Doing Without Coal

Writing for Greenwire, Darren Samuelsohn reports on action by West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D). The exemplary coal state senator “pushed back at the Obama budget request, saying it fell well short of what was necessary.” Necessity in the Coal State lexicon means perpetuation of the “clean coal” lie. “In an interview as he left the hearing, Rockefeller said his complaints didn’t rest with the budget.”

It’s not a question of money, it’s a question of the overall approach,” he said. “I just wonder whether they really do understand the importance of coal, the fact the nation can’t exist without it.

The biggest single source of carbon emissions in Washington, D.C. belongs to Congress.

Excellent suggestion, Jay! Let’s see if we can. It probably will be quite difficult to start. Similar to when the Russians pulled out of Cuba and there was no money to pay for foreign oil. But, you know, they muddled through. And, now there are using oil again, although not in the same way.

Think about it… the Navy did away with coal; railroads; so why not the Capitol Power Plant and elsewhere? Let’s see your Peak Coal scenarios, Big Eddie.

Offshore Drilling, ‘Clean’ Coal, and Nuclear Power: Is Obama’s Clean Energy Agenda Really Clean? (Audio) (treehugger.com)

This entry was written by jcwinnie, posted on 2010-2-5 at 1:21 pm, filed under economics, energy, policy, politics, survival and tagged coal, economics, petroleum, politics, survival. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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jcwinnie

Posted 2010-4-24 at 8:00 am | Permalink

“Telling companies and individuals that they are paying more now but will pay less tomorrow is always a difficult message to sell,” observes Fiona Harvey.

In Europe, a group of organisations financed a study that found “the cost of electricity by 2050 could be no higher than it would be under a high-carbon ‘business as usual’ regime*.”

* Editor’s note: Def. regime (pronounced, ray-gimme-dat-ree-mote-igotta-watch-thuh-Shopping=Channel), see Banana Republic.

The capital cost of building the vast amounts of renewable power infrastructure needed will be huge, but the advantage is that once this cost has been paid, the running costs of renewable power generation are far lower than for conventional power stations.

In addition, Europe’s creaking power infrastructure will have to be updated in any case. Replacing old coal-fired power stations with new coal-fired power stations will also be expensive, so building wind turbines and solar farms instead will look less expensive by comparison.

Finally, investing in a smart grid that runs across the continent will be a huge help. There will be two key advantages. One is a massive improvement in energy efficiency, as the demand can be evened out and the supply matched to demand across vast areas at once. The second is that it takes away the potential instability from relying on renewables, because if the renewable energy sources are geographically dispersed – hydroelectric in the north, solar power in the south, wind in the North Sea and other coastal areas, waste and biomass everywhere – then that removes the problem of relying on a single intermittent and unpredictable renewable energy source such as wind.

To get to this future will be hard, though, as the report makes clear. Capital investment in low-carbon energy infrastructure must double in the next 15 years, the authors estimate. That will almost certainly push up the price of electricity in the shorter term, even though efficiency savings could offset much of that cost to consumers and businesses.

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By The Art of Coal – After Gutenberg on 2010-2-12 at 2:24 pm

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