California's generation of electricity from coal drops dramatically
latimes.com
latimes.com
According to SNL, "at times, as much as 50% of Southern California's electricity still comes from coal-fired plants, Steve Homer, director of project management for the Southern California Public Power Authority, or SCPPA, told SNL Energy." https://www.snl.com/InteractiveX/Article.aspx?cdid=A-3411331...
This really is a reminder that the writers of articles frequently do not write the headlines. That's a big reason why titles of articles are frequently misleading.
> In 2014, less than 5% of California's total energy demand was served by coal and petroleum coke-fired plants, nearly all of it from plants outside the state
Which is followed by what you quoted:
> At times...
So, according to that source, out of state coal consumption can range from 5% to 50%. It doesn't say exactly when the 50% figure was hit, or why.
Max contribution from coal: 50%
The quote is from the Southern California Public Power Agency (SCPPA). Their members include LADWP, Anaheim, and other municipal power agencies. The 50% of which he speaks is, like others have noted, for demand (not energy), but only for SCPPA, not all of California. The < 5% is for all of California.
I spent a day or two once sifting through California Public Utility Commission archives.
California has not approved a coal plant since at least 1978, mainly due to NIMBY concerns wherever they tried to build them.
We're playing stage 3 of Power Grid, and coal is already getting more expensive. Let's just stop burning it now please.
Also we should leave some coal around just in case we destroy society and our descendants need to bootstrap a civilization again. It's hard to do that without an easily accessible fossil fuel.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...
However, to make a fair comparison you should also consider the toxic byproducts of uranium extraction and purification. Coal is not refined in anywhere near the same degree as reactor-grade uranium.
The energy density of uranium makes it a non-issue. A 1GW reactor fissions about 1 ton of enriched uranium per year. You need about 10x as much raw material, so we're talking about 10 tons of uranium per year.
If you can't reprocess, then you lose about 95% of the fissionable material in the uranium. So you use up 20 tons of material per year, and you need to mine about 200 tons.
In comparison, a 1GW coal plant uses about 3 million tons of coal per year. And be real, coal isn't particularly clean to mine either. You need to wash it, and that water ends up just as polluted with heavy metals as the fly ash. Not to mention the human toll - black lung disease still killed about 25k people in the year 2013, and incidence rates (in the active miner population) have actually been rising since the 1990s.
It's the difference between a small-scale mining operation and large-scale strip mining.
If I understand correctly, these waste products are liquid or solid that can be stored, rather than dispersed into the atmosphere like coal byproducts. (Of course, storage poses its own technical challenges, like warning people in fifty thousand years not to mess with them, and the Hanford site's current leakage problems.)
There's a lot of crud they're producing.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/xenon.html
But it's still misleading, since essentially all of that CO2 will remain in the atmosphere, while radioactivity in the form of uranium, plutonium etc. will all rain down to the ground quickly (i.e. "fallout").
Edit: I remembered wrong, carbon-14 isn't the problem. It's uranium etc. in the ash from coal powerplants. Disregard this post.
The second problem with it is the radio isotopes are Uranium and Thorium which as far as these things go are a nothing burger. AKA they are very weakly radioactive and they don't bio-accumulate.
Third problem with it is fly ash is about as radio-active as plain dirt. Because dirt also has similar levels of thorium and uranium in it.
Also statistics helps frame an accurate picture when looking at it in terms of energy, not mass: "'In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.' Our source for this statistic is Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J. P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL." [1]
[0] http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410
[1] Ignore the incorrect headline: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...
This is wrong because your shielding is radioactive. Concrete is radio active, dirt is radio active, fly ash is radio active. Your granite counter top is radio active.
Fly ash sitting in a landfill has zero radio-logical hazard. Because there isn't anything about it that will increase the local back ground radiation level. And because the radio-isotopes have a zero risk profile.
That same cannot be said for nuclear waste.
That is why the original statement is grossly misleading. And why it pops up again and again like bad penny.
There's a Scientific American article from a few years back which points out that coal ash is radioactive. It turns out that, yes, it is, rather mildly. But it's still thousands of times below the the lowest clinical significant level.
The problem with nuclear arises, say, should a core failure occur the radiation exposure received in a few minutes would exceed that of a very long time (I believe it was millions of years) of fly-ash exposure.
Or, when in normal operation of a nuclear power plant you are creating waste products, including the plant structure itself which are deadly for tens of thousands of years. Far longer than any human institutions or even extant languages.
Of the various noxious consequences of coal-fired power generation (and there are many), radioactive emissions are simply not a concern.
So pulverize the nuclear waste product, including the "deadly" plant structure itself, mix with other stuff, and spread it evenly in a large landfill. Or even better, make fine powder and throw it into the atmosphere. With a bit of wind, everything will be well below "lowest clinical significant level."
Sounds horrible? But that's exactly what coal plants do!
E.g., people who are pro urban density tend to be NIMBY on things that expand car usage. Then they label anti-density people as "NIMBY", as if that really means anything. The fact is that they're both NIMBY, just on different issues.
Everyone is NIMBY on something.
Modern society is pretty cool, but it does have some costs. I have little patience for people who want all the benefits of modern society but none of the costs.
The problem is systems that gives property owners a veto over other people's property.
This seems like a misleading statistic. Since you have looked at the numbers, how many natural gas power plants were built over the same time period? I can think of at least two just in my county.
> Second, in a report that the agency released last week, California saw a 96% decrease in coal-fueled electric power consumption during the same time frame. That is the steepest fall by percentage of any state.
That reads to me like the title is correct but incomplete - coal energy production and consumption are both down significantly.
Problems with title as it stands:
1. Suggests California has (or had) considerable coal-based generation. It doesn't and didn't.
2. Suggests California's reliance on coal-fired electricity was high. It wasn't.
3. Fails to disclose that a small quantity of imported power has been reduced yet further.
It's actually almost a perfectly anti-informative headline. Reading it you'd form a mental state nearly perfectly counter to reality.
Here it explicitly refers to all power fueled by coal as different from power generated by coal in-state:
"Second, in a report that the agency released last week, California saw a 96% decrease in coal-fueled electric power consumption during the same time frame."
And goes into the reasons why this shift is affecting not just in-state generation but consumption of out-of-state coal power:
"“What the bill basically said is, if you’re going to sell power in California, you have to be as clean as the power that we burn here in California,” said Dan Jacobson, legislative director for the advocacy group Environment California."
It even calls out a plant in Nevada as one of the plants providing power to CA that was taken offline:
"For example, the 1,636-megawatt coal-fired Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nev., shut down at the end of 2005. Southern California Edison had a 56% interest in the plant."
Even the article that OP links to supports the LA Times article, rather than refuting it.
It's run by Argus (the sometimes good, sometimes bad company from Arrow) near San Bernadino.
Coal 228.6 - 205.7
Diesel fuel and heating oil 161.3
Gasoline 157.2
Propane 139.0
Natural gas 117.0
To turn a barrel of tar sands oil into gasoline, for example, adds another ~230 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere - in addition to the emissions from burning it. That's ~40 pounds/million BTU.
It almost costs us more energy to mine and refine tar sands oil, then we get out of burning it.
Theoretically, meteor strikes may have exposed/breached a deposit sometime in history. So large releases probably happen from time to time. How would we know? What trace would these catastrophic methane releases leave in the geologic record?
Hydro and nuclear are pretty much tied. And wind is a close 3rd.
see page 134: also has SO2, NOX, and a few other stats: http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2002/nea3676-externaliti...
So, in terms of installed capacity it's much closer to 13 and generally below nuclear.
The state's not water-rich to start with. Dams have significant impacts, and virtually all major waterways are already heavily managed.
Nuclear faces safety, fuel, and disposal challenges. The latter for the nex million years.
Fuel availability is ~80 years at present usage, 6 if the world relied solely on uranium-based fission.
Systemic risks of nuclear are distinctly non-negligible, and are not technologically addressable: they concern management, organisation, politics, war, economic stability, and far more.
Solar and wind fare far better on all counts.
So, putting them in the middle of a desert might be problematic.
I wonder if there's any current commercial ones that are more efficient? Theoretically we can greatly improve efficiency by using high-temperature designs, but good luck building an unproven new design of reactor these days...
Finding such a source in the middle of a desert might be a reason people don't build it there.
France has been known to throttle it's nuclear power generation (they have tons) in the summer because the water in the nearby lakes that they use for cooling gets too hot.
Lot of fossil fuel generation out there that's going to be left as stranded assets.
I'm unaware of anyone vertically integrated, where they own the wells, the pipelines, and the generation facility (in the US).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/power-plant...
A few states use almost zero coal.
It would be interesting to find alternative uses for coal that weren't polluting. A more enlightened civilization might use the revenue from that alternate use to fund re-education and social support for people too old to learn new skills other than coal production. In that way you could humanely "close out" the era of coal use on the people whose lives were intimately tied to its existence.
Yes, but if you read the article, it's dropped from 1% to 0.2% - so from a tiny fraction to an even tinier fraction, working out to a drop of 0.1 percentage point per year
So beyond the psychological frame, not much has changed.
It could, but it won't as long as the labor market is soft.
Coal consumption, 90% of which is in electricity generation, is down nationally.
It appears solar and natural gas are out competing coal: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...
... to another profession, as is how structural unemployment works in general.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-dakota-gas-flaring-20140...
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/30/265396179/much-of-north-dakota...
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/north-dakota-gas-flaring-...