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.
But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three.
In fact its just enough time to build a fleet of nuclear plants, but as you also point out, fear rules that decision far more than physics.
Wind and solar and batteries are awesome, but even in very optimistic case scenarios we need an alternative to coal and the temporary surge of natgas to handle baseload between here and ~2040. It should be nuclear, but, sigh.
> Nuclear now looks like a technology where every decade or two you lose a city.
No, it's a technology where if you use power plants decades out of date, that have known safety issues, and then cover-up the magnitude of the problem once a catastrope occurs then you have a very expensive clean-up operation.
Cleaning up Fukushima will be expensive, there's no denying it, but it's arguably the case that the Deepwater Horizon rig mess could cost significantly more.
Moreover, what's driving low natgas prices in the US is the use of hydraulic fracturing -- 'fracking' -- which injects some fluid, often water, horizontally along an entire layer of shale to free the trapped gas. This technique enabled formations like the Marcellus Shale [1] in WV, PA, OH, NY to be economically viable to extract, and this formation grew to be the largest producer of natgas in the US.
There are many unanswered questions about the long-term impact of hydraulic fracturing on seismic stability and on groundwater, and the technique is under scrutiny in many parts of the world. Predictably favored by energy-lobbyists and opposed by environmentalists, fracking remains a contentious issue whose future in the US could depend on a "simple" party change -- hardly a sure bet.
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.
For the U.S., I think the cost overruns of nuclear have been a bigger problem than change of public opinion due to Fukushima. If Westinghouse's four new units at the Summer (South Carolina) and Vogtle (Georgia) plants had come in on time and on budget, there would be states and regions willing to build more nuclear, even if it remained unpopular in many parts of the country. But the extent of the construction problems there and Westinghouse's subsequent bankruptcy are going to discourage any new construction and financing for a while.
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.
>>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.
I used to hear that electric vehicles would help to absorb the excess solar and wind that need to be overbuilt because that's cheaper/easier/better than burning gas or building batteries.
I seem to recall reading a study that suggested that surprisingly few electric bus or delivery van fleets would be required to soak up this cheap electricity and tame demand fluctuations but more recently I heard people saying that it's going to be a problem/disaster.
I'm not sure if there's new knowledge or it's just become a popular talking point.
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.
Once we're saturated enough with solar I can't imagine there being an easier ad-hoc way to generate energy for small groups in the post-apocalypse. I think you're right though that coal is the ultimate society at-scale fallback.
Hear hear! Ive always thought that in the case of a not quite extinction level event amd society/knowledge slides backwards, having easily accessible fossil fuels would help kickstart a new industrial revolution.
interesting. the widespread dissemination of knowledge should make it easier to bootstrap ourselves up even after an apocalypse, but we certainly have tried to use up the easily accessible energy and minerals.
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.
Perhaps you misunderstood what marginal cost means. It is the cost of generating one additional unit of power on an already existing infrastructure. It takes expense to mine an additional ton of coal, transport it to a power plant, burn it and convert it into electricity even after the underlying infrastructure is setup. It doesn't for solar and wind.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Molten salt reactors require an external chemical plant processing radioactive materials. Radioactive chemical plants are a huge headache. If anything goes wrong, there's a huge mess and another long-term toxic waste site. Hanford (a PUREX plant) and Pantex (in Texas) are both now toxic waste sites.
Every nuclear reactor design that has something complicated going on in the radioactive section has had serious problems. Gas-cooled reactors leak. (Ft. St. Vrain was so promising.) Pebble bed reactors jam. (The one in Germany is permanently jammed and can't be disassembled.) Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Ones with attached chemical plants have problems with handling of hazardous materials. It's discouraging.
Ordinary water-based reactors have a simple radioactive section. All the complexity is outside. Yet even those have problems.
Hyman Rickover on this subject:
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following
basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is
cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is
very flexible in purpose ("omnibus reactor"). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.
(8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the
following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind
schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on
apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem.
(4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of
the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is
heavy. (8) It is complicated.
There's one problem with nuclear that probably will never be overcome: it takes around 20 years from commissioning to the eventual connection of a nuclear power plant to the grid.
You can have an equivalent in solar, wind + storage in less than three years. That's 17 years of not producing electricity.
I wonder why the tech community has this infatuation with nuclear power. Ever since I registered my three-digit slashdot account, I've been reading exactly this post, just that the type of reactor people dream of seems to change every five years or so. Good to know it's "Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders", right now.
Meanwhile, solar power has lowered prices by a factor of 10 or so and is on a clear trajectory to beat fossile fuels on costs, without subsidies.
I'm suspecting there is something cultural going on here–maybe some instinct to seek out what others perceive as dangerous? Beats me...
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.
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.
>> 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.
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%).
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.
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.
"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...
Animats|8 years ago
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-...
cagenut|8 years ago
But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three.
In fact its just enough time to build a fleet of nuclear plants, but as you also point out, fear rules that decision far more than physics.
Wind and solar and batteries are awesome, but even in very optimistic case scenarios we need an alternative to coal and the temporary surge of natgas to handle baseload between here and ~2040. It should be nuclear, but, sigh.
astrodust|8 years ago
No, it's a technology where if you use power plants decades out of date, that have known safety issues, and then cover-up the magnitude of the problem once a catastrope occurs then you have a very expensive clean-up operation.
Cleaning up Fukushima will be expensive, there's no denying it, but it's arguably the case that the Deepwater Horizon rig mess could cost significantly more.
niftich|8 years ago
There are many unanswered questions about the long-term impact of hydraulic fracturing on seismic stability and on groundwater, and the technique is under scrutiny in many parts of the world. Predictably favored by energy-lobbyists and opposed by environmentalists, fracking remains a contentious issue whose future in the US could depend on a "simple" party change -- hardly a sure bet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_Formation
seanmcdirmid|8 years ago
_delirium|8 years ago
awqrre|8 years ago
philipkglass|8 years ago
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|8 years ago
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.
ZeroGravitas|8 years ago
I seem to recall reading a study that suggested that surprisingly few electric bus or delivery van fleets would be required to soak up this cheap electricity and tame demand fluctuations but more recently I heard people saying that it's going to be a problem/disaster.
I'm not sure if there's new knowledge or it's just become a popular talking point.
soperj|8 years ago
strictnein|8 years ago
lettergram|8 years ago
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
accountyaccount|8 years ago
FullMtlAlcoholc|8 years ago
NotSammyHagar|8 years ago
unknown|8 years ago
[deleted]
Mendenhall|8 years ago
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.
sfifs|8 years ago
loeg|8 years ago
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|8 years ago
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.
mirko22|8 years ago
epistasis|8 years ago
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.
Animats|8 years ago
Every nuclear reactor design that has something complicated going on in the radioactive section has had serious problems. Gas-cooled reactors leak. (Ft. St. Vrain was so promising.) Pebble bed reactors jam. (The one in Germany is permanently jammed and can't be disassembled.) Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Ones with attached chemical plants have problems with handling of hazardous materials. It's discouraging.
Ordinary water-based reactors have a simple radioactive section. All the complexity is outside. Yet even those have problems.
Hyman Rickover on this subject:
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose ("omnibus reactor"). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.
Tade0|8 years ago
You can have an equivalent in solar, wind + storage in less than three years. That's 17 years of not producing electricity.
matt4077|8 years ago
I wonder why the tech community has this infatuation with nuclear power. Ever since I registered my three-digit slashdot account, I've been reading exactly this post, just that the type of reactor people dream of seems to change every five years or so. Good to know it's "Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders", right now.
Meanwhile, solar power has lowered prices by a factor of 10 or so and is on a clear trajectory to beat fossile fuels on costs, without subsidies.
I'm suspecting there is something cultural going on here–maybe some instinct to seek out what others perceive as dangerous? Beats me...
tdb7893|8 years ago
ams6110|8 years ago
FussyZeus|8 years ago
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.
delecti|8 years ago
arnon|8 years ago
sfifs|8 years ago
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.
Tanegashima|8 years ago
"We are backing nuclear"
"This time it will be good"
Can you see a populist saying that?
Turing_Machine|8 years ago
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.
mrfusion|8 years ago
xutopia|8 years ago
pc2g4d|8 years ago
finid|8 years ago
Wait! Hold it right there! Are you trying to tell me that "clean coal" is not coming back? </sarcasm>
jankotek|8 years ago
[deleted]
marcgcombi|8 years ago
[deleted]
phaemon|8 years ago
"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...