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Comment by arnon | Hacker News Reader

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 families have managed to "wait out" in the past.

Further, if you've lived your entire life in a coal town, the sheer scale of the plants, mines, railroads, and other infrastructure can make them seem permanent, reliable. It is very difficult to imagine so much specialized infrastructure simply ... going away.

Imagine if you had spent your entire life as a datacenter tech, as had your father. You knew the business inside and out, understood the network of suppliers, the customers, the hardware, everything. You've gotten into arguments about different rack configurations and which you prefer to work on. This is your career. You got into this business because it would provide a stable life for you and your family, and you were damn good at it. Then people started telling you that we would no longer need datacenters - at all - in 5 years because there were now cheaper, better alternatives. You wouldn't believe them.

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?

Wind and solar are non-starters. They're more expensive than coal and they can't cover base load.

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...

So disgusting that the biggest threat to coal is natural gas, yet it's being blamed on environmental regulation. Do Scott Pruitt et. al really believe they're going to juice the economy, or are they cynically handing political favors to their wealthy friends?

Coal has vast negative externalities. The toll on health and lost productivity alone are large, not to mention its affects on the climate.

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?Rec...

That's true, and unrelated to the conversation at hand or anything I said. If those externalities were priced in, much of the relative cost description I gave would be wrong.

But they aren't. That's not to say they shouldn't be - just that right now the fact is that they aren't.

If I worked in an industry, and a new competitor came out that was initially more expensive, but killed less people, I'm not sure I'd be that surprised if my work started to dry up in favor of the less deadly alternative(s).

If at least one of the alternatives was cheaper too, then I would surmise the game was up.

If you were an arms manufacturer you would be thoroughly unconcerned.

While your witty retort made me laugh, unless you are suggesting that coal power stations are weapons designed to kill people living near them, I think you are missing the point.

I'm suggesting that, pretty much by definition, externalized costs do not get factored into economic decisions.

Unfortunately for coal, not all of its problems are externalities as much as they used to be. If your customer is paying for it, even if not directly in the price you charge, that can alter their behaviour, as we are seeing around the world.

To the extent that customers actually change their behavior, that is a positive development. I'm not sure the effect size is particularly large.

Efficiency programs have been pretty successful, and the overall trend in power consumption (in the US) is negative for now, which is great. But relatively few people even know what fuels are used to supply their power, so I'm not sure how easily consumers can respond.

Coal production hasn't actually changed that much over the last decades. It has just moved west, and become muh more efficient.

(Unfortunately...)

If coal is so great and cheap, then why is no one building new coal plants? Over the past few years wind and solar account for ~40% of new generation capacity and natural gas makes up the rest. Based on your comment, one would expect to either see only natural gas capacity being built out or some mix of natural gas and coal. That is not what is happening and it's because wind and solar are cheaper than coal in several areas of the country.

I feel like you and I don't disagree, but for some reason you think we do. Natural gas is replacing coal for base load generation because it is cheaper.

from wind-watch.org:

> "How does wind power affect base load? Wind power has no effect on base load.

https://www.wind-watch.org/faq-electricity.php

Well, you said wind and solar are more expensive than coal and I am saying they are not (hence why they are being built out like crazy). You seem to be arguing that wind and solar cannot replace coal since there are intermittent. I think that is wrong.

Okay, cool.

When power generation companies demonstrate that you are correct and replace their base load production capacity with solar and wind I will (joyfully) eat crow. That isn't really happening right now, though. Natural gas is replacing coal and non-hydro renewables make up a very small fraction of overall capacity.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...

Solar power is currently following Moore's law.

Prices are cutting in half every 2 years.

There is not a whole lot more price cuts that need to happen before Solar is at grid parity, and cheaper than coal.

In places like Hawaii it is already way way cheaper than any other available power solution.

In order to cover base load solar + utility scale battery deployments need to be cheaper than a coal plant in terms of TCO.

You're not wrong, and of course things like a carbon tax could change the economics substantially, but base load generation is not going to be solved by cheaper panels alone.

Mainly Natural Gas.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2...

The EIA needs to work on responsive web design.

You should talk to some folks involved in economic development who have experience with politics and attitudes in W. Virginia. What I've heard is the coal lobby still has the most money and power and politicians are behaving in a short sighted manner in order to appease coal and protect themselves. It would take a lot of courage and political capital to burn (no pun intended) to tell the truth to the state about the future of coal. It's part hope part cronyism.

W. Virginians are notoriously undereducated. So it will take a while but eventually the truth will be known and a day of reckoning will come.

To be fair my undereducated family in neighboring rural Virginia truly believed Trump "will bring the jobs back". They were aghast when I showed them a video of Tim Cook on 60 minutes explaining that those (manufacturing) jobs aren't coming back.

I grew up in West Virginia. You could not get elected in that state if you told the truth about coal jobs never coming back. So our politicians continue to pay lip service to the idea that "if we just de-regulate the coal industry, we can put WV miners back to work".

I didn't grow up in the coal mining regions of the state and I've since moved away, but it is depressing watching the citizens of my home state consistently vote against their own interests due to outright fabrications and lip service paid to them by gutless politicians who lack the backbone to tell them the truth.

West Virginia has a lot to offer and I do believe the people there could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they accepted the fact that coal is the past and the state needs to move forward into new industries/the future.

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.

I mean one could make a very similar argument between the displaced coal miners and the people who still work for a failing startup. You want to believe the good times are coming again and that desire to believe can override a lot of really good logical thinking.

Americans are hopeful, it's our single greatest strength and the source of our most disastrous failings.

I think that comparison is a little weak. Most startups fail but some still succeed, and those working for the startups that are failing can look at the success stories and aspire to that, and it's not completely unreasonable for them to do so.

Meanwhile there's no coal mining company that's booming while others flounder. The whole industry is shrinking. It'd be more like if cell phones were becoming obsolete in favor of cranial implants or something, but you were still working on a social app for Android.

Well I mean staying at that specific startup. Obviously the industry is fine. Maybe you really like the company, maybe you really like the coworkers, maybe the coffee's real good, maybe you just hate change. Whatever the reason that attachment can keep you at a place long after you know you should've left.

Oh, they know they're being conned, they're not stupid.

It's just that they believe that both sides are conning them, and they vote for the most appealing set of lies.

Or for the side that displays some empathy along with the lies.

As far as I can see everyone with half a chance for it has been conning Appalachia, or trying to, for pretty much as long as it's been recognizably a place.

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