This is the properly researched case that fleshes out my speculations about the perilous state of all the grids in the world where net zero policies are in place.
What I call the" wind drought trap" is set when subsidised and mandated intermittent energy drives out conventional power to the point where there is barely enough to serve the base load.
The trap is sprung by windless nights when there is a peak load and unscheduled outages of conventional power.
There is a 'frog in the saucepan' effect because the problem is not apparent as long as there is spare coal and gas capacity.
Then the collapse can be very sudden, like Britain in June 2021 when a serious Dunkkelflaute occurred, and also Texas in February 2021.
You might have expected someone would check the reliability of the wind supply before they went into large-scale wind farming in the way that you would check the rainfall of a district before you bought a property to grow crops and pasture. But they managed to be surprised by the European Dunkelflautes that can last for weeks, and sailors and millers must have known about them for centuries.
I like to think of wind droughts as the loose thread in a knitted garment and if you pull on the thread long enough the whole garment will unravel.
The silence of the meteorologists on the matter of wind droughts makes me very suspicious because they must know that high pressure-will systems are associated with low winds. We know that the WMO was a founding member of the climate alarmist club in the UN when they established the IPCC.
The first assessment report of the IPCC in 1990 recommended a survey of the wind resources of the world in case they could be exploited for large-scale power generation. They must have found wind droughts and they must or should have known that this would disqualify wind power as a basis for reliable power supply until adequate storage technology is available. They wanted to destroy the economies of the West by getting rid of fossil fuels and unexpected wind droughts would deliver a fatal blow when the fossil fuel supply fell below the base load.
President Trump will be very cross if he finds out that this was indeed the plan and this could help to destroy the climate fraud if the Musk mafia can get into the records of the met offices and find incriminating communications from the WMO. That would totally discredit the WMO and their associates in the heart of darkness and justify the withdrawal of funds from all of the offending UN agencies.
The AI [boom, war, marketing campaign, investment hype] provides a great chance to monetize keeping coal going. Running a coal plant at a high load and using power excess-to-demand to run a data center should be quite profitable for the state or utility that could take it on. It has already been done for bitcoin "mining", and would work well (is working) for natural gas.
In my Peaky by Day, Stargate by Night essay, I tried to do a quick run at it:
My utility has an immense facility located a couple hundred miles away, with three generator plants around a roughly triangular coal field. It is mostly mothballed. I think if it was run at half capacity, my electric bill would be about 30% lower (after deleting wind and solar overcharges and tariffs). I'd love to see them running, and I think the working community there would be thrilled to get the work.
Yep, the best, cleanest, and most cost effectives are hydrocarbon based, including coal. I work in the ONG industry and always wonder what a 6" carbon steel tube in the ground does to harm Gaia while it delivers a rich way of life for our people.
I know, it is the work of the devil in the form of the environmentalist corrupt business model of grift. The USAID revelations are the tip of the iceberg: just wait until DOGE gets to the dept of energy... I live 40 miles NE of the Twin Shitties and our best farmland is being covered with toxic solar panels. Our energy bills are not declining... It is criminal.
USAID is a CIA slush fund and has done pretty much nothing but evil in the World, responsible for millions of deaths.
Including the Ukraine disaster, maybe 2M young men, in the prime of their lives, wasted for what? For nothing? Ukraine could have kept their entire land area, lived in peace with its neighbors to the West & East, had a wealthy & productive nation, and made $billions as a trading hub between Russia & Europe. Thanks to USAID, they will be left with a fraction of their land, a destroyed nation, in horrendous debt to vulture capitalists, like BlackRock, millions of lost population. USAID/NED/CIA a blight on World peace & prosperity.
Interesting. Climate action as a priority.. Dissenting viewpoints as evidence of Russian Bots and Putin apologists. I see you agreed with a comment criticizing the Malthusians for their attack on nuclear so I consider you an ally in the struggle session for on-demand power.
You might enjoy the comment section over at surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com blog where they see energy policy and climate change as a predicament rather than a problem to be solved. They sometimes engage in heated and patiently moderated debates over climate change, geopolitics, culture wars and trade policies.
Thank you! Taking the time to show the absolute economic advantages coal offers is greatly appreciated. The battery backup cost comparison was awesome! This will go down as one of your best feature articles so far! Thanks EBB for working so hard to put the facts out to the masses so we can share with anyone who cares to get informed!
The economic advantages are minor, the big thing is that the US like many other countries is foolishly putting all their energy eggs in one basket, that is natural gas. NG replacing Nuclear, Coal & Oil. NG supplying most heat, fertilizer, cement, plastics and a lot of the chemical industry. And now major exports of LNG. And wasting vast amounts of capital on wind & solar shrines in order to greenwash the NG. Talking about setting us up for the Big Crunch.
And I don't believe these rosy predictions by Gas industry pundits and the EIA. They lied about that in the 1970's causing a major economic & social disaster that took 20yrs to recover from. You can argue the US never recovered from it, with heavy industry moving overseas. With G&R, amongst others warning that domestic NG & Oil production are sliding down the backside of Hubbert's curve:
Adam Rozencwajg: Peak Oil Arrives in the US Shale Patch. Are You Ready?
Going without electricity is even more expensive than electricity produced with distillate oil. Just ask the Texans that went without power for days during Storm Uri.
Also, not much distillate oil will be burned because it’s a backup fuel that is only used when/if the natural gas supply is interrupted.
Certainly. I was not suggesting that they not use it.
But I would like to see realistic planning so that they don't need to use it. Things like leaving Vermont Yankee and Indian Point in operation, for example.... Sigh.
1. Reliable generation from coal is paramount and it’s more than just the on-site storage aspect. Maintaining synchronization on the grid is easier with rotating inertia that inverter-based resources have trouble with, not to mention the extra equipment required to tie them in.
2. There is less risk with coal burning than batteries. Yes, it’s a giant pile of fuel but we have the ability and knowledge to fight hydrocarbon fires. The proliferation of batteries without a proportionate response in battery firefighting capabilities and knowledge makes battery fires considerably more difficult to put out. This also does not scratch the surface on how much more toxic battery fires are.
3. David Blackmon (great energy reporter and Substack writer) has hypothesized that we will see new baseload coal plants being constructed as the AI race continues to ramp up. They have already knocked over the first 2 dominoes with restarting old nuke plants and now starting to build on-site combined cycle gas plants. As the need for cheap energy continues, it would not surprise me to see a tech company come out and admit the obvious - the cheapest plant to build and operate is coal. The future will get very interesting in the coming years.
A big problem with Coal is getting investors when they have to figure on endless lawsuits from the Malthusian crowd, same as was done to nuclear power in the starting in the early 1970s. And then if Trump's successor loses the next election all that coal investment likely will just become stranded assets.
That's why it would be a much wiser investment to focus on nuclear, especially SMRs. By all logic nuclear should have a lower LCOE than coal going forward. Especially if Trump & DOGE can take the axe to the NRC.
It would be very challenging to be an investor and have to estimate which way the wind will blow every 2-4 years. I’m hoping the success will become a bit of a snowball and American excellence will come back without apology. That could potentially steer us in the right direction for 5-10 years
That's what I'm hoping too. The counter-revolution to all the insanity we've experienced since the Clinton years. It may spread throughout the Western World. Even in Europe the Greens are rock bottom in popularity and populist politicians and political parties are starting to form governments, in spite of efforts to ban them, marginalize them & censor them.
Agreed. Focusing on the new generation of nuclear reactors is a far better option than promoting continued use of coal, which is a dirty fuel causing health problems. Nuclear produces no emissions.
Another reliability factor is that coal supply and storage isn't vulnerable to extreme cold snaps or pump or valve failures as sometimes happens to nat gas supplies.
Great recap of yet more benefits of the fossil fuel industry to keep us safe. Also, couldn’t agree more than it is fantastic to have an Energy Secretary who actually understands energy!
This article has given me so much hope. Finally someone with a brain is at the helm in the energy sector. Of course coal is a logical source of cost-friendly energy production. Looking to solar grids and windmills is like depending on unicorn farts for the food supply. Getting out of cartoon-land and getting into reality on energy may in fact save lives in our cold winters. My elderly sister and her husband nearly died in the winter of 2021-2022 when Texas tried to rely on windmills to produce enough power to keep the heat on. They froze up! No good, not in the USA in the 21st century!
Thanks for your research. Great article, and right on!
You mentioned "it's Clean". You didn't elaborate on that. The public thinks coal and its emissions are extremely dirty, but as you imply, and as I've heard, modern coal burning methods are much cleaner than they ever were in the past. I don't know any details though - perhaps you could write a brief answer on that?
Yeah the modern coal fleet emits very little pollution due to pollution control equipment. The U.S. has great air quality most places and pollution is basically at background levels. The same people who bemoan LNT for nuclear radiation need to think for a second about using lnt to claim coal plants are bad
I don't think coal will ever be "clean". Maybe "cleaner", but not clean. Certainly not compared to nuclear. While I agree mostly with this article, I consider a coal revival to be a temporary stop-gap measure until a nuclear revival is completed, with many new nuclear plants online and generating power. Unfortunately, that will take a long time due to excessive overregulation that must be reversed. In the meantime, I would prefer not to live near a coal-fired power plant.
Coal is NOT clean, even with the most advanced emission controls - which are not installed on all coal plants. And there is no way to economically control CO2 emissions today.
I suppose it depends on your definition. As I said, coal is much cleaner than previously. And compared to the terrible environmental destruction of wind and solar, and the mining of lithium, cobalt, manganese, and rare earth minerals, coal is squeaky clean!
[NITPICK] In the third paragraph above your "Cost of Energy Storage: Coal vs. Batteries" table, you have "Based on EIA data, it costs about $25 in fuel costs to generate electricity using coal in a sub-critical coal plant"
You may wish to specify "$25 in fuel costs per MWHr"
All energy companies are regulated monopolies. Based on what I can see, due to those regulations, Xcel Energy only earns money/distributed profits to shareholders, through construction/upgrades to its system like wind and solar. How can I discover if this is true? Because if it is true, there is no incentive to produce inexpensive energy. Or any reliable energy at all.
Look into utility ratemaking formulas, and you will see that utilities pass through their expenses (including fuel, power purchases, and depreciation) in addition to charging a rate of return on their rate base (undepreciated assets). This incentive is supposed to be regulated by utility commissions, but mandates, subsidization, and even just the goal of reducing emissions (without mandates) have overridden this concern in many places.
I knew that part, I'm trying to get to the actual mandates and laws that drove the rates up. They must be published somewhere. On my power bill it doesn't show how much of each type I am being served. Thanks, Ken
It was a great presentation by Trump, Wright & gang but while they talked about some minor items like dishwashers, the most important subject that was conspicuously absent was nuclear power. It should be right up Trump & DOGE's alley, to take on the penultimate dysfunctional & corrupt bureaucracy that is the NRC (Nuclear Rejection Commission). That is the prime example of a bunch of snot swallowing bureaucrats who think it is their divine duty to control the entirety of Nuclear Energy and instruct our elected Politicians as to how it must be done, not the other way round.
Sure hope Ken Paxton wins his lawsuit that the NRC is functioning illegally and its mandate does not allow it to regulate anything but large PWRs. The individual states will be quite happy to regulate their own nuclear power plants, even if they are limited to SMRs.
As you correctly pointed out in your post on the cost of renewable generation, the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) method of calculating the costs of generation doesn’t always present an actual picture of what’s going on. LCOE calculations are useful for comparing the cost to construct different types of generation facilities, but are not nearly as useful a tool for comparing costs of operating plants.
And that is the case for your LCOE cost calculations for coal plants. Because these plants are relatively old and highly depreciated, they have virtually no capital costs, as your graph depicts. But that means the LCOE calculations hide the fact that coal plants have relatively high variable costs—higher than nuclear, higher than hydro, higher than combined cycle natural gas, and higher than wind and solar. And variable costs dictate how often a generation facility is operated. No one is going to pay more money to run a coal plant instead of a less expensive plant just because the coal plant is highly depreciated. It is coal’s relatively higher variable costs that have caused coal plants’ capacity factors to decline, something you acknowledge when you say that coal’s low capacity factors are “because of low wholesale power prices.”
Further, I don’t think that owners of coal plants are basing their decisions on whether to shut their plants down based on LCOE calculations. Your calculations suggest that an average coal plant only needs to make $34/megawatt-hour to cover all of its costs and earn an acceptable return on investment. If that were true, no coal plants would be retired because wholesale energy prices, combined with capacity payments, easily reach and often greatly exceed these levels, particularly during the daytime hours when coal plants are more likely to be operating. That coal plants are being retired suggests the owners believe that their costs are much higher.
Finally, one question. The subtitle of your post “It's Beautiful, It's Clean, It's Coal” suggests that coal plants produce clean energy, but nowhere in your post do you ever discuss its environmental effects. Why did you say that? The only way I could justify such a claim is if you believe that the environmental controls coal has been required to install have eliminated the harmful emissions. If so, I don’t think you should be advocating for the removal of environmental regulations.
Hi Matt and thanks for your comments. We think that the coal plants are being shuttered because they don't generate a return on investment for the utility companies in vertically integrated regions of the country. In restructured markets I think your points about variable costs have merit and I will look into those further. Coal plants are also being shuttered due to environmental regulations that are overly stringent given the major success that existing technologies have had in reducing particulates, nox, sox, and mercury emissions. Indoor air quality is worse than outdoor air quality yet EPA keeps promulgating ever-stricter regulations that are meant to cause coal plants to shut down. We think gaming the NAAQS and imposing CO2 regs to shut down coal plants is bad energy policy.
Thanks Isaac. If coal plants are being shuttered for not generating a return in vertically-integrated regions, that is because they have very low rate bases, the very thing that gives them low LCOEs. I am straying far afield from my knowledge base, but that seems like a very strange thing for PUCs to allow if the plants are in reasonable condition and are needed for system reliability.
I agree with you that the CO2 regs are bad policy, but I don't think they will ever go into effect under the current administration.
That's where the state policies we referenced come into play. 24 states have deep decarb mandates and many establish timelines for shutting down the coal plants. Utilities also understand they can't shut down all the coal plants due to reliability reasons so they're all rushing to close theirs first before they get stuck operating assets that don't generate returns.
Even if the regs won't go into effect they still impact planning decisions. Requiring ccs by 2032 or mandating a pre-2039 shutdown is a huge source of uncertainty for the industry.
I think that most, if not all of the states with deep decarb mandates are in the states with RTO wholesale markets. That actually makes things worse because they can impose requirements about what new facilities can be built and what has to be shut down without being directly responsible for a reliability problem--they can blame the RTOS for that (of course in California and New York that is harder to do because of the state's greater control over the RTO).
Yeah in MN the PUC said they can shut down the coal plants and import from the MISO market. They think there is an endless supply other peoples electricity
Brilliant comparison between the cost of coal stockpiles and "electric grid" batteries AND their relative back up duration!
Recommended reading for all government and state agencies and utilities that are busy shutting (or having closed) down coal fired generation facilities.
This is the properly researched case that fleshes out my speculations about the perilous state of all the grids in the world where net zero policies are in place.
What I call the" wind drought trap" is set when subsidised and mandated intermittent energy drives out conventional power to the point where there is barely enough to serve the base load.
The trap is sprung by windless nights when there is a peak load and unscheduled outages of conventional power.
There is a 'frog in the saucepan' effect because the problem is not apparent as long as there is spare coal and gas capacity.
Then the collapse can be very sudden, like Britain in June 2021 when a serious Dunkkelflaute occurred, and also Texas in February 2021.
You might have expected someone would check the reliability of the wind supply before they went into large-scale wind farming in the way that you would check the rainfall of a district before you bought a property to grow crops and pasture. But they managed to be surprised by the European Dunkelflautes that can last for weeks, and sailors and millers must have known about them for centuries.
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
I like to think of wind droughts as the loose thread in a knitted garment and if you pull on the thread long enough the whole garment will unravel.
The silence of the meteorologists on the matter of wind droughts makes me very suspicious because they must know that high pressure-will systems are associated with low winds. We know that the WMO was a founding member of the climate alarmist club in the UN when they established the IPCC.
The first assessment report of the IPCC in 1990 recommended a survey of the wind resources of the world in case they could be exploited for large-scale power generation. They must have found wind droughts and they must or should have known that this would disqualify wind power as a basis for reliable power supply until adequate storage technology is available. They wanted to destroy the economies of the West by getting rid of fossil fuels and unexpected wind droughts would deliver a fatal blow when the fossil fuel supply fell below the base load.
President Trump will be very cross if he finds out that this was indeed the plan and this could help to destroy the climate fraud if the Musk mafia can get into the records of the met offices and find incriminating communications from the WMO. That would totally discredit the WMO and their associates in the heart of darkness and justify the withdrawal of funds from all of the offending UN agencies.
www.flickerpower.com/images/RAFE_CHAMPION_CAN_THE_US_ESCAPETHE_WIND_DROUGHT_TRAP_The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
and they can of four days on in
The AI [boom, war, marketing campaign, investment hype] provides a great chance to monetize keeping coal going. Running a coal plant at a high load and using power excess-to-demand to run a data center should be quite profitable for the state or utility that could take it on. It has already been done for bitcoin "mining", and would work well (is working) for natural gas.
In my Peaky by Day, Stargate by Night essay, I tried to do a quick run at it:
https://open.substack.com/pub/winston866100/p/peaky-by-day-stargate-by-night?r=o86ng&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
My utility has an immense facility located a couple hundred miles away, with three generator plants around a roughly triangular coal field. It is mostly mothballed. I think if it was run at half capacity, my electric bill would be about 30% lower (after deleting wind and solar overcharges and tariffs). I'd love to see them running, and I think the working community there would be thrilled to get the work.
Nice piece!
Yep, the best, cleanest, and most cost effectives are hydrocarbon based, including coal. I work in the ONG industry and always wonder what a 6" carbon steel tube in the ground does to harm Gaia while it delivers a rich way of life for our people.
I know, it is the work of the devil in the form of the environmentalist corrupt business model of grift. The USAID revelations are the tip of the iceberg: just wait until DOGE gets to the dept of energy... I live 40 miles NE of the Twin Shitties and our best farmland is being covered with toxic solar panels. Our energy bills are not declining... It is criminal.
What's ONG? Nat gas?
Just wondering - what are you referring to regarding a "6" steel tube in ground? Oil wells? Pipelines? Perhaps you could elaborate...
I am guessing, but I think ONG is Oil/Natural Gas and the 6" steel tube is the well pipe which may bring up oil, gas or both.
You are really confused. What USAID revelations? The unsupported bloviations of Musk and Trump?
DOGE is indiscriminately destroying our federal government.
USAID is a CIA slush fund and has done pretty much nothing but evil in the World, responsible for millions of deaths.
Including the Ukraine disaster, maybe 2M young men, in the prime of their lives, wasted for what? For nothing? Ukraine could have kept their entire land area, lived in peace with its neighbors to the West & East, had a wealthy & productive nation, and made $billions as a trading hub between Russia & Europe. Thanks to USAID, they will be left with a fraction of their land, a destroyed nation, in horrendous debt to vulture capitalists, like BlackRock, millions of lost population. USAID/NED/CIA a blight on World peace & prosperity.
And the reputable sources for your scurrilous comments are...What?
And don't name Trump or Musk. Trump is a pathological liar and Musk is Autistic and frequently out of touch with reality.
BTW, are you a Russian bot? Your comments about USAID causing Russia to invade Ukraine are ridiculous. Putin is responsible for the invasion.
Nice smear jobs on everybody. A true sign of someone devoid of knowledge.
Read, Listen & Learn:
Jeffrey Sachs: The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID's Origin
Tucker Carlson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-3QssVPeg
Jeffrey Sachs: NATO In 'Wartime Hallucination' Mode! The Most TERRIBLE Offensive Is About To Happen
youtube.com/watch?v=DuBVKT4a0H8
US Staged a Coup in Ukraine - Here's Why and How, Chris Kanthan:
https://www.sott.net/article/393740-US-Staged-a-Coup-in-Ukraine-Heres-Why-and-How
USAID malfeasance documented:
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/01/31/trump-executive-order-us-regime-change-network/
I guess they're all Russian bots. What a ridiculous comment.
Interesting. Climate action as a priority.. Dissenting viewpoints as evidence of Russian Bots and Putin apologists. I see you agreed with a comment criticizing the Malthusians for their attack on nuclear so I consider you an ally in the struggle session for on-demand power.
You might enjoy the comment section over at surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com blog where they see energy policy and climate change as a predicament rather than a problem to be solved. They sometimes engage in heated and patiently moderated debates over climate change, geopolitics, culture wars and trade policies.
🙄
Thank you! Taking the time to show the absolute economic advantages coal offers is greatly appreciated. The battery backup cost comparison was awesome! This will go down as one of your best feature articles so far! Thanks EBB for working so hard to put the facts out to the masses so we can share with anyone who cares to get informed!
The economic advantages are minor, the big thing is that the US like many other countries is foolishly putting all their energy eggs in one basket, that is natural gas. NG replacing Nuclear, Coal & Oil. NG supplying most heat, fertilizer, cement, plastics and a lot of the chemical industry. And now major exports of LNG. And wasting vast amounts of capital on wind & solar shrines in order to greenwash the NG. Talking about setting us up for the Big Crunch.
And I don't believe these rosy predictions by Gas industry pundits and the EIA. They lied about that in the 1970's causing a major economic & social disaster that took 20yrs to recover from. You can argue the US never recovered from it, with heavy industry moving overseas. With G&R, amongst others warning that domestic NG & Oil production are sliding down the backside of Hubbert's curve:
Adam Rozencwajg: Peak Oil Arrives in the US Shale Patch. Are You Ready?
Peak Prosperity, Chris Martenson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaK0Dsdz7RA
Oil Peaks and Crime: The Hidden Connection Explained - Peak Prosperity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV4NNV1pDZs
That’s true in many ways. On site storage is a key factor in energy security that is the greatest advantage of coal.
Most gas-fired power plants can also burn distillate oil, which can also be stored onsite.
They can all burn methanol also but that is taboo.
Distillate oil is a fairly expensive way to generate electricity. It's reliable and storable, but expensive.
Going without electricity is even more expensive than electricity produced with distillate oil. Just ask the Texans that went without power for days during Storm Uri.
Also, not much distillate oil will be burned because it’s a backup fuel that is only used when/if the natural gas supply is interrupted.
Certainly. I was not suggesting that they not use it.
But I would like to see realistic planning so that they don't need to use it. Things like leaving Vermont Yankee and Indian Point in operation, for example.... Sigh.
Good information! 3 thoughts:
1. Reliable generation from coal is paramount and it’s more than just the on-site storage aspect. Maintaining synchronization on the grid is easier with rotating inertia that inverter-based resources have trouble with, not to mention the extra equipment required to tie them in.
2. There is less risk with coal burning than batteries. Yes, it’s a giant pile of fuel but we have the ability and knowledge to fight hydrocarbon fires. The proliferation of batteries without a proportionate response in battery firefighting capabilities and knowledge makes battery fires considerably more difficult to put out. This also does not scratch the surface on how much more toxic battery fires are.
3. David Blackmon (great energy reporter and Substack writer) has hypothesized that we will see new baseload coal plants being constructed as the AI race continues to ramp up. They have already knocked over the first 2 dominoes with restarting old nuke plants and now starting to build on-site combined cycle gas plants. As the need for cheap energy continues, it would not surprise me to see a tech company come out and admit the obvious - the cheapest plant to build and operate is coal. The future will get very interesting in the coming years.
Thanks for your reporting as always.
A big problem with Coal is getting investors when they have to figure on endless lawsuits from the Malthusian crowd, same as was done to nuclear power in the starting in the early 1970s. And then if Trump's successor loses the next election all that coal investment likely will just become stranded assets.
That's why it would be a much wiser investment to focus on nuclear, especially SMRs. By all logic nuclear should have a lower LCOE than coal going forward. Especially if Trump & DOGE can take the axe to the NRC.
It would be very challenging to be an investor and have to estimate which way the wind will blow every 2-4 years. I’m hoping the success will become a bit of a snowball and American excellence will come back without apology. That could potentially steer us in the right direction for 5-10 years
That's what I'm hoping too. The counter-revolution to all the insanity we've experienced since the Clinton years. It may spread throughout the Western World. Even in Europe the Greens are rock bottom in popularity and populist politicians and political parties are starting to form governments, in spite of efforts to ban them, marginalize them & censor them.
Agreed. Focusing on the new generation of nuclear reactors is a far better option than promoting continued use of coal, which is a dirty fuel causing health problems. Nuclear produces no emissions.
Another reliability factor is that coal supply and storage isn't vulnerable to extreme cold snaps or pump or valve failures as sometimes happens to nat gas supplies.
Great recap of yet more benefits of the fossil fuel industry to keep us safe. Also, couldn’t agree more than it is fantastic to have an Energy Secretary who actually understands energy!
I love that he (Chris Wright) explicitly stated that Germany's path is a bad idea that we will NOT follow.
This article has given me so much hope. Finally someone with a brain is at the helm in the energy sector. Of course coal is a logical source of cost-friendly energy production. Looking to solar grids and windmills is like depending on unicorn farts for the food supply. Getting out of cartoon-land and getting into reality on energy may in fact save lives in our cold winters. My elderly sister and her husband nearly died in the winter of 2021-2022 when Texas tried to rely on windmills to produce enough power to keep the heat on. They froze up! No good, not in the USA in the 21st century!
Thanks for your research. Great article, and right on!
You mentioned "it's Clean". You didn't elaborate on that. The public thinks coal and its emissions are extremely dirty, but as you imply, and as I've heard, modern coal burning methods are much cleaner than they ever were in the past. I don't know any details though - perhaps you could write a brief answer on that?
Yeah the modern coal fleet emits very little pollution due to pollution control equipment. The U.S. has great air quality most places and pollution is basically at background levels. The same people who bemoan LNT for nuclear radiation need to think for a second about using lnt to claim coal plants are bad
I don't think coal will ever be "clean". Maybe "cleaner", but not clean. Certainly not compared to nuclear. While I agree mostly with this article, I consider a coal revival to be a temporary stop-gap measure until a nuclear revival is completed, with many new nuclear plants online and generating power. Unfortunately, that will take a long time due to excessive overregulation that must be reversed. In the meantime, I would prefer not to live near a coal-fired power plant.
I agree that nuclear is the best option but will take a long time to get up to speed.
Coal is NOT clean, even with the most advanced emission controls - which are not installed on all coal plants. And there is no way to economically control CO2 emissions today.
I suppose it depends on your definition. As I said, coal is much cleaner than previously. And compared to the terrible environmental destruction of wind and solar, and the mining of lithium, cobalt, manganese, and rare earth minerals, coal is squeaky clean!
Great analysis. Thanks!
Wow... That table! Great analysis and explanation.
[NITPICK] In the third paragraph above your "Cost of Energy Storage: Coal vs. Batteries" table, you have "Based on EIA data, it costs about $25 in fuel costs to generate electricity using coal in a sub-critical coal plant"
You may wish to specify "$25 in fuel costs per MWHr"
It is clear in the table.
[/NITPICK]
Oh sure yeah that makes sense. Thanks Jeff!
All energy companies are regulated monopolies. Based on what I can see, due to those regulations, Xcel Energy only earns money/distributed profits to shareholders, through construction/upgrades to its system like wind and solar. How can I discover if this is true? Because if it is true, there is no incentive to produce inexpensive energy. Or any reliable energy at all.
Look into utility ratemaking formulas, and you will see that utilities pass through their expenses (including fuel, power purchases, and depreciation) in addition to charging a rate of return on their rate base (undepreciated assets). This incentive is supposed to be regulated by utility commissions, but mandates, subsidization, and even just the goal of reducing emissions (without mandates) have overridden this concern in many places.
I knew that part, I'm trying to get to the actual mandates and laws that drove the rates up. They must be published somewhere. On my power bill it doesn't show how much of each type I am being served. Thanks, Ken
It was a great presentation by Trump, Wright & gang but while they talked about some minor items like dishwashers, the most important subject that was conspicuously absent was nuclear power. It should be right up Trump & DOGE's alley, to take on the penultimate dysfunctional & corrupt bureaucracy that is the NRC (Nuclear Rejection Commission). That is the prime example of a bunch of snot swallowing bureaucrats who think it is their divine duty to control the entirety of Nuclear Energy and instruct our elected Politicians as to how it must be done, not the other way round.
Sure hope Ken Paxton wins his lawsuit that the NRC is functioning illegally and its mandate does not allow it to regulate anything but large PWRs. The individual states will be quite happy to regulate their own nuclear power plants, even if they are limited to SMRs.
As you correctly pointed out in your post on the cost of renewable generation, the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) method of calculating the costs of generation doesn’t always present an actual picture of what’s going on. LCOE calculations are useful for comparing the cost to construct different types of generation facilities, but are not nearly as useful a tool for comparing costs of operating plants.
And that is the case for your LCOE cost calculations for coal plants. Because these plants are relatively old and highly depreciated, they have virtually no capital costs, as your graph depicts. But that means the LCOE calculations hide the fact that coal plants have relatively high variable costs—higher than nuclear, higher than hydro, higher than combined cycle natural gas, and higher than wind and solar. And variable costs dictate how often a generation facility is operated. No one is going to pay more money to run a coal plant instead of a less expensive plant just because the coal plant is highly depreciated. It is coal’s relatively higher variable costs that have caused coal plants’ capacity factors to decline, something you acknowledge when you say that coal’s low capacity factors are “because of low wholesale power prices.”
Further, I don’t think that owners of coal plants are basing their decisions on whether to shut their plants down based on LCOE calculations. Your calculations suggest that an average coal plant only needs to make $34/megawatt-hour to cover all of its costs and earn an acceptable return on investment. If that were true, no coal plants would be retired because wholesale energy prices, combined with capacity payments, easily reach and often greatly exceed these levels, particularly during the daytime hours when coal plants are more likely to be operating. That coal plants are being retired suggests the owners believe that their costs are much higher.
Finally, one question. The subtitle of your post “It's Beautiful, It's Clean, It's Coal” suggests that coal plants produce clean energy, but nowhere in your post do you ever discuss its environmental effects. Why did you say that? The only way I could justify such a claim is if you believe that the environmental controls coal has been required to install have eliminated the harmful emissions. If so, I don’t think you should be advocating for the removal of environmental regulations.
Hi Matt and thanks for your comments. We think that the coal plants are being shuttered because they don't generate a return on investment for the utility companies in vertically integrated regions of the country. In restructured markets I think your points about variable costs have merit and I will look into those further. Coal plants are also being shuttered due to environmental regulations that are overly stringent given the major success that existing technologies have had in reducing particulates, nox, sox, and mercury emissions. Indoor air quality is worse than outdoor air quality yet EPA keeps promulgating ever-stricter regulations that are meant to cause coal plants to shut down. We think gaming the NAAQS and imposing CO2 regs to shut down coal plants is bad energy policy.
Thanks Isaac. If coal plants are being shuttered for not generating a return in vertically-integrated regions, that is because they have very low rate bases, the very thing that gives them low LCOEs. I am straying far afield from my knowledge base, but that seems like a very strange thing for PUCs to allow if the plants are in reasonable condition and are needed for system reliability.
I agree with you that the CO2 regs are bad policy, but I don't think they will ever go into effect under the current administration.
That's where the state policies we referenced come into play. 24 states have deep decarb mandates and many establish timelines for shutting down the coal plants. Utilities also understand they can't shut down all the coal plants due to reliability reasons so they're all rushing to close theirs first before they get stuck operating assets that don't generate returns.
Even if the regs won't go into effect they still impact planning decisions. Requiring ccs by 2032 or mandating a pre-2039 shutdown is a huge source of uncertainty for the industry.
I think that most, if not all of the states with deep decarb mandates are in the states with RTO wholesale markets. That actually makes things worse because they can impose requirements about what new facilities can be built and what has to be shut down without being directly responsible for a reliability problem--they can blame the RTOS for that (of course in California and New York that is harder to do because of the state's greater control over the RTO).
Yeah in MN the PUC said they can shut down the coal plants and import from the MISO market. They think there is an endless supply other peoples electricity
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/15gHczugwH/
That was awesome
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Brilliant comparison between the cost of coal stockpiles and "electric grid" batteries AND their relative back up duration!
Recommended reading for all government and state agencies and utilities that are busy shutting (or having closed) down coal fired generation facilities.