A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal

Re:A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal by FractalLP on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:11PM (#17260772)

For anyone not in the know, Trump is merely following the recommendations of the Department of Energy regarding providing economic payments to Coal/Nuclear to value the very very real value they provide in fuel-mix diversity. I recommend reading up on "Resiliency" and the Polar Vortex event of 2014. Essentially, the east coast almost ran out of the necessary power to serve load. This is because they had gas pipeline delivery issues and much gas was being used for residential heating. Fortunately, ~80% of the Coal slated for retirement in the region was available. The DOE stated things would have been "catastrophic" without coal there.

So yes Coal is uneconomic and awful for the environment. However, it is important to recognize the value that it and Nuclear bring as they often have a minimum of 3 months of fuel on-site unlike gas, intermittent renewable, and batteries.

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Re:A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal by mikeash on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:26PM (#17260889)

He’s following recommendations from a department where he appointed a leader who wanted to shut it down, and also didn’t know what it did? That makes it so much better!

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Re:A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal by FractalLP on Saturday June 09, 2018 @09:22AM (#17272884)

Rick Perry probably wanted to keep the coal industry from being shutdown regardless, but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side. The need to reimburse coal for the value it provides is well understood by all the experts at the DOE, FERC, and the ISO/RTOs. ISO-NE is deeply concerned with the upcoming retirement of several large coal units and has run into hot water for considering subsidizing them. These organizations run reliability studies to determine the impact from these retirements. They KNOW this is a problem and are trying to determine possible market solutions.

Just saying we don't need any coal shows a definite lack of understanding of the industry and the problem. I work in power system transmission, but have zero connections to either coal or nuclear. My only "skin" in the game is a deep concern for premature coal retirements based off of all the public studies which have been run.

Edit: My memory is a little foggy, but I just double-checked myself and the coal plants in ISO-NE I was thinking about were actually natural gas plants that wouldn't be impacted by loss of pipeline as they were served by a local source. If they had enough of those, you wouldn't need to keep nearly as much coal around. However, I bet they're fairly rare.

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Re:A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal by mikeash on Saturday June 09, 2018 @10:32AM (#17273214)

“but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side”

Can you explain that parenthetical? I’m at a loss.

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Re:A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal by John_KZ on Thursday June 07, 2018 @08:12PM (#17261502)

I don't get why you're downvoted so much. Coal certainly has a place, even nuclear does in a country as big as the US. Going on a "monofuel" energy production (which would be gas, for now) has a lot of hidden costs on top of the obvious ones (gas is significantly more expensive than coal on industrial scales for energy production, but still far cheaper than nuclear or solar).

Not to mention that using coal extends the deadline on your country's gas reserves, reduces the much-hated fracking etc.

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Re:A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal by FractalLP on Saturday June 09, 2018 @09:07AM (#17272827)

I'm not sure either. I work in this industry as a professional engineer and as a neutral party. The facts are the facts at this point. It might not fit someone's agenda though.

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