Solar power grew faster than any other fuel in 2016

Re:Solar power grew faster than any other fuel in 2016 by toomuchtodo on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:02AM (#15400946)

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...

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Re:Solar power grew faster than any other fuel in 2016 by Brakenshire on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:33AM (#15401189)

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.

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Re:Solar power grew faster than any other fuel in 2016 by ben_w on Friday October 06, 2017 @01:20PM (#15418482)

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.

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