant groundwater pollution which is often handwaved away by politicians. Keeping gas cheap gets you more votes.

mattbk12• 7 years ago

Fracking causing leaks of contaminants into groundwater is hugely dependent on the local geology. In locations with lots of natural fractures and nearby sources of drinking water (e.g., Pennsylvania), there's a much higher risk of contamination than in deeper basins with more uniform geology (e.g., North Dakota).

That's not to say handwaving is good, but that all geology is local and risk assessment has to be done at that scale.

stevenwoo• 7 years ago

It is hypothesized that the increased release of methane via fracking is a large driver in recent short term global warming and the amount of methane released has been vastly understated by previous industry and government studies, even though it only lasts a relatively short time in the atmosphere. https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/

jessaustin• 7 years ago

Yeah the cows have been getting a bad rap...

tbabb• 7 years ago

Yeah, this article celebrates the closure of coal, which is great because coal is super dirty, but it's tallying up all the carbon emissions they put out as if that annual emission has been eliminated. That's super misleading given that much of the demand is taken up by natural gas. I'd rather hear about the net reduction; that'd be a better indicator of progress.

viceroyalbean• 7 years ago

These figures[1] seem to indicate a ~50% decrease in carbon emissions for the same energy generated, but I'm not sure if it carries over directly to power plants.

Also, there's this fairly interesting (supposedly) zero-emissions natural gas power plant [2] but all of the news seem to be from 2018 so it's not getting a lot of attention.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11

[2] https://www.netpower.com/

notJim• 7 years ago

Renewables with storage are already starting to compete with natural gas. It seems better to do what we can to tilt that scale even further, rather than investing in more assets that will need to be stranded in 2–10 years.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/13/1755187...

mattbk12• 7 years ago

Earthquakes related to oil and gas are almost entirely because of wastewater injection, not the fracking process itself. One could argue that the increased wastewater production from the development and production of fracked wells is therefore responsible, but the connection that "fracking = earthquakes" isn't direct.

istjohn• 7 years ago

Seems a little pedantic unless there are alternative ways to do fracking.

cmrdporcupine4• 7 years ago

Here in Ontario all coal plants were shut down over a decade ago. The difference in air quality seems to have been forgotten by many people, but it was a drastic and obvious improvement.

The power mix here is now 90% nuclear & hydro, so not emitting CO2 (directly), with the remainder being a mix of natural gas, wind, and solar.

Fogest• 7 years ago

I am happy these changes were pushed forward before a politician like Doug Ford got into power as I think we know these would have been reversed as we saw with the carbon tax.

cmrdporcupine4• 7 years ago

Probably these changes are what ultimately caused the liberal gov't to collapse as the closing of the coal plants (along with a myriad other factors, including some the previous conservative gov't are at fault for) at least indirectly led to higher electricity costs and the stupid gas plant scandal, and those things were used as a battering ram by the opposition in the last 2-3 provincial elections, until they finally won.

Gibbon12• 7 years ago

A carbon tax to me seems like something designed to generate political blowback. The problem is a carbon tax punishes people for decisions they made previously where they didn't have a choice. With the hope that they'll suck it up and find a way out somehow. It's stupid to assume that 'somehow' isn't going to be toss those dicks out on their ear.

knowaveragejoe• 7 years ago

The public perception of the carbon tax in Canada is just saddening. In a poll, 80% of Canadians responded that Canada's carbon tax had increased their cost of living. The poll took place two weeks before Canada's carbon tax was introduced.

https://abacusdata.ca/will-climate-change-be-a-ballot-box-qu...

JauntTrooper2• 7 years ago

Much of this is due to the fracking tech revolution of the early 2000s, which dropped the price of energy from natural gas below coal in the US.

Shale gas has been replacing coal: https://images.app.goo.gl/zb2bBfkBuAvWePVU6

Gibbon12• 7 years ago

A friends dad who is a retired nuclear engineering professor said said as much, coal can't compete with natural gas on price. He said his former department and others were heavily dependent on grants from coal, oil, and the nuclear industry and those have all but disappeared. Quote: I got out at the right time.

resters3• 7 years ago

Keeping the coal plants online is just another way of paying welfare to the workers and the firms that own them. Taking money from everyone else and giving it to the outdated machines and workers with outdated skills.

Note that I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with being on welfare. But as a society I think we should decouple our determination of who deserves to be on welfare from our decision about how rapidly we want to destroy our environment.

In other words, let's just pay them normal food stamps or welfare checks, not keep the polluting plants open for decades longer than necessary.

For some reason many American workers feel totally proud being the indirect recipients of corporate welfare, yet would feel ashamed simply getting food stamps every month. There is zero difference between the two, except that in this case the food stamps are a LOT better for the environment.

Ma8ee2• 7 years ago

And instead of either keeping dying industries alive or giving out food stamps, why not employ the people to do something about ,e.g., US infrastructure. It’s not there’s a lack of work if you have the money to pay someone.

resters3• 7 years ago

Even better, to the extent that the government can identity useful things that need to be done (it has a very poor track record so far)

raphaelsaunier• 7 years ago

On the topic of coal, as a more worrying counterpoint, the NY Times just published an article about the actions of the Adani Group in Australia under the clickbaity yet accurate title “How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/climate/coal-adani-india-...

Havoc• 7 years ago

Wouldn't it make sense to build a solar farm there instead. I mean the power lines etc are all there already

willvarfar• 7 years ago

In other news, Australia just sank a climate treaty meeting by refusing give up coal mining: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49365918

And also on the BBC today, on a lighter note: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-49165336

robocat• 7 years ago

Why is Australia part of a Pacific Islands Forum? Did they include other Asian Island Nations? Was Hawaii included?

I think New Zealand also refused. NZ exports about two small trainloads a day from Christchurch I think.

sumedh2• 7 years ago

Why is Australia part of a Pacific Islands Forum?

Some small Pacific Islands are part of Australia and Australia also provides aid to some of the Pacific island nations.

thoughtstheseus• 7 years ago

Just look at the companies who provide maintance...they're leaving the business.

bwb• 7 years ago

Nice to feel a little hope and see this :)

beat5• 7 years ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again... market forces are accomplishing what regulation and public awareness never accomplished, in terms of reducing greenhouse emissions.

I am so glad the market is on our side for once.

Andrex• 7 years ago

We wouldn't be at this point (this early) without large public investments, regulation, and advocacy. Simply saying "oh the market's got it, we cool" is misguided thinking.

beat5• 7 years ago

Public awareness and advocacy matter more, I think. We're not regulating coal out of existence, or they'd be closing from regulation, not cost. And the public investment isn't what's driving the radical drop in wind/solar manufacturing and installation costs. That's regular economy of scale stuff.

jayd16• 7 years ago

Isn't it pollution regulations that make coal uneconomical? Coal is still a cheap option in China, for example. Have we simply used up our supply of cheap coal?

beat5• 7 years ago

No, it's that alternatives (mostly natural gas) have become much less expensive than they were, to the point where they're cheaper than coal to operate. Fracking completely changed the game, giving us access to a great deal of previously unrecoverable natural gas. (Oh, and speaking of government investment and subsidy...)

The really interesting thing is that solar/wind are becoming cheaper than coal, and will soon be cheaper than natural gas.

bjourne• 7 years ago

But you are forgetting the huge amount of subsidized R&D (via universities) and subsidized investment costs that has already been spent. Without that, it is very hard to believe that the wind power industry would have bootstrapped itself.

The same can of course be said for the nuclear industry. Without massive R&D spending and cheap capital costs, nuclear energy would never have been viable. Today, wind and solar is beating both nuclear and coal, which is great. But perhaps The Market shouldn't get all the credit.

bloaf• 7 years ago

One of the easiest ways for companies to claim huge carbon emission reductions is for them to buy old coal plants and shut them down.

kenned3• 7 years ago

It can be done, Ontario shut down Nanticoke (largest coal genrator in North AMerica) and repalced it with solar.. But something seems off with the capacity??

The Nanticoke Generating Station is a 44 MW solar power station which started operation in April 2019.[2] Previously from 1972 to 2013, it was the largest coal-fired power plant in North America. At full capacity, it could provide 3,964 MW of power into the southern Ontario power grid from its base in Nanticoke, Ontario, Canada,[3] and provided as much as 15% of Ontario's electricity.

Big Coal Plants Begin to Close

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