Obama closing coal plants?

Anyone hear about this? Just where is the power going to come from...

I think there a couple discussions on that...

So it begins.... Obama's coal crackdown

OBAMA INITIATES COAL-KILLING POLICIES DURING GREAT RECESSION

Obama may not be, but the economy sure is.

I have a brother in-law that works in the power industry as an operating engineer for power plants. The plant he as working at in the Niagara Falls area has been mothballed due to lack of power demand. He was lucky and found a new job in California.

The closing was:
Partly due to energy efficiency desire.
Partly due to less manufacturing.
Partly due to more windmills and alternative energy.

BTW, we have a problem in New York that the tranmission lines are not big enough for all of the windmill farms they built. Some windmills have to sit idle when they could be generating power.

steamup wrote:Partly due to more windmills and alternative energy.

BTW, we have a problem in New York that the tranmission lines are not big enough for all of the windmill farms they built. Some windmills have to sit idle when they could be generating power.

Hmmmm..........

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... ar-energy/

A big coal fired electric plant in my area is all but done. The local power grid put up massive new transmittion lines from the southern tier of NY into the Ithaca area. Now they don't buy much power from the the coal powered plant. Interestingly enough, the local power company sold that coal powered plant off a few years back. The coal fired electric plant workers are scrapping to get early buyouts for retirement cause they don't want to go down with the ship.

Side note: They fire the boilers (have two of them apparently) buy pumping in an entire tractor trailer load of diesel fuel to ignite AND it does not all ways light the first time. (Oh crap..... get another truck load of diesel fuel!)

Other intersting news for screwed up alterantive energy: Local HUGE dairy farm put in MULTI MILLION DOLLAR methane digester to make electricity. The same local power complany approved their project. After it was built. The farmers digesters made too much power for local power line infrastructure. Although I bet the farmer received massive grant money to put the digester together. I don't know much about it other than local grapevine. They apparently just throttled the system down and make their own power. Win or lose? They win and the rest of us loose!

sounds like it was a good idea, just badly planned by some people. burning off the methane gas that would just be wasted should have led to lower electric rates for the locals. maybe someday they will get the transmission lines needed, then more will benefit.

Small coal plants in this area are shutting down for lack of power demand.
A 60 or 80 year old plant is cheaper to shut now and dismantle than to bring up to specs.
If demand returns, they'll just build a new plant.

The lead in background ...

NJ sues Pa. power plant over pollutants

... and the first left hook.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants Portland area power plant to cut emissions by 81 percent

All this just up the road from me. This will be the second old coal fired plant that has shut down in a 10 mile stretch of the Delaware River. The first one that went down sent it's one unit to KY. It's still working, just further west. Friends that live on the NJ side of the river up in the hills across from either plant say that anything chromed doesn't stay that way long.

If your old enough to remember all the acid rain problems that some areas used to get were all caused by the coal fired power plants & fixed by some modifications to the stacks. The same thing will happen now, it`s not coal but dirty coal that needs to be addressed.

there was no acid rain problem

Must have been my own sweat eating thru the finish of my cars back then as I tried to wax out all the acid rain spots, my mistake it somehow just got called acid rain. http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/2.html

must have been, or were you buying gm cars? There's a problem anywhere money can be made to solve it.

Reduction of SOx and NOx hasn't made a substantial change in northeastern precipitation ph, most especially it has not made widespread improvements in the ph of many lakes and streams, in fact there's not a lot of correlation one way or the other, because the ph of northeastern lakes and streams is, in most cases, not significantly impacted by rainwater ph. Of course if you have a limestone building downwind of a powerplant burning high-sulfur coal, over many, many years there may be an impact on the structure, as far as the natural environment goes, it has little to no impact, although it did waste/destroy hundreds of billions and possibly trillions of this nation's gdp over the last 30 years.

the paint problem started when the epa,( another guvment tirannical agency, like the irs,) mandated no lead in paint primers. took gm a few years of worn thin paint jobs to get it right.

As I recall it was happening to all makes of cars in the 60s & 70s, could be it was more noticeable on some more than others from make to make or different colors. None the less it was a real problem, like I said I think more so in some areas than others. I lived a little south of Pittsburgh then & it was bad.

Coal plant closings, Good. these closing plants, in the next several years, are plants that are 40 to 60 years old. outdated, worn out, dirty, giving coal a bad name. can you begrudge a policy of trying to keep the environment a little healthy. do you own coal stocks,? we ALL own stock in the air we breathe. If other sources of power can help reduce coal consumption, and we only use the latest and cleanest coal fired plants, is doing that, a good policy, or is bashing the man more fun?. building these newer plants should also put people to work, they don't build themselves.