First U.S. Coal Plant in Years Opens Where No Options Exist | Hacker News Reader

First U.S. Coal Plant in Years Opens Where No Options Exist

bloomberg.com

43 pointspseudolus66 comments

What a strange article.

From my understanding it's an article about a family owned business supplying coal for a newly launched coal power plant in a remote Alaskan college town.

There were 4 quotes from the article: 1- From a representative of the college (good) 2- From an analyst who did not participate in this situation making a report that is totally unrelated to this news piece 3- From an analyst commenting on the news piece 4- From the company's website

There were no interviews with the residents. Nothing about the business supplying the coal. No comments from students. No mention of town halls or different sides.

Am I just becoming an old crabby guy or was this... lacking something?

Those things all cost money and time.

No, those things all used to be considered basic journalism.

The focus of the article was on the question of why this particular facility makes economic sense when coal generation as a whole is declining in the US.

Oh I get that.

But it was lacking any depth.

It seemed one sided. But I can't even call it that. It didn't even give a side. It was more like... hearsay with a single interview, probably on the phone, with 1 person on the ground. Even then, they could have published the interview for some depth. But not even that. Hell, probably browsing local facebook groups/reddits or calling their local municipality/college associations you could find more information with a few hours of free time. It's... surreal in terms of how shallow it was.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd fully expect a tabloid to publish trash rag stuff, but... I'm seeing it more now in major publications, and even oddly shared on sites like this.

I'm just... I just find it odd.

Feels more like a small-town newspaper writeup.

Could be that an overloaded author, sitting at a Bloomberg desk, was assigned the story ... with no experience in energy, and given nothing to to work with but a couple of local Alaskan newpaper clips. Maybe muttering to himself while he typed.

"The project, financed with university and state-municipal bonds, replaces a coal plant that went into service in 1964." Does it really count as a new one if it's just replacing an old one?

I think it does when nearly everywhere else coal plants are being replaced by other kinds of power generation.

Not exactly. Newer powerplants are more efficient and have got better at handling emissions. So even if it is replacement it could be a strict improvement on the existing option.

I think the defining features are:

a) does the new build bring any new capacity to the grid

b) what is the CO2 emissions per kWh

c) how does that compare to the old plant

I don’t have time to read the article right now, perhaps it explains?

It's really short, basically some administrator at the university said the math didn't work out for other energy sources, whatever that means

$245 Million for a _17_ megawatt plant seems insane - the Georgia and Kansas plants both are in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion a pop, and are ~50 times as powerful. I get that economies of scale are huge in power and that Fairbanks isn't exactly Georgia, but wow.

I am under the impression that cost of materials and construction in Alaska will be significantly higher than in Georgia or Kansas. It costs more money both for skilled labor and to get the materials out to a relatively remote location.

That was my first thought too. At $1/W, 17MW of solar power would be $17mm + supporting infrastructure and that would be very expensive for solar at that scale. I don't know what coal plants typically cost but this seems an order of magnitude too high.

True, although to be fair I imagine it harder to build a power station in Alaska. And solar isn't going to be a great solution either!

Alaska gets quite a bit less sun than the rest of the US and would need maybe 2x over-provision. And no idea what people will do for electricity the other 20 hours a day where solar panels are either useless or nearly useless. Also, cloudy days.

I wasn't trying to say solar was a good solution in this situation. I was giving a cost comparison to highlight how high this seems to be.

If this were Stack Overflow, your comment should be the winner.

Yes a typical nuclear power plant would average 1 GW, so to me, the smallness of the coal plant and its exorbitant price should be the core facts of the article.

Maybe due to the remoteness of the location, they couldn't build an offshore wind farm and send the electricity over the grid (although I'm skeptical that they put enough energy into exploring this option).

Someday we'll probably be drying algae, hemp, switchgrass or peat as feedstock for these legacy fossil fuel plants.

Fairbanks is a population of just ~30K, regularly has -50F temperatures during the winter, so it might not be directly comparable to a similar effort in KS or GA.

You can buy a "new surplus" 35 mW diesel generator plant right here:

https://www.industrialgeneratorsforsale.com/product/caterpil...

I didn't RFQ, but I'm guessing below $1M...

They need this and a storage tank.

Here's another: $125K per 1.7 mW..

https://www.industrialdiesel.net/Generator-Sets/3516-CATERPI...

The story should be about gross tuitions at pubic universities..

Everything is expensive in AK.

Everything is expensive in Alaska as you have to ferry things from mainland USA. More importantly people who will be less willing to work in cold harsh and depressing climate of the winter. Most workers will have 1 month work 1 month paid off. It is not very unusual. (Ditto for Hawaii)

The trend is that coal use is declining in the United States. Trends have outliers. This news is not sensational.

Uhhh it's still not running yet[0]. Headline says "Opens", but article says "open in April". It was slated to open last fall.

More details on the "cleanliness" of this new plant[1]:

3% less CO2 than the old plant

"very low" PM2.5 emissions

[0]https://fm.kuac.org/post/problems-discovered-during-testing-...

[1]https://fm.kuac.org/post/irony-arctic-climate-change-researc...

I had an interesting meeting with some politically connected tribal elders from Alaska. Right now they use a lot of diesel generators, so bringing a coal plant online is probably a better option than that.

There is a few areas in super remote locations within Alaska where the ground is literally on fire. Building geothermal plants would be a clean way of capturing and producing power for the entire state. The problem is that the areas are so remote that running transmission lines would cost ~$1M/mile and go across some pretty inhospitable land.

I had the idea of building the plant and then housing cryptocurrency mines, on site in containers, to literally generate the revenue to build the transmission lines. The problem being of course that in order to that, it would require quite a bit of capex based on a pretty volatile market. Not really an ideal investment.

Anyway, just thought it would be a fun story to share here. Cheers.

>The university’s new plant is a combined heat and power generator...

At least it's efficient.

Under "bio-mass" did they consider burning local wood? At least it would be carbon neutral...

How is that carbon neutral? Aren't you taking carbon that was otherwise sequestered and burning it?

New trees happen quickly, and remove carbon in the process. New coal not so much.

"Carbon neutrality" isn't about preserving known reserves of fossil fuels. It's about net-zero emissions by balancing new carbon emissions with carbon reductions or sequestrations.

Regardless, burning a tree is only carbon neutral if you actually plant more trees, and probably a LOT more trees, since the tree you burnt was presumably more mature and it still takes a long time for trees to grow. Moreso, you can achieve carbon neutrality with fossil fuels through the exact same mechanism - burn coal, then plant trees.

And lots of tree farms do plant new trees, making it neutral. Coal is more carbon-dense, so you need to plant more new trees than already exist and there probably isn't room for them unless you clear a forest first, and then what are you going to do with that wood?

Obviously other sources of energy are better than burning wood, but efficiently burning wood is better than burning coal or oil.

I bet they did, but when I lived up there the EPA was threatening to crack down on the area because so many people burn wood to keep warm. Everybody wants cleaner air, but when it's -50 outside and all you have is wood, and a government office over 4,000 miles away in a completely different environment is looking at charts and handing down sanctions while you're freezing your ass off trying to keep warm to survive, it becomes a sore spot. I'm sure wood was not really an option given federal regulations.

they said "nothing penciled out" but I would be curious to see an actual explanation of the costs of various energy sources... I can't imagine natural gas would have been that much more expensive, and in terms of indirect financial costs would likely have been a better choice (creating much less localized pollution)

My understanding is that natural gas has to be trucked in from the south, as the North Slope doesn't export it overland. I could easily imagine the local coal mine being cheaper, especially accounting for winter supply mitigations.

Especially ironic that it was paid for with money from oil and gas profits.

What was that money expected to be spent on?

This is a perfectly valid thing to spend the money on, I just find it ironic that of all things it's oil and gas money.

Ironic means that it was contrary to expectations.

Not sure if it's a coincidence but I read a report on BBC how most insects will die/vanish in 100 years except for cockroaches and other insects that thrive on human waste; butterflies, bees and other insects being too fragile for human pollution. Sobering

that seems mostly due to pesticide use which is unrelated

[citation needed]

Insects and other arthropods thrived in prior warm high-carbon eras, what you read was a sensationalist pop sci report about pesticides specifically.

Your reply is simplistic

(1) This is not pop sci : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063... - it's a research article resulting from a collaboration between 2 universities

(2) The paper mentions pesticides but also mentions climate change (global warming due to high-carbon), also mention intensive agriculture.

(3) usage of pesticide is highly linked with C02 pollution and climate change. You cannot consider one without not considering the other.

(4) How do insects thrived in warm high-carbon eras? I'd be happy to read papers on this

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