I think that's been an economic reality in the USA for a few years now, though also including natural gas in the tech doing the replacing. The recent EPA document that was intended to support coal and nuclear covered this:

“The draft report finds that since 2002, ‘most baseload power plant retirements have been the victims of overcapacity and relatively high operating cost but often reflect the advanced age of the retiring plants.’

“Overcapacity is a major cause of the turmoil in electricity markets. The report explains that because the growth in electricity demand has flattened since 2008, it is harder for ‘less competitive plants’ to survive. …

“And it doesn’t make sense to keep an uneconomic plant running when you know it’s going to keep losing money.

“In the case of nuclear power, the study notes that vast majority of the plant closure announcements blame plant retirement on ‘unfavorable market conditions.’ And the ‘most unfavorable condition is that the marginal cost of generation for many nuclear plants is higher than the cost of most other generators in the market.’

“Similarly, coal is also hurt by its high marginal cost: ‘[Coal] plants that have retired are old and inefficient units that were not recovering their operations and fuel costs, much less capital cost recovery.'”

That may be starting with the oldest, dirtiest and least efficient powerplants but it's only going to get worse for them as time goes on.

Small caveat: the Trump administration is looking into using a national security law from decades ago to prop up coal plants (the law provides subsidies to generators who can keep 90 days of fuel on hand). If this policy were to go into effect, it would raise rates consumers pay, very likely speeding the adoption of rooftop solar in those markets.

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-09-29/perry...

This doesn’t worry me. In fact I like the idea of coal power plants being a backup and ready to go. The more solar we have the less backup we’ll need, but it’s always nice to have a backup.

Coal generators don't work this way. It can take 12-36 hours to ramp from a cold start. Natural gas (combined cycle turbines) can throttle up in minutes, which is what pushed coal out of the generation mix (natural gas is a perfect compliment to renewables until battery storage is cost competitive, you have to be able to fill in generation intermittency gaps with little response latency).

Here's a great story [1] from the Tampa Bay Times about what happened when TECO (the local utility) didn't want to power down a coal fired boiler to take the generator out of service to clear slag from the bottom of the boiler (TL;DR several people died a horrible death from the equivalent of flowing magma).

Coal is almost dead, just a bit more of a way to go.

[1] http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/tampa-e...

Coal is dead in Britain, there will be zero generation in the next few years. It was the deregulated energy industry that killed it, starting in the 80's, out-competed on price and flexibility by gas.

I don’t want to sound like I’m a fan of coal, but coal died in the UK before it became uneconomical: the coal miners went on strike for long enough that the government made it a strategic goal to never let striking workers be politically relevant again.

A much better plan is to use an excess of solar energy to power processes that produce ethanol-based fuels and then keep a reserve of those (which by the by, is carbon sequestration at best and neutral at worst).

Coal power plants are awkward and inefficient and require a lot of work just to move the fuel around. There's a reason the world worked hard to develop better fuel technologies as quickly as possible.

That's kind of ironic, considering that solar plants can keep an effectively unlimited number of "days of fuel" on hand.

They can't though -- the next day could always be cloudy and there's a very strong chance that one day in 90 will be.

So solar panels can't stock a reliable X day supply, even if over any (moderate) period of time, they have a very guaranteed supply.

They can with batteries, but that is a slightly different situation.

In answer to the question below, this isn't practical with modern battery technology.

Is there a battery technology that can store 90 days worth of full-plant production (which doesn't require a second generator consuming a fuel later)?

All the ways I know of on that scale actually require a second plant/turbine -- in which case, you didn't store 90 days of solar production capacity, you actually stored 90 days of the second plant's fuel, which you produced intermitently with solar capacity. (Which can still be a very good and environmentally friendly thing to do! But isn't what we're talking about as a technical point.)

Ways of the second variety:

- Hydro pumping

- Hydrocarbon synthesis

- Hydrogen separation

- Compressing gasses

And there's probably more that I'm forgetting.

The oversupply in the generation market is why I've lately been confused why the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles more vigorously to drive demand for electricity. With pretty much every other electric appliance having only gotten more efficient I don't see any other way to drive significant increases in demand.

"Utilities Should Charge Into Electric Vehicles"

"The total potential market for electricity fueling American vehicles is staggering (warning: large back-of-envelope ahead).Let's just take light-duty vehicles (not heavy trucks or buses), of which there were about 190 million on the road in 2015, according to government figures. For the sake of simplicity, replace them all with a full battery-electric vehicle that gets 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour, loses 10 percent of the power it takes as it charges and discharges, and travels 13,000 miles a year.Presto! You've basically created an entirely new center of demand for power rivaling the entire industrial sector of the U.S.:"

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-03/electri...

Well you need to subtract what is currently burned off in refineries in those calculations it is quite significant (roughly same amount of energy for refining oil and electric cars per mile driven but only 1/5 or so in electricity and rest in burning oil products).

Gasoline cars use lots of electricity...

There isn't much additional profit in the selling of additional electrons to consumers for a number of reasons, not limited to the fact that electric utilities are regulated monopolies, and widespread decoupling[1] of utility rates which incentivizes utilities to get customers to save electricity.

The profit to be made is in the building of the generation capacity itself. The problem with this is that coal plants and traditional nuclear plants are very expensive to build compared to natural gas plants and renewables like wind and solar.

After being built, they are very expensive to fuel and maintain compared to renewables.

So utilities are more likely to choose natural gas or renewables for new generation capacity. It's not that the coal industry hasn't tried to convince people that they are the fuel of the future (i.e. the "Clean Coal" marketing effort), but the costs just don't line up in coal's favor, and that's not even considering the cost of the currently unaccounted externalities of coal burning.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_(utility_regulation...

That's why I said "coal and nuclear industries" rather than electric utilities. Even if the generators aren't making money from increased output someone still needs to mine the minerals that power those plants. While I agree that those technologies are not viable in the long term, in the short term their interests (staying in business a few more years) align with the long term interests of the environmentalists (who want to decouple transportation from fossil fuels which is impossible with ICEs).

>why the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles more vigorously to drive demand for electricity

Well, on the coal side, they can hardly maintain that coal isn't bad for the environment whilst simultaneously claiming that electric cars are better.

There are advantages that electric cars have that have nothing to do with their evironmental benefits. They have massive torque, smooth acceleration, are silent at low speeds, you never have to go to a gas station, fewer moving parts so less to go wrong, etc. And even on the most coal-intensive grids in the US electric vehicles produce less greenhouse gas emissions than the average ICE vehicle and there's still a public health benefit to displacing non-GHG emissions away from cities where people live.

Although, coal produces its pollution many miles away from population centres, whereas internal combustion cars produce it feet away from people breathing it in on city pavements.

Nuclear in particular should be promoting it, it matches perfectly with the overnight charging demand. Perhaps in that case it's just that nuclear isn't that significant an industry, they have enough effort trying to promote themselves.

Certainly it's strange that utilities in general aren't all guns blazing for electric cars, I suspect we'll see that start to happen soon.

Various utilities give $10K rebates on EV purchases. I've never run the numbers to see how that works out for them economically. Though they often get government support to roll out insulation and other efficiency improvements so maybe it falls under that.

The ones that pay to control the timing of EV charging make more immediate sense to me.

Electric vehicles = widely-available high-capacity batteries = solar eats their lunch, very very quickly

I don't think electric vehicles lack promotion.

When was the last time you saw or heard an ad for a electric car? If you went into a car dealership, would you expect the salesperson to recommend an electric car to you if you didn't ask?

> would you expect the salesperson to recommend an electric car

Not in the US perhaps but here in Norway I think I might. It has a lot to do with the attitude of the authorities and how much they are willing to skew the market in particular directions. In the past they skewed it for diesels now for electric. The US has historically tended to skew the market to favour on-shore producers, regardless of what they made, at the expense of imported vehicles. Now there are subsidies for electric cars so I can easily imagine that there will soon be a time when a salesperson recommends an electric car even in the US.

Every single day for months.

I ended up buying one. Tesla doesn't advertise much, but Chevy, Toyota, Nissan, BMW etc sure do.

Note that there is a difference between retirement and destroyed. I believe my company still keeps an old coal boiler from the 1880s connected to a generator from the 1920s in operating condition. Because this generator exists and can be started in an emergency (with 12 hours warning for warm up time) we get a substantial discount on our power. I understand that about every 5 years the power company asks us to turn it on at which point we supply power for most of the town.

If you look you will see many businesses have their own generator running on the hottest day of the year - they get a discount. Because diesel generators can start on a minutes notice they get are higher on the priority list as to when they get asked to run on their own generator rather than grid power.

The above isn't to say that the power company is retiring these old power plants in the same way. I would guess in some cases the maintenance required to make them safe (or emissions legal) to use might be too high and they are destroyed.

It would be prudent to have backups,but it's hard to imagine why many nuclear plants would be kept in operating condition.

The levelized cost of solar is already less that the fuel and maintenance cost of coal, for many locations. However that’s the levelized cost, which means that it has to be used when the sun is out in order for solar to be competitive.

It’s why the DOE is ignoring the findings of their own baseload reliability study to try to impose coal and nuclear subsidies:

http://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-does-baseload-power-rule...

The weird and arbitrary “90 days of fuel onsite” requirement says nothing about reliability, but it is a way to define what coal+nuclear can do (though I wonder if coal plants keep 90 days onsite these days...)

While coal is more expensive, natural gas plants can still be cheaper for many locations. And older nuclear plants presumably have extremely low ongoing costs (as they don't pay for storage of waste in most countries).

Yes, and since most natural gas plants are fed by pipeline, the subsidies seem designed specifically to exclude natural gas.

This is despite coal stacks freezing during the last polar vortex, causing much of the reduction in resiliency.

(Side note: though many old nuclear plants are still cost competitive, utilities seem to favor fossil fuels to the extent that many if not most of them are at risk of being decommissioned. And in competitive energy markets, many of these old plants can't bid on price any more either, leading to many proposed nuclear-specific subsidies in particular markets.)

Nuclear and coal often can be shut by warm weather too, if their water supply is affected.

I'm not sure anyone is upset about the idea of having to build new mass storage stations for major grids and sell storage for new homes.

Distributing the grid COULD be the next big infrastructural push for the western world, if folks could just agree to stop propping up the fossil fuel world's influence.