175 Coal Fired Electrical Power Plants Slated To Close!

57 this year alone. The low price of natural gas is sighted as a contributing factor.

http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/28/recor ... n-in-2012/

What the hell is going on anymore? The rest of the developing world is scrambling to achieve a decent standard of living; and in the meantime ours is being devastated.
The damn Chinese would probably send over some of their 800,000,000 workers to dismantle those plants and float them back over to China on bamboo rafts, powered by long oars.

2 things going on here.

Less demand (drive for more efficient manufacturing and less manufacturing has lead to much lower demand)
More emmisions regulations (old plants are no longer profitable based on expense to upgrade to meet new requirements, makes more sense to shut them down and invest in better performing plants, ie. make them more efficient and able to produce more power to replace the ones that are shut down)

The natural gas market is connected to the electric market. When NG price is low, so is the electric profit. Low electric price = low profit = shutting down marginally profitable coal plants.


It's just good business sense. Kind of like lean manufacturing. Use the most efficient process and only make as much as you need for the imediate demand. The environmental regulations are the real driving factor for the industry to implement this business stragety. And in some areas, deregulation of electric supply has also been a driving factor. When you are tossed into a competetive market, you tend to have to work harder and smarter to see the same results.

The last I had heard was that NG has surpassed Coal and is now the largest energy source for making electricity.

I believe the order is now:
-------------------------------
1) Natural Gas
2) Coal
3) Nuclear
4) Hydroelectric, Oil, and Others

When Nuclear moves ahead of coal there are going to be a bunch of lay offs coming in the bituminous and sub bituminous coal industry. Anthracite is in great demand as a coke substitute in the manufacture of steel. Apparently early on in the history of steel making anthracite was the primary carbon source, until at some juncture it was all but completely replaced by coke, and now anthracite is seeing a major resurgence. I can only assume that the high energy costs required to manufacture coke have made anthracite competitive with coke again, or perhaps fiscally advantageous. I'm not sure if the steel producers of today use anthracite straight up, or in combination with coke.

There's a lot of recent news about Obama's war on coal. They played a speech he made in Ohio in 2008, something like, " Ahhh we can putta man on the moon in ten years. don't tell me we can't find a way to... produce clean coal energy... blah blah blah".
His gestapo EPA is forcing coal plants to close NOW, that were scheduled to close in five years.
Even West Virginia democrat politicians are speaking out against him. Ya think democrat West virginia will produce one vote for him this year?

Mining jobs are being decimated, and for every one there's six more that are coal industry related.

They'll come right back and say there's more coal jobs now than ever etc etc. I don't have the stats, but the cost of a megawatt of coal is skyrocketing.

This trend and policy is way more sinister than just incompetance; the tyrant is trying everything he can to reduce our nation to third world status.
In the meantime, we're exporting megatons of coal to freakin CHINA, where they burn it with no pollution controls whatsoever.

This guy lies right to our face and turns around and does the opposite of what he promises.

electric rates around here, and many places are cheaper now than 10 years ago. and I am told, that the environment is better off now. I personally could not care less what fuel is used to generate the "juice" if it meets the former criteria.

homecomfort wrote:electric rates around here, and many places are cheaper now than 10 years ago.

This has been driven by lower natural gas process because of the fracking. How long will that last? I've seen this show numerous times, about a little less than 15 years ago it was costing me less that $1 per gallon of diesel. The producers are cutting back and there will be more demand in the future from new power plants, people switching those oil furnaces/boilers they put in 15 years ago, they want to expand it's use into cars etc. That's all fine but that is going to drive the price right back up, in 2007 the cost of natural gas was going right up along with everything else. In addition to that because of the higher costs associated with coal they no longer have to meet that lower cost.

lsayre wrote:The last I had heard was that NG has surpassed Coal and is now the largest energy source for making electricity.

I believe the order is now:
-------------------------------
1) Natural Gas
2) Coal
3) Nuclear
4) Hydroelectric, Oil, and Others

When Nuclear moves ahead of coal there are going to be a bunch of lay offs coming in the bituminous and sub bituminous coal industry. Anthracite is in great demand as a coke substitute in the manufacture of steel. Apparently early on in the history of steel making anthracite was the primary carbon source, until at some juncture it was all but completely replaced by coke, and now anthracite is seeing a major resurgence. I can only assume that the high energy costs required to manufacture coke have made anthracite competitive with coke again, or perhaps fiscally advantageous. I'm not sure if the steel producers of today use anthracite straight up, or in combination with coke.

Coal still does 45%, NG is probably in the 25% range. As far as nuclear goes I was just reading in the paper they are putting the final permit for a new reactor in Bloomsburg on indefinite hold until the storage issue is resolved which I take it to mean long term storage at Yucca mountain.

The figure I heard when I posted that was 38% of electricity from NG. This site says its 40%. It must be changing rapidly. News from a few years ago is totally antiquated.

http://www.newenergychoices.org/index.p ... ntro&sd=fk

They are already capping the fracking wells & putting off others to drive the price up. There is no nuke fuel storage in Yucca Mountain.

lsayre wrote:The figure I heard when I posted that was 38% of electricity from NG. This site says its 40%. It must be changing rapidly. News from a few years ago is totally antiquated.

Those are not antiquated figures, they would be based on educated guess from last years numbers Here's the current ones

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ ... =epmt_1_01

12 month production ending in May (Thousand Megawatthours):

2011
Coal : 1,812,078 43%
Natural Gas: 998,363 24%

Total Generation: 4,140,513

2012
Coal : 1,589,868 39%
Natural Gas: 1,142,841 28%

Total Generation: 4,076,305

Obviously there are a lot of differing figures out there, but the handwriting is on the wall and the pace of the transition is accelerating.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/0 ... ectricity/

lsayre wrote:Obviously there are a lot of differing figures out there, .

The figures I'm citing are from the EIA which is the place any of these stories will be getting their figures if they want accurate ones. The EIA is like the CBO of the energy world.

http://www.eia.gov/about/mission_overview.cfm

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is the statistical and analytical agency within the U.S. Department of Energy. EIA collects, analyzes, and disseminates independent and impartial energy information to promote sound policymaking, efficient markets, and public understanding of energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment. EIA is the nation's premier source of energy information and, by law, its data, analyses, and forecasts are independent of approval by any other officer or employee of the U.S. Government.

but the handwriting is on the wall and the pace of the transition is accelerating

This wave of plant closures is the most inefficient and oldest ones where upgrading them is impractical. The decline will stabilize. There is really no way to get rid of coal at the present and that will be especially evident when the cost of NG starts rising 2 or 3 years down the road.