So long, dinosaur coal plants. My lungs are looking forward to solar eating the rest of your lunch.
"Data processing and blockchain interests are the latest entities to court the ailing Hardin Generating Station, a 109-megawatt coal-fired power plant that is seeking a buyer to avoid closure." - https://www.apnews.com/6a577c7d0dc1488b9481d03685950e96
Great, now we can watch train loads of coal go into a building and bitcoins come out! Yeah, that is the smell of progress.
In the case of US, New York at 8PM would get electricity from California at 4PM. There would be some losses from transmitting power for such large distance, but shouldn't it be better than just wasting energy or storing energy even less efficiently?
To limit resistive losses you have to go to really high V -> massive pylons (there were some built behind the iron curtain).
But you still have capacitive coupling (and reflections after the TL is larger than $\lambda$/10 -> You need to go to very low f or even DC
But high V. DC is hard! and low f AC is massive.
Ultimately it hasn't been done because it hasn't been worthwhile.
"In July 2016, ABB Group received a contract in China to build an ultrahigh-voltage direct-current (UHVDC) land link with a 1100 kV voltage, a 3,000 km (1,900 mi) length and 12 GW of power, setting world records for highest voltage, longest distance, and largest transmission capacity."
(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current)
So to minimize power loss in the cables, you want to minimize the current. In order to transfer the same amount of power, you need to increase the voltage.
Not sure about the pylon sizes.
For example, where it's hot, people are running aircons during the day. Where the weather is cold, you need to run heating, but (1) often that's not electric, and (2) heat stores relatively well (in e.g. hot water tanks). In temperate climate, the uncomfortable power surge happens at ~6pm, when people get home from work and start turning on the light and running home appliances (stove to cook dinner, opening the fridge which must cool, etc).
The solution is storage, but at current pricing the amount required for a full renewable grid would be obscenely expensive. Luckily battery prices have been dropping quickly for years and continue to do so.
Market driven demand side flexibility is not very well tapped, doesn't require any technological leaps and there's a lot of room for improvement there. For example:
* Aluminum smelting plants that vary their usage depending on spot cost (actually already happening in Germany).
* Smart electric storage heaters that turn on when electricity is cheap.
* Smart electric vehicle chargers that take electricity spot price and current charge levels in to account when deciding when and how much to charge.
* Hell, even bitcoin miners.
Or we’re going to subsidize residential storage (such as the 50k home project in Australia).
1. Cars have very very large batteries. You'd be hard-pressed to use more than a third of the capacity of a high-end Tesla Model S over night (100 KWh!). Sure, maybe you're driving a Nissan Leaf and its battery is only a third of that capacity, but in a few years 100 KWh might actually be common. What if you want your car battery to be at 100% in the morning so you can go on a roadtrip? Just make sure your car is aware of it.
2. There's going to be a marked for used batteries from old, retired electric cars. You might only need 20-40 KWh of remaining capacity to live comfortably in a fully off-the-grid solar setup.
But yes it is going to be harder and harder to compete with solar in a supply priced market.
Then they talk about how their solar is starting to be dispatchable (market wise) by curtailing production. I.e. if they commit to sell 80% of their production then 20% of it becomes available as dispatch able power. That only makes sense if the solar power is cheap enough. Which it is does in some situations in some markets.
Absolutely. The coal industry, like any industry, will obviously attempt to hang on as long as it can. However the US is down to a point where there are only ~50,000 coal mining jobs left (vs 175,000 in 1985). Solar, wind and natural gas can easily replace those.
There's no way coal pulls out of this decline (EIA first quarter updated figures):
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2018.03.20/main.png
Good choice of words, in that what we need to do with both coal and oil is leave it in the ground; which means that the people who've invested in its extraction need to be overcome somehow. Whether that's buying them out, making it uneconomic, or something more coercive.
The coal is still going somewhere. I assume overseas, but unfortunately (in this instance), as people of earth, we all share the same atmosphere.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-oakland-port-coal-2018...
https://www.publicnewsservice.org/2018-05-15/energy-policy/6...
Further, you're referencing a coal job figure, which is meaningless in this context. Coal production in the US over the past decade was higher than ever, by quite a large margin too, it's just that humans are no longer necessary for much of it.
I'm not a fan but these are the facts. Fortunately, production is now dropping worldwide, but it really is early days, it's still way up compared to 10, 20 or 30 years ago, and it certainly isn't because of renewables. It's a gas-driven change.
No it wasn't. It peaked in 2008 and is down quite a bit since then. 2016 production dropped 18% over 2015 and was the lowest since 1979. And despite the current administrations best efforts, 2017 production increased ~6% over 2016.