The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

Well over 40% of US electricity is still from coal. Despite all the hype, renewables other than hydroelectric are only 3% in the US.<p>What&#x27;s driving energy prices is cheap natural gas. Natural gas is cheap to extract and can be extracted fast. But after a while, it&#x27;s all gone. Britain&#x27;s North Sea Gas boom is over.[1] Gas fields also drop off faster than oil fields. The cheap natural gas boom won&#x27;t last forever. It&#x27;s created the illusion that the energy problem is over.<p>Nuclear is discouraging. After Fukushima, nuclear plants are scary. Fukushima was a reasonably good plant which got hit by a larger than expected tsunami and lost site power. That was enough to cause a major disaster. Nuclear now looks like a technology where every decade or two you lose a city. The small-nuclear enthusiasts are a bit scary; some argue they need fewer safety precautions because their reactors can&#x27;t melt down. What could possibly go wrong? Big, expensive containment vessels are a good thing; when Three Mile Island failed, the containment held it in.<p>Battery technology will help. Wind and solar are intermittent, and can&#x27;t carry too much of the load until there&#x27;s more storage. But it&#x27;s going to take a lot of batteries.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crystolenergy.com&#x2F;assessing-future-north-sea-oil-gas&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crystolenergy.com&#x2F;assessing-future-north-sea-oil-...</a>

Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can&#x27;t reverse it. Investors in new generating plants expect them to operate for decades. The regulatory pendulum is going to swing back against coal within a decade. The optimal thing to do if you own an old coal plant is to run it as much as you profitably can right now, don&#x27;t invest in major upgrades for the future, and be ready to scrap it whenever the EPA resumes actually protecting the environment.<p>The Chekhov&#x27;s gun waiting to go off in electricity demand is electric vehicles. When they become a non-trivial part of transportation they&#x27;ll be the biggest new demand driver for electricity in two generations. Hopefully they&#x27;ll arrive in a big way shortly <i>after</i> the big wave of coal retirements is finished; otherwise they could keep marginal coal units lingering for a while longer.

I&#x27;m glad we&#x27;re leaving a lot of coal in the ground, but for different reasons. If society as a whole ever slides backwards (due to global war, horrific disease, etc), it leaves a lot of fairly easily extractable energy for the future generation that survives. Dark way of looking at it, I know.

Was hard to get through the rhetoric and falsehoods like &quot;When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the marginal cost of that electricity is essentially free&quot;<p>I read on until &quot;The natural gas that comes out of these wells is practically free&quot;<p>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.

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 future.

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.<p>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 their ship to come in while the politicians get ever fatter.

Solar appears to be on an exponential. If true, no one is prepared for where that will take us in just two to four years!

I disagree with the metrics here. In the US Hydro power is not considered renewable yet it powers roughly a third of Canadians. Quebec&#x27;s Hydro Power also powers a large part of New York, Vermont and Massachusetts.

<i>And yet his energy plan is to cut regulations to resuscitate the one sector that’s never coming back: coal.</i><p>Wait! Hold it right there! Are you trying to tell me that &quot;clean coal&quot; is not coming back? &lt;&#x2F;sarcasm&gt;