>Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is a political move, this is quite likely just economics.
Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is likely economics, RTFA at least a few paragraphs:
Granite Shore Power, the company that owns the coal plant in Bow, New Hampshire, said they ceased commercial operations September 12th, about a year and a half since they announced they would retire their facility by 2028 as part of a settlement agreement with environmental groups.
It's going to be a mix of both. If it were massively profitable, they'd just pay up whatever they need to, get whatever influential politicians on their side, do a bunch of marketing, and then continue operations.
Yes, natural gas is now cheaper than coal for power generation, and solar has become much cheaper. Even disregarding environmental concerns, it's just not a good choice any more.
I'm curious, in case anyone knows, how much of the economic disadvantage of coal is because of environmental reg compliance versus other, more fundamental costs?
A slurry is transported in one variety of these. The trick is to induce a swirl in the flow, so even though particles are constantly falling out of suspension, they stay suspended. It's mathematically analogous to how putting a twist in magnetic field lines in a tokamak (or stellarator) prevents ExB effects from driving the plasma into the wall, as they would in just a plain toroidal magnetic field.
Lots of water is needed and drying the coal before burning it adds cost.
Acre-feet as a unit just made me realize how many options you get for volume with multiple base units (a foot-mile-inch is ~12m³ in case anyone was wondering). The non-metric system continues to impress (not in a good way)!
I'm not a coal proponent, just trying to understand the veracity of an argument that I think R's make sometimes (that coal isn't economically viable primarily because state regs make it too expensive).
Coal requires manual labour and mining so even without environmental regulations it's expensive. In the US coal use decrease had very little to do with environmental factors most of it was because fracking brought in cheap natural gas and pushed coal out.
Its does, but you should see the machines they use for coal mining these days, particularly in Wyoming. A giant strip mine seems to require like 20 workers, but with giant trucks and excavators.
Even for underground mines, check out the massive longwall mining machines they use- it's kind of astonishing. They pretty much take all the coal.
I think this is lost in the political talk about protecting mining jobs- the main original competition is more efficient mining operations.
Anyway, it really says something that natural gas and solar are cheaper than coal given this context.
It's a bit dated (completed in 1978) and cost approximately $100 million. At one point it was the heaviest land vehicle, clocking in at 13,500 tons. It's since been succeded, but this bucket-wheel excavator needed only five people to operate. Those five people could mine 240,000 tons of coal[8] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden (rock/soil on top of the coal) per day. That's 2400 coal wagons!
After totally tapping out all of the coal at the Tagebau Hambach mine, in 2001, it took a crew of 70 together to move it 14 miles to the next mine. This move cost 15 million German Marks.
I think it's primarily a fundamental cost issue. It's simply far cheaper to get an equivalent amount of energy from fracking a natural gas formation than having to literally dig coal out of the ground.
(disclaimer that I manage a climate&energy research group)
Most of the comments here are speculative.
The TLDR is that coal plants have trouble ramping their production up/down quickly, unlike natural gas which can do so in minutes. So, if you have a grid that is being thrashed by variable production (renewables), this results in variable pricing and demand for baseload. Coal cannot economically compete in that market (and neither can nuclear, which has the same problem).
Given that renewable power power is self correlated (all the solar panels are producing at once - or they’re not, all the wind turbines are turning at once - or they’re not) - renewable energy leads to low prices when it’s produced and high prices when it’s not.
Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?
Batteries are also highly useful for relaxing transmission constraints. I've seen a claim that sufficient storage (at various places in the network) could increase the energy transmittable over the existing grid by a factor of 3.
An analogy here is natural gas pipelines with intermediate storage caverns, which allow the pipelines to operate more steadily even if demand various greatly over the year.
> Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?
Even better, if you have a functioning wholesale electricity market, you can put those batteries on the grid and benefit everybody.
No, because as the parent comment suggests, if you have solar+wind backed by natural gas and battery storage, if the battery storage isn't enough the natural gas plants can quickly fire up. But coal plants don't have this ability, so it doesn't work as well in this environment (which is today's environment).
Yeah, but sometimes the intermittency is pretty extreme, and you can get away with significantly less overpaneling and storage if you have a mix of power sources. Not many experts advocate for 100% renewables.
Right; batteries aren't really suitable for the low frequency part of the supply/demand mismatch. Daily storage, great, perhaps up to 1 week, but lower frequencies they are increasingly expensive.
But there are other storage ideas that do much better for that. For example, burning an e-fuel like hydrogen, or ultra low capex thermal storage.
Well, if you want to answer that question, you probably also need to figure out the hypothetical cost of the other power sources minus environmental regulations.
Nuclear would be (and used to be) massively cheaper, before regulations went wild against it.
I'm deliberately saying 'went wild', because the earlier nuclear power generation that was built to saner standards also has turned out to be incredibly safe already.
(Basically, anyone who avoided insane Soviet bullshit had safe nuclear power, as measured in eg fatalities per Joule of electricity generated.)
The regulatory costs of nuclear are mostly occurred in the design phase. Those costs are sunk and mostly irrelevant for new builds of old designs.
The fact that old designs like the AP1000 are crazy expensive to build has a lot more to do with the fact that the US sucks at building mega projects than anything else.
Interestingly, one of the reasons the design phase for nuclear is so onerous is the sheer amount of red tape involved due to compliance and other regulatory reasons. You wanna know something funny? You know what's really good at generating piles of convincing sounding bullshit that it's possible no one even actually reads, and looks like it's totally going to insert fuel rods into the nuclear power industry?
Other countries are better at building particular types of mega projects. Some are better at transit, others are better at building tunnels, others are better at building massive ships, et cetera. But in regards to nuclear, I believe you're right.
I'm getting the impression the problem isn't any particular regulation, but rather than because regulations exist, the design is fixed.
Getting a design approved means a specific design is approved. So, the power plant must be built as designed, no changes. And apparently ensuring you built exactly what the design specifies is really expensive.
What's needed to reduce this cost is having some way to get a whole cloud of closely related designs approved, so that reasonable deviations from the design are also approved. This is equivalent to saying only the most critical part of the design would need to be built as designed, everything else would be allowed some slop. With something like this, one might (for example) be able to build the confinement building with less tight control on the configuration of the reinforcing steel.
I'm don't know how one would get such a cloud of designs approved. Maybe this is a problem that could be solved by massive computation? Run billions of mutant designs through a simulation gauntlet to see how sensitive it is to various perturbations? Or maybe add more defense in depth, like devices that scrub radioactive elements from steam (such things exist) so the tolerable chance of meltdown can be allowed to increase while keeping expected damage in check?
Sounds kind of like hyperparameter search - you're searching the design space for the bounds of the different parameters. I don't know if parametric design is possible on reactors, but would be neat if possible.
I'm mostly curious if there's any world in which coal beats at-scale solar production, or if it's totally moot. To be clear, I'm not rooting for that so much as looking for an ironclad case against.
Nuclear is a whole can of worms because of its PR problems.
It wasn't just spiraling costs, but also the collapse in the steady 7%/year growth in electrical energy demand. Without transparency on demand growth, very long term investments become risky (a risk reflected in the bankruptcy of WPPSS). The passage of PURPA in 1978 also didn't help with this as it allowed a flood of non-utility generation onto the grid, helping soak up what demand growth there was.
It looks like the top-end estimate is that the Fukushima disaster may have caused up to 500 additional total lifetime deaths from cancer. Roughly 23,000 people per year died of diseases attributed to coal power plants in the United States alone from 1999-2020.
Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.
500 deaths at $12M per life is $6B. This is a small fraction of the total cost of Fukushima.
People say LNT overestimates deaths, but what they don't realize is that even if you take LNT at face value the cost of deaths from a nuclear accident isn't really that high. A regulatory regime where reactor operators that have accidents are charged the inferred cost of the expected deaths could work.
People whose metabolic reserve is low often die when you stress them.
I saw a study claiming 440 excess deaths from the Los Angeles fires. I'll make an assumption that permanently moving old and health impaired people from the Fukushima exclusion zone had a similar increase in mortality. And then a bit of looking leads me to this.
"The evacuation itself also was not without severe consequences. The accident was in the winter, and the evacuation of 840 patients or elderly people in nursing homes and health-care facilities apparently resulted in 60 immediate deaths due to hypothermia, dehydration, trauma and deterioration of serious medical conditions (Tanigawa et al 2012) and upwards of 100 deaths in subsequent month"
Fatalities per Joule of generated electricity is extremely low for nuclear power, even if you add not just Fukushima but also Chernobyl.
So if you'd scale up, and keep that level of safety, it would be fine. Even less safety would be fine. After all, we accept much less safety in eg natural gas or even solar power. (Solar power is extremely safe once running, but if you look at casualties over the lifecycle, you get a few people falling off roofs when installing residential solar power. It's a very small number, but nuclear is so safe, that the roof-fall incidents of solar are a big number by comparison.)
NE is starved for natural gas. They replaced the coal plants with gas and didn't bother to build enough pipelines (and even blocked them). We are getting a lot of our gas from Tankers from Europe and even Russia before the war. So now NE has nearly the highest electricity costs in the country even though we're not far away from some of the most abundant natural gas in the planet.
Including regulatory and litigation expenses, this is simply not true. That said, coal is very dirty and is not the best choice for power generation because of pollution. Coal is pretty cheap, and it's take most of my lifetime to change the cost through regulation, litigation and lawmaking.
Unlikely. The ISO has 3.5GW of solar and nuclear capacity equally (I’m aware of capacity factor of solar vs nuclear, but the ISO also reports ~6GW of behind the meter distributed solar which only manifests as reduced demand). The ISO needs more batteries, renewables, and transmission from hydro in Quebec, Canada (1.2GW), but nuclear is not needed to succeed long term and those two generators will eventually be decommissioned, as their license only extends their operating period to ~2050. Twenty five years is plenty of time to replace their 3.5GW of output; 18GW of battery storage, 17GW of wind, and 13.5GW of solar is in the ISO’s interconnect queue or has been proposed by developers.
https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-re... (NextEra, which owns the Seabrook nuclear power plant in N.H., stands to lose tens of millions of dollars every year if the NECEC comes online and attempted to use political donations to scuttle the Quebec Hydro transmission line)
https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/ne... (“The new transmission line between Quebec and Maine will provide 1,200 megawatts (MW) of renewable hydroelectric power to the New England power grid in Lewiston, Maine, sufficient to meet the demand of 1.2 million homes. Once built, NECEC will be New England's largest renewable energy source, saving customers $190 million per year.”)
Yup, I've been watching the NECEC story unfold over the years. Boston's giant natural gas Mystic Generating Station was closed in anticipation of the power being replaced by NECEC.
There is an interesting podcast about Quebec hydropower, it's quite an accomplishment, not without controversy.
Apropos nothing,
what would happen if that transmission line simply didn't get completed till, say 2028? Hydro power sounds like something woke people might like, and dear leader says we can't have that.
Canada may cut you off eventually because the population is rapidly growing and it will want the power for itself. Hopefully New England is preparing for that eventuality.
> Canada may cut you off eventually because the population is rapidly growing and it will want the power for itself. Hopefully New England is preparing for that eventuality.
Trump just closed the already approved largest solar power project in the US. That’s political.
I’m all for fusion but we need power now for the transition. Losing the solar project for 3 million people is a big loss. it takes a long time to get any type of big power up to speed.
I understand the problem is transmission much more than generation. There's a backlog of power sources waiting to come online for infrastructure to catch up. Or so I heard.
I believe it was an episode of the podcast "Shift Key". Season 2, episode 5 is called "A Beginner's Guide to the Interconnection Queue". The hosts talk to some industry people who present the case. They say that there practical reasons why the interconnection queue is slowing down renewable generation deployment significantly.
I don't know if this podcast presents a balanced view, but it sounds convincing to me.
Peak coal was in 2007, and has been falling rapidly since. We are currently generating about 1/3 the electricity from coal in 2023 vs 2007[0].
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...