Sorry Trump, US coal plant retirements second highest ever

[NeoGreen]

https://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/sorry-trump-us-coal-plant-retirements-second-highest-ever.html

Sorry Trump, US coal plant retirements second highest ever
Sami Grover November 15, 2018

When I wrote about Spanish miners embracing the closure of mines, one commenter questioned my assertion that US coal was declining too. And they were right—at least as far as coal production is concerned.

Consumption, and consumption capacity, however is another matter.

In fact, Bloomberg News Energy Finance (found via the good folks at Cleantechnica) reports that coal power plant closures will hit their second highest year on record, at least as far as capacity is concerned:

This year’s widespread closures were headlined by the retirement of four massive Vistra plants in the ERCOT (Texas) market. Coal plants retiring this year produced 127,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2017, enough to power 12 million homes.

And nobody appears to be in a rush to be building new capacity either. Interestingly, alongside competition from cheaper natural gas, Bloomberg New Energy Finance points to the "zero marginal cost" nature of renewables as one of the factors putting pressure on the viability of coal. As Mike noted back in 2015 (the only year to beat the current one for coal plant closures), the fact that solar and wind have extremely low marginal costs once they are up and running means they can afford to undercut coal for baseload power at almost any price—leading to what some have referred to as "death by capacity factor".

Emphasis added.

Leads me to wonder what the marginal cost is for nuclear? Hmmm....

[Finishline42]

1. "Death by capacity factor"

Every time the grid pulls from wind and solar means that a gas, coal or nuclear plant is not being used. The less they are used means that their fixed costs are spread over fewer hours which drives up their price to generate electricity.

[NNadir]

2. It's always amusing to hear an anti-nuke announce that coal is dead.

I suppose this is supposed to offer evidence that the marginal cost of the entire planet waiting, like Godot, for the grand renewable energy nirvana that never comes, while people die all around the world from air pollution.

Of course there is no marginal cost in the mind of this set of vapid thinkers for the seven million people who die every damned year from air pollution while bourgeois people who don't give a shit about the greater mass of humanity prattle on about their solar and wind cars, and spew myopic romantic nonsense about how "coal is dead."

The 2018 World Energy Outlook is out.

It's here: World Energy Outlook: The data (in MTOE, but I'll use SI exaJoules) is on page 38 in table 1.1.

In 2017, coal produced 157.01 exajoules of energy, which - in the "percent talk" that anti-nukes use whenever they launch into their gas bag rhetoric about so called "renewable energy" - 1,476.38% of what the solar, wind, geothermal and tidal energy industry produced combined. This is 0.21 exajoules less than 2016.

A victory?

It would be fun to hear an anti-nuke tell me, in a way that an intelligent person might understand, which industry is dead? It won't happen though. Useful intelligence is reality based, and anti-nukism is just a fantasy cult and not even remotely cognizant of what reality might be. Intelligence and anti-nukism are antithetical to one another.

In 2017, almost half a century after illiterate anti-nukes started handing out their "marginal cost" mindless bullshit, starting spewing rhetoric that, um, kills people, since nuclear energy saves lives, the so called "renewable" wind and solar industry combined, after decades of mindless cheering, and after soaking the world economy for trillions of dollars, can't produce 40% of the energy that the nuclear industry has produced reliably year after year for decades, using 1950's and 1960's technology, albeit technology developed by some of the finest minds the world has ever known, Fermi, Meitner, Wigner, Seaborg...

Were it not for ignorance, the nuclear industry might have saved many millions upon millions of lives lost because ignorance has been crowned with its Trumpy crown.

This I note took place despite the fact that small minded people successfully, using fear based marketing, successfully represented that the threat of someone, anyone dying from radiation at Fukushima mattered infinitely more than the 7 million people who died in 2017 from air pollution. And let's be clear, OK? These people died because the so called "renewable energy" "revolution" sold by horseshit salespeople didn't work, is not working, and won't work.

It's cheap carny marketing. "Step right up...step right up..."

We're running 23 ppm higher in CO2 waste spread over the entire world's atmosphere than we were just ten years ago, never mind the PAH, the PM 2.5, the ozone, the sulfuric acid and the nitric acid that spews continuously while we wait, endlessly and, frankly, criminally, for so called "renewable energy" to be meaningful.

It won't happen.

Having watched a man die of lung cancer - my father - I have a special insight to lung disease, the same disease that air pollution causes when it isn't causing heart disease, COPD, and severe asthma in small children, many of whom die. (I know what it's like to watch a grown man gasping for air through fluid filled lungs; I can't imagine a baby doing the same.)

What is the marginal cost of blank stupidity? I don't know. How much is a human life worth? How much were 70 million lives in the last ten years worth?

Anything?

Not in the minds of people who prattle on about their "someday" wind and solar powered Tesla cars apparently.

Unlike the nuclear industry, which has a history of saving lives stretching over decades, the wind and solar industries are useless to do the same, if for no other reason that they can't exist without access to dangerous fossil fuels, fuels that kill people.

Marginal costs, indeed.

Have a pleasant Friday tomorrow.

[Finishline42]

3. with all your numbers you say proves renewables don't work

How do you explain Texas getting 17% of their electricity from wind - up from less than 1% 15 years ago?

Iowa getting over 35% of their electricity from wind in 2016?

What we need are the means to move the electricity from the wind belt to users in the mid-west which is why Texas was able to grow their wind farms so quickly. They built the transmission lines from West Texas to Dallas and Austin.