https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-09-29/perry...
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 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.
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.
In answer to the question below, this isn't practical with modern battery technology.
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 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...
Gasoline cars use lots of 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...
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.
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.
The ones that pay to control the timing of EV charging make more immediate sense to me.
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.
I ended up buying one. Tesla doesn't advertise much, but Chevy, Toyota, Nissan, BMW etc sure do.
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.
“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.