11–20 of 160 posts
I read on until "The natural gas that comes out of these wells is practically free"
Then I had to give up because its obvious propaganda with no real interest in the truth. I am all for clean energy, but unfactual propaganda isnt good for anyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.
For about a century, coal has been the cheapest, most reliable fuel for utility-scale power generation. For most of the eastern seaboard, coal has only been supplanted by natural gas (slowly) over the last ten years. Competing fuel price fluctuations dictated the change. Natural gas prices before fracking were both higher and much more volatile. There have been periods of ebb and flow that many workers and their fami…
Edit: Did you mean to imply that Coal is not actually going away because the 'cheaper alternatives' are fake?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.
You have the luxury of not depending on it coming back in order to earn a living again. I'm not saying it's a good thing they believe it, I'm saying the conned is still the victim: it's the conartist that should be punished, and the GOP has been conning Appalachia for decades.
Coal was dead long before Trump was elected. The fact that he and the majority of the GoP continue to lack the political will to tell their people the truth does not change this. The worst victims of all of this are of course the people being told that coal is coming back, that the way that their fathers made a solid living will someday return so they continue sitting in a pit of addiction and despair, waiting for th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For about a century, coal has been the cheapest, most reliable fuel for utility-scale power generation. For most of the eastern seaboard, coal has only been supplanted by natural gas (slowly) over the last ten years. Competing fuel price fluctuations dictated the change. Natural gas prices before fracking were both higher and much more volatile. There have been periods of ebb and flow that many workers and their fami…
Why shouldn't I believe them? Assuming they are pointing to the datacenter equivalents of wind/solar/nuclear energy as the reason why datacenter use is shrinking. Edit: Did you mean to imply that Coal is not actually going away because the 'cheaper alternatives' are fake?
Nuclear could cover base load but is orders of magnitude more expensive (up-front) than coal. Huge investment, huge regulatory burden, huge political risk. Until recently, we hadn't built a new nuclear plant in the country for decades. [0] Coal is cheap and reliable. Always has been.
What's killing coal is low, non-volatile natural gas prices from shale fracking.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
From Newsweek (arguably a progressive-leaning publication): "The best estimate available for the total cost of wind power is $149 per megawatt-hour, taken from Giberson’s 2013 report." http://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480
Also from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/wind-powe...
Coal was dead long before Trump was elected. The fact that he and the majority of the GoP continue to lack the political will to tell their people the truth does not change this. The worst victims of all of this are of course the people being told that coal is coming back, that the way that their fathers made a solid living will someday return so they continue sitting in a pit of addiction and despair, waiting for th…
Not defending Trump, but what you expect? "We are backing nuclear" "This time it will be good" Can you see a populist saying that?
The ones truly complicit in the Great Lie know who they are, and I have a feeling their day of judgement is closer than they want to believe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have the luxury of not depending on it coming back in order to earn a living again. I'm not saying it's a good thing they believe it, I'm saying the conned is still the victim: it's the conartist that should be punished, and the GOP has been conning Appalachia for decades.
The real solution is how do you get the people being conned to recognize that they are being conned and quit voting for the people conning them. If there wasn't a payout (e.g. people being (re)elected), then it wouldn't be happening.
Americans are hopeful, it's our single greatest strength and the source of our most disastrous failings.
More and more people are turning to Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors, like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders, If Kirk Sorensen and others are right this will revolutionize energy (and probably not just energy but mining, water desalination etc.) as we know it unlike wind or solar ever could. Natural gas and coal should die once and for all as they are as dirty as it gets. I strongly believe we are ready for truly nuclear…
There's lots of talk, and boy would I ever love to see these actually happen!
However, there's stuff that a utility can design and install toady, and there's stuff that's decade out. For nuclear, deployment of "understood" designs can take a decade, easily.
The other thing about these new nuclear reactors, I don't ever hear anybody talk about them being much cheaper than current reactors. That should be one of the key selling points. They need to be cheap enough that they can run at, say, 50% capacity over the course of a day to follow the demand curve. Right now nuclear runs continuously at near maximum in order to be economical.
Wind and solar are getting cheaper. Storage is getting cheaper. These new nuclear technologies don't need to compete with natural gas and coal, they need to compete with the cost in 20 years of renewables with 30%-50% of that energy getting stored.
In any case, I'd love to see these technologies enter production so that we have a more diverse energy pool. But I don't think it does them any favors to pretend that they're further along than they actually are.