King Coal
Over the past decade, nearly one hundred coal burning power plants have died in the proposal stage trumped by the legitimate objections of local communities fearful of a dirty deadly fuel that is neither cheap nor clean. Ozone and particulates from coal plants kill tens of thousands of Americans each year and cause widespread illnesses and disease. Acid rain emissions have destroyed the forests over the length of the Appalachian and sterilized one in five Adirondack lakes. Neurotoxic mercury raining from these plants has contaminated fish in every state--including every waterway in nineteen states--and poisons over a million American women and children annually. Coal industry strip mines have already destroyed 500 mountains in Appalachia, buried 2,000 miles of rivers and streams and will soon have flattened an area the size of Delaware. Finally, coal, which supplies 46% of our electric power, is the most important source of America's greenhouse gases.
Beating our deadly and expensive coal addiction will be lucrative. America's cornucopia of renewable energy resources and the recent maturation of solar, geothermal and wind technologies will allow us to meet most of our future energy needs with clean, cheap, abundant renewables. Bright Source, a solar thermal provider, has just signed contracts to provide California with 2.6 gigawatts of power annually from desert mirror farms. Construction costs are about the same per gigawatt as a coal plant and half the cost of a nuke plant. Once built, the energy is free forever. In contrast, once you build a coal plant, your biggest costs--fuel extraction and transportation and the harm from emissions--are just the beginning.
In the short term, a revolution in natural gas production over the past two years, has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight--and without the expense of building new power plants.
How? Well it's pretty easy. Around 900 of America's coal plants--78% of the total--are small (generating less than half a gigawatt), antiquated, and horrendously inefficient. Their average age is 45 years, with many limping past 75. These ancient plants burn 20% more coal per megawatt hour than modern large coal units and are 60-75% less fuel efficient than high-efficiency gas plants. These small units account for less than 42% of the actual capacity for coal fired power but almost one half the total emission of the entire energy sector! The costs of operation, maintenance, capital improvements and repair costs of these antiquated worm-eaten facilities, if properly assessed, would make them far more expensive to run than natural gas plants. However, energy sector pricing structures make it possible for many plant operators to pass those costs to the public and make choices based on fuel costs, which in the case of coal, appears deceptively cheap because of massive subsidies.
Mothballing or throttling back these plants would mean huge cost savings to the public and eliminate the need for more than 350 million tons of coal, including all 30 million tons harvested through mountain top removal. Their closure would reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain, and slash America's CO2 from power plants by 20%--an amount greater than the entire reduction mandated in the first years of the pending Climate Change Legislation--at a fraction of the cost.
These decrepit generators can be eliminated very quickly--in many instances literally overnight by substituting power from America's existing and underutilized natural gas generation, which is abundant, cleaner and more affordable and accessible today than dirty coal.
Since 2007, the discovery of vast supplies of deep shale gas in the United States, along with advanced extraction methods, have created stable supply and predictably low prices for most of the next century. Of the 1,000 gigawatts of generating capacity currently required to meet national energy demand, 336 are coal fired, many of which are utilized far more heavily than for cleaner gas generation units. Surprisingly, America actually has more gas generation capacity--450 gigawatts--than coal. But most of the costs for coal-fired units are ignored in deciding when to operate these units. Public regulators traditionally require utilities to dispatch coal first. For that reason, high efficiency gas generators, which can replace a large percentage of U.S. coal, are used only 36% of the time. By simply changing the dispatch rule nationally, we could quickly reduce power generated by existing coal-fired plants and achieve massive emissions reductions. The new rule would change the order in which gas and coal fired plants are utilized by requiring that whenever coal and gas plants are competing head-to-head, the gas generation must be dispatched first.
To quickly gain further economic and environmental advantages, the larger, newer coal plants that remain in operation should be required to co-fire with natural gas. Many of these plants are already connected to gas pipelines and can easily be adapted to burn gas as 15 to 20% of their fuel. Experience shows using gas to partially fuel these plants dramatically reduces forced outages and maintenance costs and can be the most cost effective way to reduce CO2 emissions. This change can immediately achieve an additional 10 to 20% reduction in coal use and immediately reduce dangerous coal emissions.
Natural gas comes with its own set of environmental caveats. It is a carbon-based fuel and is extraction from shale, the most significant new source, if not managed carefully, can cause serious water, land use, and wildlife impacts, especially in the hands of irresponsible producers and lax regulators. But those impacts are dwarfed by the disastrous holocaust of coal and can be mitigated by careful regulation.
The giant advantage of a quick conversion from coal to gas is the quickest route for jumpstarting our economy and saving our planet.
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Most really pragmatic solutions are comparatively simple. The KISS theory in operation. I agree with the "brilliant" part, as well.
Wind has been more problematic than solar from an historical perspective. The co-generation issues with a source so widely-variable have made wind generation unpopular with utilities. Most can't make a profit on wind.
Solar has been problematic in that the cost of deployment, even stretched out over 15-year amortizations has made the wholesale cost to utilities higher than can be recouped at allowable market retail rates.
The co-generation of wind using banked hydrogen and oxygen storage is on the horizon http://whigsntories.blogspot.com/ The cost of solar will be below $1 per watt of peak output rating by this time next year, as R&D rolls out new technology http://eqsolaris.com/site/index.php
In the short meanwhile, prioritizing NG-fired generation over coal-fired is an excellent tactical move. Begging the question, What are we going to do with all that coal? And the related question, Are we going to have to bail out our railroad industry when 20% of its revenue (coal hauling operations, mostly for power plants) trickles to a stop?
As usual, a brilliantly simple and pragmatic approach to getting off the dime on energy. In the Clinton era, we created coal standards, but the bill was watered down to apply to only new plants as opposed to converting older plants. The result? No new plants were built until Bush got into office.
This is how the old Washington works. Following Kennedy’s lead, we focus on the big ideas. We convert old plants and parallel with solar. Solar can eventually take over. Wind, wave, algae, etc are all more problematic. If we need to burn something its better to be Nat Gas than coal or switch grass or pretty much anything else given today’s technology.
Speculators that purchased huge swatches for land to arbitrage energy for anything except solar will not like this, but we need to move forward.
The cost issue is irrelevant in this case because the existing infrastructure was built by the taxpayer over a hundred plus years. We simply need to convert and this actually is an investment as opposed to spending.
At the same time, Nat Gas for autos is problematic and muddies the waters. We must jack up cafe standards even higher until we get to a better place with the auto. Converting autos to Nat Gas will likely set that infrastructure in place for at least 50 and likely 100 years.
This is an opportunity for congress to get something done right for a change.
With all due respect to Mr. Kennedy, I humbly disagree with your assertions that natural gas is anything other than blatantly destructive to our species. The time when ignorance to global consequences is allowed has passed.
Respectfully,
Extremely important article. Thank you.
Unfortunately, this reads as an advertisement, and I'm wondering where the vested interests are. There may be benefits to natural gas, but there are also environmental hazards like the pollution of underground water from hydrofraking. Not only that, but we'd still be dependent on utility companies to provide our energy. A much better solution would be mandatory solar panels on every building combined with new wind farms. There are other alternative solutions that would allow every building to cheaply produce all the electricity they need with zero waste and zero impact on the environment. The point is that we have to solve this energy problem once and for all. That means forward-thinking solutions that will work and keep working no matter what happens with the economy. Eventually the utility companies will have to step away from profitability and towards sustainability.
Yes, I agree with that. I work for one of these smaller coal plants and do not like it. We normally are off for a month because of the load being so low and go onto our smaller gas fired plants during that time. We only supply the surrounding buildings with 125 psi steam and cannot run the turbine, which supplies about 38% of the electrical power, at all. We have been on gas for over 4 months now and will not start running coal until september when the load picks up due to the students returning back to the university. Hopefully something will be done and we can get rid of coal altogether and just run natural gas or fuel oil and just buy all of our electricity from the utility plant as well as getting some from solar and wind farms just off campus.
As RFK Jr. states, there are environmental impacts to natural gas drilling but they are very minor compared to the horrendous damage done to the environment by coal mining. Frac'ing is a much safer practice than what you have heard. Hundreds of thousands of wells in this country have been frac'd since the 1960s. Frac'ing has become news because it is a concern in the New York City watershed, which is especially sensitive because their water is untreated. All he is saying is that if the government did not grant the coal industry special privileges and subsidies, the market would choose the more affordable and environmentally friendly fuel. The coal lobby has enabled that industry to get away with murder.
We should switch to natural gas immediately. However the claim that we have affordable natural gas into the next century is false. Peak gas is around the corner, and will usher in an era of ever-increasing costs (peak coal is as well - no advantage to sticking with the foulest of fuels).
We have a very short window of time to ramp up alternatives. If you haven't put solar on your rooftop and/or wind in your yard - why not? There will never be a better/cheaper/more important time.
The time for action was the 90s. It is now PAST TIME for action!
Tom
Everyone knows (or should, if they want to be knowledgable on the subject) that America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. However, we really need to ask ourselves if trading in on that "wealth" is really inline with what we are trying to accomplish these days.
No matter what you do with coal, it will involve a huge release of CO2. There are many zany schemes for capturing this... but we need to ask ourselves if 1. they are practical, and 2. will they actually be implimented?
It's one thing to SAY we are going to pump the carbon dioxide underground... but will they really do it, or will they just figure it's cheaper to release it into the atmosphere? Because really, what is there to stop them? The weak and limp cap-and-trade system, which has no penalties built in?
America would have been far better served with a straight out tax on CO2 release, rather than a zany and complex scheme which will only profit Goldman Sachs.
Mr. Kennedy, Your Father was the man I idolized when I was a young teenager even more so then JFK . I will never forget Bobby's compassion and warmth. I so wonder what the world would be like if had both John and Robert Kennedy had lived. Thank You Sir for all that Your Family has sacrificed for the good of the country. God Bless You.
Ditto. Couldn't have said it better.
Amen and Amen
What a, pure and simple, stupid idea.
"to provide California with 2.6 gigawatts of power annually"
Watts are a unit of power, i.e. energy per unit of time. Gigawatts per year would be a unit for the growth of power output. If the sentence were correct as stated, it would mean that BrightSource provides no energy at time zero 2.6 gigawatts at the end of year one, 5.2 gigawatts at the end of year two, and so on. Unfortunately, that's probably not what the deal calls for.
Heh, I go to pick a nit, and then I leave out a comma myself. It should have a comma after "zero" in "no energy at time zero, 2.6 gigawatts at the end of year one, ... ".
My family is from Salem, MA, and my memories of the coal burning power plant located there are just as Mr. Kennedy describes. However, I am not convinced that the Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline is saving the day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritimes_&_Northeast_Pipeline
"The Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline is a 30 inch /24 inch natural gas transmission pipeline that runs from the Sable Offshore Energy Project (SOEI) gas plant in Goldboro in Guysborough County on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, Canada, for 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) to Dracut, Massachusetts, in the United States where it connects to the North American grid. The pipeline runs through the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and the United States states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. The system has a capacity to carry 440 million cubic feet per day. It has its offices in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The pipeline came into operation in 2000. Prior to this, natural gas was selling for US$2.31 per million BTU in the New England market (February 2000). By December, the price was US$8.45 per million BTU. The abrupt rise in price was attributed to an increase in demand in New England. In contrast, the price of competing heating oil rose from 45 cents to just 58 cents per litre over the same period"
Conceptually this path makes all the sense in the world. In reality however, not in thoughts, we are a long way from "cleancoal."
I wish it were so easy, but how can we equivocate the "saving of the planet" while dithering over a few percentage points of efficiency between old and new plants, when it's quite clear the major utilities are not going to just Jump to it...and even if they did the math shows that we actually wont be reducing much CO2 emissions..as if that mattered in the next 20 years..and in the mean time, new and promising technologies for non-carbon fuel go hungry. 20 Million for a center on global warming on SanFran's Hunter's point is a nice gesture but 20 million can buy a lot of R&D for space based solar and fusion.
C'mon, get off your lazy pre-conceptions of what is happening in energy physics and developement. It's as if the kings and ministers of old europe were arguing how to build horse powered submarines to repell moorish invaders.
Let's focus on saving the planet in meaningful ways; like understanding the very real threat of cosmic impacts and gamma burst, or our need for energy and materials and the un-deniable path towards the 10 billion mouths we'll be feeding like it or not...soon.
Barring that, what about signing over all procedes (not just profits)ffrom these carbon trading schemes to be used exclusively to help modernize and build sustainable and flood resistant infrastructure to the wave of new mega million cities...none of which are in the US by the way. Cheers.
And where do we go for clean water after the last aquifers are poisoned by hydrofracking for natural gas? Chemicals involved in the process include benzene (causes sterility), butoxyethonol (causes birth defects) and over 200 other lovely substances that cause cancer, impair life or cause death. So the hell with those of us who live here in the Catskills? Fine. My little stream feeds a bigger one, which feeds a river, which feeds a major NYC reservoir. To hell with those who live in New York City? To hell with everybody as long as we can keep wasting energy and gas companies get rich?
Most people who are in favor of expanded gas drilling don't live where it's about to happen, any more than most people who are in favor of coal use live where they're blowing the tops off mountains. We are eating our young here, and we need to find a way to make it stop.
Natural gas is too valuable to be burned in stationary power plants or for industrial heat. We should immediately subsidize the conversion of automobiles to run off natural gas and to provide the infrastructure to support such a change. This not only would reduce carbon emissions by 30% it would also free us from imported oil. With no dependency on imported oil we would be free of Middle Eastern entanglements thus saving $500 billion dollars per year in war and military costs.
Generating electricity from wind and solar makes sense in every respect. Unlike oil, most of the money required to make this happen remains in America, its carbon free and it’s non-depleting. At the present it requires subsidies to be “economically viable” using traditional cost benefit analyses. What these analyses ignore are the environmental costs of coal and the military costs for oil. Were the military savings from a switch to domestic gas employed to subsidize wind and solar we could substitute wind and solar for coal. Thus the solution for carbon emissions, wars and imported oil can be obtained by simply diverting funding of the military to domestically produced alternative energy. Solar subsidies for individuals and businesses offer the additional benefit of not relying on the grid to move the electricity. Thus point of use generation is a double savings.
my company bought a fleet of natural gas vehicles. the technology isnt there yet.
they have a very short range per tank a little over 100 miles. so your driving is planned around where you can refuel.
the engines clog easily. natural gas does not flow well and oil needs to be added. the oil then needs to be removed before entering the combustion chamber. something that has not been perfected let alone adequatly provided for. the engines provide major overhaul every 10000 miles.
they will not start in cold weather.
anybody who advocates natural gas vehicles does not know the facts.
Honda may have solved these problems.
http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-gx/
Natural gas cant be all that valuable, olephart. We have several hundred years supply, the price has dropped from $12 to $3 in two years.
It's value is as a replacement for imported oil. The cost of maintaining a military commited to securing Middle Eastern oil is $185 per barrel and 4400 American lives (so far).
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