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Old-Style Coal Plants Expanding
WYODAK, Wyo. - Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry's standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come.
(Creative Commons on flickr - By Señor Codo) An Associated Press examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.
The construction wave stretches from Arizona to Illinois and South Carolina to Washington, and comes despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by tragic mine disasters in West Virginia, the Gulf oil spill and wars in the Middle East.
The expansion, the industry's largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted "clean coal" technology is still a long ways from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail. The Senate last month scrapped the leading bill to curb carbon emissions following opposition from Republicans and coal-state Democrats.
"Building a coal-fired power plant today is betting that we are not going to put a serious financial cost on emitting carbon dioxide," said Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at the University of California-Berkeley. "That may be true, but unless most of the scientists are way off the mark, that's pretty bad public policy."
Federal officials have long struggled to balance coal's hidden costs against its more conspicuous role in providing half the nation's electricity.
Hoping for a technological solution, the Obama administration devoted $3.4 billion in stimulus spending to foster "clean-coal" plants that can capture and store greenhouse gases. Yet new investments in traditional coal plants total at least 10 times that amount - more than $35 billion.
Utilities say they are clinging to coal because its abundance makes it cheaper than natural gas or nuclear power and more reliable than intermittent power sources such as wind and solar. Still, the price of coal plants is rising and consumers in some areas served by the new facilities will see their electricity bill rise by up to 30 percent.
Industry representatives say those increases would be even steeper if utilities switched to more expensive fuels or were forced to adopt emission-reduction measures.
Approval of the plants has come from state and federal agencies that do not factor in emissions of carbon dioxide, considered the leading culprit behind global warming. Scientists and environmentalists have tried to stop the coal rush with some success, turning back dozens of plants through lawsuits and other legal challenges.
As a result, current construction is far more modest than projected a few years ago when 151 new plants were forecast by federal regulators. But analysts say the projects that prevailed are more than enough to ensure coal's continued dominance in the power industry for years to come.
Sixteen large plants have fired up since 2008 and 16 more are under construction, according to records examined by the AP.
Combined, they will produce an estimated 17,900 megawatts of electricity, sufficient to power up to 15.6 million homes - roughly the number of homes in California and Arizona combined.
They also will generate about 125 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to emissions figures from utilities and the Center for Global Development. That's the equivalent of putting 22 million additional automobiles on the road.
The new plants do not capture carbon dioxide. That's despite the stimulus spending and an additional $687 million spent by the Department of Energy on clean coal programs.
DOE spokesman John Grasser acknowledged the new plants represent a missed chance to rein in carbon emissions. But he said more opportunities would arise as electricity consumption increases.
Experts say the widespread application of carbon-neutralizing technologies for coal plants remains at least 15 to 20 years away.
"This is not something that's going to happen tomorrow," Grasser said. "You have to do the required research and development and take steps along the way."
Producing clean coal power appears straightforward: Separate the carbon dioxide before it goes up the smokestack, then store it underground in geological formations.
Experimental trials have been successful but putting the concept into commercial practice has been stymied by high costs and the difficulty of isolating carbon dioxide from other gases.
"We are pushing the envelope as far as what's possible," said Jon LaCour, manager for the 115-megawatt Wygen III coal plant, which came online in northeastern Wyoming this spring. "We have no way of capturing carbon."
Inside the plant, a ton of coal per minute rumbles off conveyor belts from the nearby WyoDak mine.
Hulking steel pulverizers crush the fuel to the consistency of baby powder, fans blow it into a giant furnace and the coal goes up in flames that can top 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, producing steam to generate electricity.
WyGen is more efficient than earlier plants, burning about 20 percent less coal. Yet the process itself has changed little since Thomas Edison built the first plant in 1882 in Manhattan.
And while dramatic advances have been made at the back end of coal plants - where Wygen's operator, Black Hills Power, removes most of the nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and other acid-rain pollutants - efforts to curb greenhouse gases have lagged.
Black Hills spent $80 million on pollution controls for WyGen, bumping up its price tag to $247 million. Like most of the new fleet of plants, space was left at WyGen for the future installation of carbon-capture equipment.
As climate change emerged as a global dilemma in recent years, the coal industry at times appeared on the ropes.
Environmentalists trumpeted 100 plants dropped or delayed. Regulators imposed tighter emission limits for acid rain pollutants and reined in destructive mining practices. And the recession dampened consumer demand for power, prompting some utilities to scrap expansion plans.
But coal has not gone away.
"The reason coal burns in this country is not because anyone likes the smog. It's the cost," said Daniel Scott, a coal industry analyst with Dahlman Rose & Company in New York.
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38 Comments so far
Show AllDon't worry.
Obama will save us.
Tiredoftrolls,
Thank You, that's the hardest I've laughed in a week.
LMAO!!
We killed most of the whales for their oil and are systematically killing everything else burning fossil fuels.
Try living one day without support from the oil industry (plastics,transportaion etc.) and/or energy from coal fired generation. Try an hour. You might have to stand naked in your back yard. The problem of transiting out of our oil addiction is primarily between our ears. We need to envision change as an exciting adventure not an impossible burden.
The envisioning, and even science behind change exists now. What doesn't exist, is a President, or a Congress, that hasn't been bought by the existing Energy Industrial Complex.
The whole oil addiction meme is great fodder for those who want to divert attention away from those most responsible for changing what's going on "between their ears". The same ones enmeshed in the nexus of power/profit, who block even the most feeble attempt at logical and currently achievable "change"
"An exciting adventure" reminded me of something I came across the other day http://www.zero-race.com/en/
Such a vision inspiring project. Too bad most of the media has missed this. Time to focus on technology that works. We need to move beyond dumb concepts like "Clean Coal". The cost of producing "real" clean coal in the foreseeable future would be so high it could never compete with solar or wind even using today's production costs for renewables.
0 > Bush again.
Could we imagine when 0bama signed for 24 mountaintop removal operations that no plants would be built to burn the results?
Of course, were it not for Congress' consistent majority compliance, 0 might really be helpless and isolated in his corporatism as so many depict him in his supposed progressivism or centrism.
We need extra-electoral action.
This is a foolish waste of money in more ways than just the obvious. When cities in the American south and southwest start experiencing 125+ degree weather, and tens of thousands of people start dying from the heat, the country is likely to react by cutting back on carbon emissions, including shutting down coal plants.
It will be too late at that point of course, but that's how we do things here- no action at all until the sh-t hits the fan, then extreme reactions with the hope that we can fix the problem.
All the coal will be gone before they ever find a way to make it "clean".
That's our President's fault. He claims to believe in the mythology of "clean coal". He's not as smart as we thought and much more corrupt than anyone could have predicted.
Build condom factories, not powerplants.
just a thought--MD
Condoms need fossil fuels to be made.
As was mentioned in that clicking isn't the solution post by Loeb it's going to take major protests to stop coal. People are going to have to get off of their asses, if they care about the future of this planet, and go to the coal plant in their area and camp out and protest like crazy.
Getting out there and protesting en masse, maybe even risking bodily harm, is the only thing I can think that has a chance of stopping coal..
Indeed... we have to start small, but trust that this country is a powder keg. People know they've been ripped off. People know the empire is corrupt. Remember the silence before a storm... in this case, we have all been silenced by the corporate media which has the power to tell us what 'most' people believe and yet that is a flimsy sort of 'control' that can fall apart in a day, a week, or a month. We've seen it many times in the past.
Why ought this news surprise anyone?
The Obama presidential run was financed significantly by the coal industry and then Senator Obama cast his loyal vote on every bill for Big Coal while in the Senate. (Refer to opensecrets. com for the amounts.)
We have to face facts. There is just no political will in this country to decrease our use of fossil fuels and the concomitant release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Our children, and especially our grandchildren are going to have to face the consequences of our negligence. I'm glad I won't be around to have to live with the consequences.
Jim Shea
Those are not facts. Political 'will' is not measurable when the whole propaganda system is gamed and we don't have an informed public. But IF the public will were driving this country's policy, there would be no war; polls show that people actually believe in protecting the environment against rapacious polluters.
It's not about "will," but about breaking through the chains of corporate propaganda. Speak out, organize, demonstrate. One person can hold a sign. Two people can hold a banner.
BNSF coal trains going from Wyoming to Vancouver BC with tons per week being shipped to Korea and China, for their coal fired plants or trade, is this NAFTA at work, Utilities at work, profit at work, Warren Buffett ownes the rails and invested in the business of solar maufacturing plants in China and elsewhere not employing our citizens to build solar panels here to put on our roofs or blades to turn in our neighborhoods, and they talk of green and green jobs and technology, too much money to be made, let us put our panels together for our use, oppps, the government/private Utilities would lose their take, their hold on energy and energy policy. The inefficiency is in the distribution or transmission of energy. solar (wind is caused by the heat of the sun) is there all the time with no waste, guess it's the control of the distribution, government subsidies for alternatives are a drop in the bucket compared to coal and we are building 1900 miles of new transmission lines in the west, in Wyoming to send power around that can be collected right where you are reading this post, it's the control of the Utilities and their private for profit partners in policy.
One of the first things that should have happened under the new administration was a moratorium on new coal fired plants, with the only possible exception being when a new plant replaces an older less efficient plant. What has happened to the EPA finding? How about the Copenhagen pledge?
It appears the administration is slinking away from controversy of any kind, no matter how important the issue, and no matter how absolutley wrong the other side is.
You guys who said a vote for Obama was a waste were right. Even if it had given McCain the election, the results are more or less the same.
Some day we may use nuclear power and renewables to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as fuel or materials of some sort. We will also have to figure out how to restore the ocean ecosystems, and feed billions of refugees while keeping them from killing each other and eating every last creature on earth... Life will be "interesting".
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guardians, watch the watchers, etc?)
Hello bbr-001,
Your last paragraph says it all. Killing each other is both a sport and a business. We seem to be acting like locusts on steroids. We will consume until there is nothing left.
Clean Coal is a reality... See: http://www.zeep.com/
Please contact me for additional information regarding this new technology by email at leesmithjr@comporium.net
Rubbish. Con artist. Coal is the death of the planet and those who pimp for the industry may, one day, be held accountable for their sick urge for profits at the risk of all?
My Grandpa drove around Europe during WWII on home made coal gas. Dirty technology requiring lots of energy to make it work.
So what? How is that germane? Your grandpa polluted the planet like a nutter and so should we?
My comment on "Clean Coal reality above".. check out the link.
My grampa happened to live in German occupied Holland and unable to obtain fuel for his car.
What would you?
"'The reason coal burns in this country is not because anyone likes the smog. It's the cost,'" said Daniel Scott, a coal industry analyst with Dahlman Rose & Company in New York.
The doom of our species, billions and billions of other species,and our planet earth is using our brains to arithmetically figure "the cost" breakdowns on profit-and-loss sheets that puts money in the pockets of owners and stockholders of whatever, regardless of the anti-life consequences. Not being able to connect our brains, hearts, body, and spirits that together sense and KNOW what is life-affirming and what is life-destroying has been conditioned away.
The god of the "modern," industrial world is MAMMOM and the thinking is linear and nose-to-the-ledgers with all those little numbers, and not being able to SEE in the broadest sense possible.
The natural world is our mother, our teacher, our salvation.
The hierarchical patriarchies with their competitiveness, arrogance, and oneupMANship, with the constant itch/the need to conquer, the need to label everything as good or bad, better than to lesser than to unworthy represent such a narrow view and a limited evolvement that is reinforced by the measurement of success as having high position, power and the most money to control "life" and other humans and creatures, ... these things lead us by the nose to our doom.
The message of the 1960's and early 1970's brought with it the refreshing notions of balanced feminine/masculine principles within the female and male. PEACE, LOVE, FLOWER POWER, SHARING, COOPERATING, LIVING and LAUGHING together ...
The film, "Pretty Woman," with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere said it all so simply as the driven, corporate take-over mogul [Gere] takes off his shoes and socks in the park and walks in the grass and feels the natural earth under his feet for the first time in years and years. And, of course, he goes through a change toward cooperation and mindfully building together rather than destroying the lives of many.
So simple the message. How far away John Lennon's song "Imagine" is now ... again.
Never in my seven decades-plus, have I experienced every day the kind of despair and anguish I feel as I read about and listen to the utter stupidity and blindness and vise-like narrowness and cruelty of those who govern us or are in charge in other venues in this land with its never-realized dream of freedom [to be] for all.
Seems like MAMMOM has won as it laughs hysterically on its way to the bank.
Our slow suicide is now accelerating, and The Great Mother has had just about enough. All the natural responses to preserve life and have it bloom and live another day centuries to millennia hence will be upon us fully soon.
If you bake bread and forget to turn off the oven, what's left is only an inedible, burnt offering to the gods of Doom. The oven is on high now. Who will reverse the dial to OFF?
For each of us, the only way out is in and the refusal to participate in this species'-wide suicide anymore. Enough of us, we might still turn the tide by who we are and how we choose to live.
Big order. Different kind of cost, but worth every aware effort and sacrifice.
THERE IS NO HEARTBEAT ON EARTH THAT IS NOT SOMEHOW OUR OWN.
/cm
I hear you.
And going further, as Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins essentially wrote in the 1982 book "Brittle Power", ironically, renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear energy since the 1970s -- if you include all the external costs like pollution, health problems, risk of war, burdens on future generations, suffering of people and other creatures as you point out, and so on. But, we just don't pay the true cost of, say, oil, at the gasoline pump (if we did, gasoline would be so expensive everyone would have switched to electric cars decades ago -- there were viable designs even in the 1970s). So, beyond the situation being sad, what you write about is ironic, because time and time again for decades people get away unchallenged with saying fossil fuels are cheaper, as if they were some tough-minded realists, when in reality such people have long been the ones living in fantasy land, and being given a free pass by the media and academia. (See also Noam Chomsky's "What Makes the Mainstream Media Mainstream".
Still, times are changing, so don't give up hope. Howard Zinn has a great essay called "The Optimism of Uncertainty" about how things may suddenly change when we least expect it (almost as like a miracle), and showing several historical examples (like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall).
For my own part, here is an essay I put together than includes a description of four long term heterodox alternatives as a path forward with a mix of a basic income (social security for all), democratic-resource based planning (to set sin taxes and subsidies or just do things), stronger self-reliant local communities (acting locally to craft solutions), and/or a gift economy (like we see a lot of on the internet), which can be found here:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
I've also found recently a great essay called "Ignorance, Apathy, and Greed" by Fred E. Foldvary on how those three things are interwoven, and making suggestions on how social activists need to work on all those, with the conclusion: "To remedy social ills, replace ignorance, apathy and greed with knowledge, sympathy, and charity."
Hey, makin' a buck is unarguably more important than long term sustainability, biodiversity, or any highly probable catastrophes. Get real hippies. Get a job. Buy a BMW. Hell, make a coal fired steam car. Party like the world is about to end....
Huh. Why don't I find you funny? Instead, I feel like saying, "No, quit your job and grow up. Sell your BMW and quit being an idiot."
Coal is cheap because there's no class action lawsuit by the estates of 100,000 asthma casualties per year, and because corporations do not have to go to prison for manslaughter. My guess is that Osama Bin Laden has declared himself to be a Nevada corporation, which gives him perpetual immunity from anything.
Black Hills Power just raised our residential electric rates 19% to pay for this "dirty coal" electricity.
Go to Oil Change International's web site and use their Dirty energy Money Tool and you'll see the amount of money your elected officials received from the energy companies.
Better Green than Dead. Green Party candidates don't take campaign contributions from the polluters.
It is time to start voting green. No more lesser of two evils stuff. There is no real difference between the two major parties. I really thought Obama and his "environmental green team" would cut through the BS (in spite of his nominal support of the clean coal and corn ethanol scams)and get a GHG reduction program going. Elements of the stimulus package and tax breaks for solar, etc were a start, but the dream team seems to have been benched.
I can see voting for dems like Waxman, Markey and Boxer, but most dems are clueless and/or beholden to the energy industry, and Obama has quit on this.
Raising energy prices on working and non-working people now is out of the question without first changing the tax code and enabling a much greater shift of the burden to higher income people. Without fairness you can forget the legislation. To the elite environmental policy makers, WORKING PEOPLE CANNOT HANDLE ANY ADDITIONAL FINANCIAL BURDEN!
The whole system needs to change or we're going to kill the bloody planet!
More coal is suicidal--but for some it is all about making money, not anything else.
Concentrated solar thermal plants have bigger start up costs, but can be built anywhere, can store energy overnight and will never run out of fuel. Coal carbon plants are dinosaurs on the way to extinction, and so are we, if we keep staying with them. Dinosaurs were very big, cheap to grow, but had very small brains.
I agree. I was kind of surprised to read this article given what Lester Brown has written in March (2010), complete with a picture of a "Dinosaur Crossing" sign: :-)
"Coal-Fired Power On the Way Out?"
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/03/coal-fired-power-on-way-out.php
"The past two years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful movement opposing the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States. Initially led by environmental groups, both national and local, it has since been joined by prominent national political leaders and many state governors. The principal reason for opposing coal plants is that they are changing the earth's climate. There is also the effect of mercury emissions on health and the 23,600 U.S. deaths each year from power plant air pollution. Over the last few years the coal industry has suffered one setback after another. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 123 plants have been defeated, with another 51 facing opposition in the courts. Of the 231 plants being tracked, only 25 currently have a chance at gaining the permits necessary to begin construction and eventually come online. Building a coal plant may soon be impossible."
While there is plenty of reason for pessimism, there is some reason for optimism too.
I not sure it makes any difference. We have already done it. Oxygen levels have fallen from 21% to 19%. When CO2 is released it combines with water vapor and that produces Carbonic Acid which in turn acidifies our Oceans. In turn kills the pytoplankton. They produce somewhere between 50 to 70% of our oxygen not to mention they do that by converting CO2 into oxygen. I figure 10 to 20 years and all life ends. Global warming will accelerate and we will achieve temperatures of about 900 F. Maybe our radio and TV signals, a few space probes and just maybe a few orbiting satellites will be all there is of us. Our planet will be completely dead until the sun expands into a red giant about 100 million years from now and is consumed. IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY!
I don't care about myself, its my children and particularly my grand children and especially the grand daughter I am raising.