Tell me about coal plants.

[Robb]

Here's the deal.

My regional electric co-op is gearing up to sign on for an extension to the contract with the company it buys power from -- another, bigger co-op of which it is a member. The extension improves the bigger co-op's borrowing power, because it can show all its members set to buy power for the next couple decades, and use that borrowing power to upgrade its system.

Wherein lies the problem. The "upgrade" planned includes building at least one, maybe three new coal-fired plants. Our local co-op is thinking about not signing on and facing higher rates, as a way to send a message its members are more interested in renewables and conservation than more coal plants. I'm pretty pleased they're even thinking about it.

But one of the guys on the board said something about how when the big co-op builds a new plant, they use the latest technology and improve the plants around on the same site -- he noted one new coal plant a year or two ago, I want to say in Arizona, built on a site with two other plants, and when all was said and done, capacity from the three plants was obviously higher than before, and the total emissions was less than before the new plant was built.

Is this even, like, possible? And if so, should we worry so much about the possibility of a new plant, if that's the kind of track record we're looking at?

[Deja Q]

1. Coal is cheap and plentiful but creates a lot of pollution, unless

significant forms of pollution cleanup are put into place. And those are expensive and deregulation won't be helping the issue.

And you may have seen some new commercials lately - about coal:

A new propaganda commercial says (in a warm, seductive, sexy voice no less) how we have more of it in the USA than there is oil in the middle east... Ooooh! Coal is plentiful! Coal will save our lives! Coal is cheap! And no doubt they'll say next time "You can smoke it like crack too!!!!" :eyes:

So, forgive me, when can we power our SUVs with coal?! :eyes:


www.powerfromcoal.com if you want the whole propagandafest... :crazy: (warning, page loads slow, looks like a 7 year old designed it, so either it's a popular site or on a server with an Intel 80486 processor and 10m/bit bandwidth...)


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=6174826

[don954]

2. I live near port everglades and there is a coal plant there

its for backup, there are several CNG plants there too. i can tell when its on, there is a black plume from the stacks and my blue florida skys turn brown...

[madokie]

3. I think that reality rules and we are consuming more electric as each day passes

so anything that will clean up some of the plants we now have and add to the capacity of those, I am all for.

the reality is we are here today consuming large amounts of energy from many sources

I'm doing as much as I can, we drive only about 5000 miles a year and we heat with pretty clean burning wood pellets and have switched to florescent lights.

[greenman3610]

4. emissions of sulphur and ash might be better but CO2..not so much

there is no technology to remove CO2 at this time.

I don't know where you are located, or if your coop has
a choice of who it affiliates with, but more and
more areas are seeing very large wind plants in the
planning stages, on the scale of traditional
power plants.
It is also possible, that an expenditure by the
utility to improve efficiency among customers
might be cheaper than investing in new plants.
For instance, buying and installing new CFC lighting
for all their customers might very well more than
offset increased demand for some time.

"Residential, commercial, industrial, and municipal lighting uses about 22 percent of all the electricity generated in the United States, and accounts for thirty-nine million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. RMI estimates that the technology already exists to cost-effectively save 50–90 percent of the power now consumed by lights in the United States. That would save $30 billion a year—enough electricity to retire 70 to 120 large power plants—and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by twenty to thirty-five million tons per year."
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid352.php


An American utility exec interviewed in NPR the other
day, one of the peope who has come forward to urge
CO2 caps - said he was building coal plants but
engineers were required to design them with
CO2 capture retrofit in mind for down the road -
there is work being done on the technology.
he's the second one interviewed here
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7396163&ft=1&f=1025

[NNadir]

5. There is no technology to make coal "clean."

The most serious pollutant of all of the filthy pollutants from the unacceptably dangerous fuel that coal - and other fossil fuels represents - is carbon dioxide.

In spite of much nonsensical marketing by coal apologists claiming that carbon dioxide "could be" sequestered, none of it is ever actually sequestered, because the idea of sequestration itself is pure nonsense consisting almost entirely of wishful thinking, denial, and outright lying. Not one industrial sequestration plant on a significant scale is planned anywhere on this planet. Not one coal plant has ever been built that does what the coal industry continuously talks about in connection with this score.

There is also talking about "scrubbing" and fly ash capture, but at best these remove only a portion of a vast amount of coal waste. The heavy metals - lead, mercury, uranium, thorium, cadmium, etc, even if they are captured - still need to be dumped and they are dumped, often indiscrimately. A full sized coal plant will generate millions of tons of waste each year - all of which will remain toxic for the entire history of the earth.

Coal is only "cheap" if you are allowed to ignore its external cost - the cost to health, the enivronment, the future - with complete indifference to humanity and decency.

The external cost of this unacceptably dangerous fuel has been measured and is covered in the reports of the ExternE group. Figure 9, to which I often refer on this site, says every thing you need to know.

http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf

Note that the external cost - the cost of unmitigated destruction - is as much as three times as large as the internal cost.

Anyone and everyone who uses coal to generate energy is destroying the future. I hate to put it so bluntly, but it needs to be said, on the grounds that there is all sorts of immoral weasling and misrepresentation about this subject, everywhere.

[madokie]

6. nuclear is better I ask

http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf -??

[NNadir]

7. Yes, very, very, very, very clearly so.

It's not even close, not even remotely close.

[Ready4Change]

8. Where does your energy come from now?

If it comes from old technology coal plants then the upgrade to new plants, while not ideal, would at least be an improvement.

But if your energy already comes from newer coal plants, or a nuclear plant, or a hydro dam, then all you'd be doing is funding the burning of yet more coal. Not an improvement, and maybe a step backwards.

So without knowing where you are getting your energy from right now, it's hard to say if you'd be improving things or not.