To be perfectly fair, I’m sitting here at an energy company building solar energy plants, but my office is powered by coal. Coal has indeed contributed to a cheap and stable electric market in the US, but it is being phased out as a technology because of cost and maintenance. Most of our coal plants are quite old, and even without any environmental regulations, are getting cost prohibitive to maintain, and building new ones would be more expensive than other technologies. I don’t hate coal - it is just not going to be a big part of our future energy mix.
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Short answer, yes, a large portion of per-panel costs is labor and shipping. We would see a short period where prices would spike but only as long as it took to spin up competitive assembly lines in other parts of the world like India, (which is already putting a dent in the Chinese market).
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This the most clearly stated explanation I’ve seen yet, you rock!
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“Our family visits the Kentucky Coal Museum every year! We love it here!”
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My country is powered by water. It’s doable (both countries are similar in size and logistic is insane all the same). I find the USA’s dependence on coal really weird. It’s archaic, something not expected from the most powerful country in the world.
We have public transportation in big cities that run on electricity and biodiesel. There’s nuclear energy. Lots of potencial in solar. Kinetic energy. Coal dependency looks like a case of pure, concentrated stubborn pride from my corner of the world. Why use coal?
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Yes, exactly! Was going to make that point but you did so perfectly.
Fun Fact - The Shadow radio program was sponsored by Blue Coal. Now, I have never seen a picture of the stuff, but evidently they did actually color it blue as part of marketing/branding. As did other companies other colors. It was supposed to keep it together some and lube it in the chutes.
Fun Fact 2 - I got some coal from a miner with some pyrite shells in them and some pyrite star burst formations called mine dollars.
QFT
I think if they had some other viable industry that employed the same numbers with similar benefits, they wouldn’t be nearly so in love with it. I mean, if you think about how many people owe their existence to the jobs of coal mining now, and in the past, as well as the sort of camaraderie Union’s develop, and what its demise means to their prospects in life, WHY they cling to coal isn’t hard to see. I mean cleaner air is nice, but you can’t feed your kids with it.
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It was super cheap and plentiful. Why build new plants of something else if it is super cheap and easy. Not every area of the US can be powered by water (though we have some large hydro-electric programs.) Natural gas is one of the main sources too, which is much cleaner and usually cheaper. Nuclear IMHO is a great option and still in use, but its not being funded for new plants so not sure on its future (and it is expensive to build). Coal consumption is on its way down, though.
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A long time ago my brother worked in the ‘coal shed’ at a major pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Australia.
Even when there were other, cheaper alternatives around they still used coal to power the company.
The reasons were:
a) consistent energy - and large amounts of it - for the production lines (they could run 24/7/365 without black/brown outs that would have caused massive problems) and they use/d robotic arms etc and their power consumption is HIDEOUS!
b) keeping both power production and usage “in house” is cheaper from an infrastructure/wiring as well as a security perspective.
I have a feeling they still use coal and I wouldn’t be surprised if all/most pharmaceutical manufacturing plants and other 24/7/365 manufacturers with robotics still do too.
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Brazil is certainly doing great work on renewable energy, but hydroelectric has a major negative impact on the environment. In my corner of the US, the Elwha Dam was removed in 2012 and even that tiny dam (built in 1913) completely altered the ecosystem around it in ways both obvious and subtle.
I’d certainly take hydro over coal, but we’ve got to find something better than both.
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Absolutely spot on. Ideology is the modern religious war.
Solar is a great solution when someone offers to pay the initial equipment cost. I have our shop plumbed and ready for solar heat via the under floor system, but have not been able to afford the panels yet. I have no doubt that such a system will be cheaper and much more efficient in the long run.
Optimistically, the prices will keep going down, and the efficiency will keep going up.
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Maybe they should have tried using clean coal instead. I keep hearing about how great it is.
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What is this, the 20th century? Solar is conventional energy! >;]P
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As mentioned, coal was cheap because it was - and is - produced here. It also employed a lot of people in a number of states, and even though that’s no longer true, they still promote it. (Wyoming, the least populous state, produces most of the coal now, giving coal an out-sized economic role there, so its use there is pretty much legally mandated, and the state exports the electricity it generates to other states. So just because of that one state, the role of coal in power generation is skewed.) The US has a lot of old infrastructure, and although coal fired power plants have been getting replaced - largely by natural gas fired plants (because now we have a lot of that) - as they age out of use, there still are some remaining and a few new ones built because of those few coal states, even though coal isn’t cheap anymore (and provides very few jobs). Solar has been taking off here in California in recent years, and to a lesser degree in some other states, too, but with Trump in power, some states look like they’ll actively discourage solar. Never mind that the solar industry employs far more people in the US than coal or other fossil fuel industries…
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Remember that this is the same country that has such provincial earmarks as the Imperial measurement system, lack of socialized medicine, and Occupant Trump. We’re not exactly known for embracing civilized concepts here.
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It depends on your situation. He have hydro power here in Australia too but its only in a few places. Most of our country is a big sandbank, so we don’t have the altitude for hydro.
On the other hand we have enough flat land to power the entire world off photovoltaics, and wind power is doing well in our coastal areas.
The US has its own unique issues, and I doubt it could go 100% hydro for similar reasons to Australia.
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I think he meant ‘coal is still king’ because it’s what employs most of the people (or would, if there were jobs available). I didn’t see it as an endorsement.
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The Kentucky Coal Museum is only open during daylight hours.
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Hey, we’ve been crying since November. There should be enough of those to power every museum for 100 years.
The US has already built out as much hydro as we can - there just isn’t a ton of hydro resource in the US. Colorado, for instance, only has one river left that isn’t dammed (the Yampa).
Coal was easy for a long time because you could just build a huge plant, mine coal regionally (WY still produces most of our coal), and power a wide grid. The solution won’t be so simple, because it will need to take into account regional resources like wind, solar, hydro, as well as a mix of baseload and peaker type fossil fuel generators, and storage and load management to handle the gaps. Not as simple, but ultimately necessary.
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