Taking the place of coal will be clean-burning natural gas and clean, green solar and wind power.
Glancing at the headlines you might really think that this fantasy was coming to pass.
Why just today the Sierra Club is out with an announcement that its Beyond Coal campaign is halfway to its goal of shutting down a third of U.S. coal plants. Wow!
With 12,000 megawatts of new wind power last year and 30% growth in solar power, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell 3.7% in 2012.
President Obama in his State of the Union address said that he would “direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy” — most likely by continuing to tighten emissions controls, regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant and effectively banning any new coal-fired power plants.
Earlier this week the giant power utility AEP announced that, in a settlement with the EPA and several states, it was shuttering three coal-fired plants in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky with 2,000 megawatts of generation capacity. AEP will also be investing $5 billion to install new emissions reduction technology at some of its other coal plants. And to help replace the coal power it will build 200 mw of wind and solar installations. The Sierra Club called it a “major victory.”
The story sounds even better at the TennesseeValley Authority, which in 2012 reduced its coal consumption by 16% to about 30 million tons. It’s in the midst of retiring 2,000 mw of coal capacity by 2017. Last year it completed a new 1,000 mw gas-fired plant in Tennessee to help replace the four coal units retired at the same site. For the first time in memory TVA got less than half of its power from coal.
Thanks to natural gas prices (brought about by the boom in fracking) hitting a low of $1.85 per MMBtu last April, in 2012 generators switched a bunch of their electricity generation from coal to natural gas. Nationwide that switching amounted to an uptick of some 8 billion cubic feet a day of gas consumption, offsetting millions of tons of coal.
As a result, coal’s contribution to nationwide power generation fell to 37% in 2012 down from 49% in 2007. That’s a precipitous drop for an industry that operates on such a massive scale. Natural gas accounts for 30% of power generation fuel.
So we’re on our way to getting rid of coal, right?
Not at all.
by Christopher Helman, Forbes | Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia
