Coal To Hit Green fan
A load of coal is about to hit the green fan. Earlier this month we attended a conference on coal-fired electric power. A titanic collision is in progress, albeit unseen so far. An iceberg ahead in the night. The ship unable to swerve. Here's the deal.
US peak power use increases pretty steadily about 20,000 MW a year. It has for 40 years, an incredible straight line in a world of economic wiggles. We handle this growth with spurts of power plant construction. The last spurt was around 2000 and we quietly built about 150,000 MW, all natural gas-fired because gas was cheap and green. That is roughly 150 large power plants.
Now gas is prohibitively expensive, we are once again running out of power, and coal is the only large scale option. So the industry is gearing up to build a huge new fleet of coal fired power plants. They will do so for there is no option. You can't make electricity out of political rhetoric, would that you could.
What this cold shot of reality will do to the great green political movement presently underway remains to be seen. It will not be a pretty picture.
Enjoy the show.
The Washington Pest
US peak power use increases pretty steadily about 20,000 MW a year. It has for 40 years, an incredible straight line in a world of economic wiggles. We handle this growth with spurts of power plant construction. The last spurt was around 2000 and we quietly built about 150,000 MW, all natural gas-fired because gas was cheap and green. That is roughly 150 large power plants.
Now gas is prohibitively expensive, we are once again running out of power, and coal is the only large scale option. So the industry is gearing up to build a huge new fleet of coal fired power plants. They will do so for there is no option. You can't make electricity out of political rhetoric, would that you could.
What this cold shot of reality will do to the great green political movement presently underway remains to be seen. It will not be a pretty picture.
Enjoy the show.
The Washington Pest
posted by The Washington Pest at
12:33 PM
3 Comments:
I liked your post, and I agree that it will indeed be interesting when we have to start getting realistic about our ever increasing energy needs.
The conference on coal-fired electric power? When / where was this conference? Do you have any links to some of the sources that prompted you to write this post? This would help my own research in advocating sane solutions to this complex issue. Thanks much!
- hedley
While coal might be an immeidate solution to the energy shortage, there is another source of energy completely escaping our notice.
Some inconvenient facts:
1. The earth is an charged electrically charged sphere immersed in the electric plasma of space.
2. THe earth has an electric field with a potential of about 100 volts per vertical metre.
3. Believe it or not, protons are positively electrically charged particles that spin. This spin is made use of in industry standard proton precession magenetometers. Question is that by spinning the proton is doing work and thus consuming energy, but where is this continual supply of energy coming from?
Unfortunately the only physical forces that science has available are gravity and maybe magnetism. (maybe because no magnetic field can exist in the absence of associated electric currents).
The trick is how to tap into this source of energy. Nicola Tesla apparently did.
One other thing about coal is the radioactive elements in it as well as elements not normally associated with plants and trees.
If the Greenies actually understood what burning coal actually produces, apart from plant food, we might have another scare.
Hedley: The conference is here
http://www.ElectricPowerExpo.com/
Check out the industry forecast by Ken Maize in the January issue of Power magazine.
Louis: Harvest the earth's EMF -- We love it!
The Washington Pest
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