Xcel Energy Says It Will Close Two Coal-Fired Power Plants a Decade Early | Hacker News Reader

Xcel Energy Says It Will Close Two Coal-Fired Power Plants a Decade Early

finance.yahoo.com

126 pointsga-vu87 comments

Natural Gas prices have done a great deal to reduce coal usage. Shutting down a plant is no easy decision.

It is clear coal is just being priced out of the equation.

Imagine how much faster we'd go if we actually had the help of the federal government (via grants, etc) instead of fighting these utilities tooth and nail and forcing them to make these upgrades under court settlements and to wait until they haven't exhausted every penny of profits before moving to renewable energy?

> wait until they haven't exhausted every penny of profits before moving to renewable energy?

XCel is a regulated energy company. Their profits are defined by their state regulators and they are granted a right to a specific rate of return through the regulation process.

There's not even case here for Greenpeace style bootstomping. a Green New Deal legislation could redirect funds from carbon taxes back into renewable energy reinvestment, turning an externality into a mechanism to fund the cleaning of that externality. Hell, the very companies that would be paying that tax could turn around and open their own renewable energy arms and take that money right back as reinvestment. I don't know why this wouldn't get bipartisan support.

Would that be before or after all planes are grounded and every building in the US is retrofitted or rebuilt to be more energy efficient in ten years?

Do you have a source for all planes being grounded? And retro fitted can mean a whole spectrum of things from very cheap things to very expensive things.

They initially released a document with more detail then the bill and pulled it back when they realized it was insanity.

I found a archive of it here: https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publication...

Some quotes:

"We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero."

"we also need to start doing new things (like overhauling whole industries or retrofitting all buildings to be energy efficient)."

"Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle"

"A Green New Deal is a massive investment in renewable energy production and would not include creating new nuclear plants."

"The Green New Deal makes new fossil fuel infrastructure or nuclear plants unnecessary."

"Repair and upgrade U.S. infrastructure. ASCE estimates this is $4.6 trillion at minimum."

"The level of investment required is massive. Even if every billionaire and company came together and were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment, the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be sufficient."

"How will you pay for it? The same way we paid for the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailout and extended quantitative easing programs. The same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars. The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit."

"Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of frontline and vulnerable communities"

"Work with farmers and ranchers to create a sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas free, food system that ensures universal access to healthy food and expands independent family farming"

Bonus quote:

"That would be pretty hard for Hawaii" - Sen Mazie Hirono on the air travel elimination plan

I highly suggest reading the FAQ and the bill (its only 14 pages) if you haven't it is laugh out loud funny.

That's because it was a draft document. In other words, you're pinning everything you're saying on a document that wasn't even done. What, you think this is some kind of "gotcha" moment? Do you really think they'd release an official document about "cows farting"?

If that's the case maybe they should focus on running their small office and get that solid before proposing to restructure the entire economy.

They still must be drafting it because I don't see a document to take it's place yet.

I see nothing about grounding all planes unless " doing things to make it unnecessary" is what you mean. That is quite a stretch. Keep in mind if we go down our current path the result is potentially human extinction.

Retrofitting older buildings is a fantastic idea that isn't terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things.

Retrofitting every building in the United States in ten years is what was purposed. The tradespeople I know are all very busy and find it hard to hire in this college focused age. Unemployment is virtually zero. Where will all these able bodied skilled workers come from? (Not to mention the trillions of dollars required)

You’re taking this literally when you should be taking it seriously. All of those issues will become more important the next time there’s slack in the construction labor market.

If I can't take a policy proposal literally how on earth can I take it seriously?

It doesn't get bipartisan support because Green New Deal comes mixed in with a bunch of other controversial welfare crap (universal healthcare, basic income, guaranteed jobs, free college) that makes it too hard to swallow. Thus, you can easily oppose GND even if you are not opposed to climate change policies. If we want to get serious about climate change we need to propose legislation specifically to target that and nothing else, otherwise you just add fuel to all the "fixing climate change is a wealth redistribution plot" conspiracies.

First off, the GND is just a framework for lowering CO2 emissions while creating new jobs in an industry in transition. There's no inherent legislation in it, so I'm using it as a framing for any actual bill that would be drawn up in its framework.

And I think you're right about "riders" convoluting such legislation too much to make it too political. But there _is_ an inherent problem to transitioning to clean energy, and that's: What do we do with all those people in the "dirty" energy world? The original New Deal sought to employ people as a primary effect of building US infra. If it had just been focused on infra, it may have never got off the ground.

Let them figure that out. Let’s not hold the climate hostage because a few people are going to lose their jobs, otherwise we are no better than companies pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

So you think that carbon taxes invested into renewable energy have no negative policy consquences at all?

Either the customers of the utility will have to pay higher rates to support the higher costs of new renewable energy or capital providers will be expected to take a haircut. In basically every prior case policy makers have essentially ringfenced energy suppliers from bearing the financial cost themselves and consumers are ultimately the ones who pay extra for renewable energy with business and industrial users often avoiding higher utility bills like in germany.

So basically, you might as well do what germany does and just force consumers to pay in the first place for higher electricity prices. That's a lot easier to administratively manage than having to collect new taxes from energy users.

OK? You raised a valid point that there may be a negative policy consequence, then abruptly undermined it by saying "we'll just make them pay it anyway." I mean, that's the point. We're paying for externalities with regards to energy creation one way or another. To not pay for "dirty" energy out of pocket now is just kicking the can down the road. Plus there's myriad positives to tipping the balance of incentives toward renewables.

I suppose conservatives might oppose such legislation because it would be an opposing view, but... well hell, who am I kidding. It's not like they have any other reason to exist now besides being contradictory.

Be careful what you wish for. Look at Germany for the best example of what you are asking for. Ignore the PR and look at the data. They have increased solar capacity, but are closing natural gas and nuclear plants to build new lignite coal plants(the worst of the coal burning plants). Since their focus on solar, Germany's CO2 reductions have actually slowed!

It seems like the biggest problem is the retreat from nuclear, not the focus on solar.

Off topic so I apologize, but I saw your name, did a double take and had to say, "It's awesome".

Or the fact that the sun doesn't shine that much in Germany? Look at a world solar potential energy map. They are throwing money down the drain.

A combination of shutting down nuclear to just import from France's nukes down the road and use solar where they don't get much sun I would guess.

Ok, looking at the data, Germany gets over 40% of its electricity from renewables, while the USA gets less than 20%.

The US has multiple states larger than Germany I think. Regardless, it is much bigger and requires more work.

Germany has a population of 80 million people. The largest US state is California with 40 million people.

Population and load is only one piece to the puzzle. A larger country means a much larger and more expensive transmission grid.

You're being super disingenuous here. The main priority of Germany's energy transition program was not to lower electricity carbon emissions; it was to phase out nuclear. They were far more worried about a 2nd Fukushima than global warming.

And as you point out, they are managing to reduce CO2 emissions anyway.

> are closing natural gas and nuclear plants to build new lignite coal plants

Do you have a source for this? Specifically the building of new coal plants.

> to build new lignite coal plants

Germany has reduced it's energy from coal by 20% over the period since the transition began. Please cite your reliable sources that show they are replacing nuclear and gas with coal.

Energy from gas is up slightly, about 7%, over the same period. Nuclear is down 50%. The difference is all replaced by solar and wind.

Because they took a stance on nuclear power and refuse to use it. The do not care about facts and safety of nuclear power, instead they choose to poison the air for surrounding countries and be the 9 out of 10 largest CO2 contributor of Europe. Renewables + nuclear power is the real deal in clean energy, having renewables + coal is definitely not going to cut it.

Yes, since it is a political shitshow. Just today they presented a plan to distribute 40 billion to give those "poor" workers and communities depending on lignite a "perspektiv for the future" [0].

And I do see reasons for that. It's just that all of this would have been done ages ago if we had a lignite fukushima.

[0] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/kabinett-kohleausstieg-101....

I'm sorry, but you seem to not understand the realities of how this industry works.

Even if a utility wants to retire an unprofitable coal unit, they might not be allowed to do so (by the state) if they're still paying it off. Let's also say they want to retire their entire fleet and go to renewables as you suggest. Will they be allowed to raise rates to pay for the millions of dollars necessary to do so? How will the poor afford a new and expensive bill? Also, although I would agree that this is good for the environment and could be vital to survival as a species, are you ok with a less reliable grid? I am, but this isn't an easy sell. I can tell you right now that there isn't enough storage that can be built anytime soon to make a rush transition for the nation. Hawaii is working on this, and they are tiny with abundant sun. But what happens in bad weather when the sun doesn't shine for a week? They need many multiples of their total capacity in storage to avoid rolling blackouts. I'm not saying it is impossible, but there are big hurdles without making this the Federal government's most important issue.

There might be some of what you talk of as well with some groups resisting change (of course there is), but in reality it isn't as simple as all utilities are evil. The reality is that there are huge changes already going on in industry that are happening about as fast as we can go. Renewable integration is happening and very quickly. The fuel-mix in my region has shifted from only a few percent of renewables into the majority of what we have online at times. This huge progress has occurred in less than a decade! This is a huge technological and social problem. Please do keep up your interest and sense of urgency though. Public opinion will be the primary motivator of Washington.

> Even if a utility wants to retire an unprofitable coal unit, they might not be allowed to do so (by the state) if they're still paying it off. Let's also say they want to retire their entire fleet and go to renewables as you suggest. Will they be allowed to raise rates to pay for the millions of dollars necessary to do so?

...

Read what the OP said:

> if we actually had the help of the federal government (via grants, etc)

They are actually becoming increasingly involved in this area by mandating certain energy market changes like reducing barriers for energy storage. It's a process though.

If I misunderstood some of the intent of the post I was responding to, they have my sincerest apology.

"Even if a utility wants to retire an unprofitable coal unit, they might not be allowed to do so (by the state) if they're still paying it off."

'sell' it to a subsidiary and bankrupt it. Or act like a bani and pretend it's too big to fail. There are many ways to ditch an asset if you want to.

"Let's also say they want to retire their entire fleet and go to renewables as you suggest. Will they be allowed to raise rates to pay for the millions of dollars necessary to do so?"

If they can't afford it then they should have looked at the coming markets and ideals of the users.

:Note I read the rest of your comment and agreed with your sentiment. To an extent. But you cannot argue in good faith that the companies that have been making bank without caring a single whit about the environmental cost are somehow the good guys when they have to start considering it.

We have seen recently that bp knew in the 80's of the effect of excessive fuel consumption on global warming. To think that they were the only large company in a similar industry to realise this is just sticking your head in the sand.

Shit has to change. We are running out of options, and frankly if some of these companies go under because they didn't prepare based on knowledge they more than likely knew, well stiff fucking shit.

I'm in a world where my son has to deal with the consequences of the previous generation, and to an extent my own actions before I had learnt enough to know.

It's time to own up, act in the best interest of everyone as a whole. If you don't, well, don't come crying to me when people start taking drastic action.

Edit: a few words, on a mobile.

I sympathize with where you're coming from. There needs to probably be a unified response from each country to make this transition happen as soon as possible.

Please keep in mind that building a coal plant wasn't a dumb idea 20 years ago where we had forecasted load growth, expensive natural gas, and renewables weren't a thing.

Why would retiring unprofitable coal plants raise prices?

Closing them all would save US consumers 10 billion a year, just in electricity costs.

No Country for Coal Gen report

https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/no-country-for-coal-ge...

In the energy market things would be cheaper when replacing it with renewables, but spending billions on additional wind farms, solar, and storage has a steep initial price tag. You'd also have to spend billions on transmission to connect all the new generation to the grid. That or mass scale microgrids which would be cheaper, but still very expensive.

Expensive up-front things that save you money can be bought with loans and paid off with future savings.

Agreed, but the key difference is that this is not only massively expensive, but will require years of construction and the coordination of millions of people.

To make that happen, FERC is trying to incent the right market conditions and some are occurring naturally.

> The clean energy strategy is part of new legal settlement between the company, environmental organizations, and labor groups involving Xcel’s proposed $650 million purchase of a 760-megawatt natural gas plant.

So they’re cutting about twice as much coal production to replace it with cheaper natural gas and the renewables they probably had planned anyway?

What makes you think it's only corporate power companies out to make a profit that are the bad guys? It's all of them, including the public utilities. I live in the Tennessee Valley, TVA is consistently the WORST utility in the South in terms of green energy initiatives, and they're a quasi-governmental agency with a complete monopoly over the region they serve. They don't make profits. Their green power program is a sham and in fact they killed our budding green energy manufacturing economy back around 2005 with absurd, arbitrary restrictions on who could get solar panels and hook them up to the grid because those were a threat to their coal buddies' bottom line. Freaking DUKE POWER, whose history includes the blood of who knows how many coal miners, blows us out of the water. (Not that TVA doesn't have blood on its hands, either, but that's another story.)

Anyway, to all the people who wonder why Appalachia won't do the obvious and just replace coal with green energy: oh, we tried, and the powers that be shut that shit down cuz they weren't gonna have none of that. Coal owns us and they aren't gonna let go without a fight.

It's almost like government-enforced monopolies are bad. You want the regulators to be in charge, until they do something you don't like, funny how that works. You want democracy until democracy votes in people that don't represent you, funny how that works.

If there wasn't a ubiquitous subsidized power grid already, at-home solar installs would be cheaper. Large utilities are only competitive because they can externalize their costs via state-enforced mechanisms (absolving responsibility for pollution, stealing property aka eminent domain).

For all the crap I give the Cali government. Their high cost of gas made me buy an ev as it was cheaper.

Now with the PGE bankruptcy, rates will increase and I'll likely buy solar.

Capitalism works. people optimize for what's cheapest for themselves

People always optimize, whether in capitalism or communism, or anything else. It's a survival function - even ants do it [1].

And what you're calling capitalism is more "fascism-lite" due to excessive regulation. (see [2] for "...severe economic and social regimentation, ...")

[1] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140526182749.h... [2] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism

> I live in the Tennessee Valley, TVA is consistently the WORST utility in the South in terms of green energy initiatives

Really? Of TVA's energy sales in 2017, 7.09% were from "green sources", good for #4 of all power utilities, private or public, in the country.

https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/assets/pdfs/utility-green-powe...

I think you misunderstand the linked doc.

Oak Ridge Electric Company, which is a tiny municipal utility that sources electricity from TVA, has 7.09% participation in its green pricing program (which presumably bypasses TVA). This has nothing to do with TVA itself and how it generates power.

Good, leave it in the ground where it belongs. Here in the US coal plant closures are more due to the rise of natural gas plants rather than renewables, but even natural gas only has half the carbon emissions and doesn't produce toxic coal ash.

American coal won't stay in the ground any more than Australia's does. There are plenty of coal burning power plants in the world, and while it may not be economic to burn it for electricity in the US, there are countries which import a lot of coal.

https://www.worldcoal.org/coal/coal-market-pricing

We have many hundreds of years of reserves, coal will certainly cease as a source of electricity before the reserves are used up.

Many of those reserves are held as assets on the books of multinational coal mining companies.

Just look at the stock prices for those companies and the rolling process of bankruptcies to see the market judgment of the value of those assets, and the demand for coal in the immediate future.

American coal mining companies seem to be cutting back or shutting down as it is. I'm not sure what the long term outlook is for them.

Speaking as someone who has recently driven through the powder river basin in WY, there is definitely coal that is staying in the ground. Mining co's are going bankrupt, and are cutting jobs and production; this is a severe enough reduction that the BNSF railway is also suffering in the area due to decreased tonnage exported.

Environmentalists should buy the coal, artificially inflate the price, and store it permanently so it never gets burned.

That would just increase demand, raising prices only until the coal mining companies caught up with their production.

No, the only solution is to get away from coal consumption.

Even so, and I may be a selfish bastard for saying it, but I'd rather they poison their rivers and groundwater with containment pool breaches and toxic runoff than we poison ours.

Natural gas might not be much of an improvement. A leak rate of greater than 3% could potentially be more destructive to the green house effect than burning coal.

http://theconversation.com/the-us-natural-gas-industry-is-le...

It falls put of the atmosphere a lot faster than CO2 though right?

I believe that is right. I'd recommend Falter, it covers a lot of ground, including this piece.

https://www.amazon.com/Falter-Human-Game-Begun-Itself/dp/125...

It actually decays into CO2 in the atmosphere and then that CO2 remains there for the normal period of time.

Yeah, the half life is somewhere between 10 to 15 years.

For the first 2 decades or so, methane is about 86 times worse than CO2:

>While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.

>In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

>But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential (GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC.

>There is no scientific reason to prefer a 100-year time horizon over a 20-year time horizon; the choice of GWP100 is simply a matter of convention.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...

Germany made a similar announcement recently, and I have the same questions here as for there.

Although there has been progress to use coal plants as variable output plants, they tend to be used base load plants that run all or most of the time. The same thing is true for Nuclear plants, and to the extent that power prices occasionally go _negative_. (This essentially means that the utility is willing to pay people to take their power for a brief time at low system loading, so that they can avoid turning a plant down or off.)

Renewables are used differently, in that there's a lot less ability to rely on them to generate power. So they're not really a replacement. This makes me think the ability to shutter these coal plants is a lot more dependent on the decision to extend the life of the nuclear plant and buy the NG plant than it is to do with the renewables they're adding.

There have also been great gains made in energy storage lately, which is what's needed to make renewables a true replacement.

Absolutely. This has to be viewed holistically, as a combination of greener generation, better efficiency, storage, lifestyle changes.... The problem's too big to solve otherwise.

> Renewables are used differently, in that there's a lot less ability to rely on them to generate power.

I am confused on your reasoning here.

Solar energy covers the daylight hours. Wind power covers the evening / night time hours.

Storage technologies smooth out the bumps.

Nuclear plants tend to experience long down times for maintenance - which hardly makes them 'reliable'.

Xcel is based in a part of the country with easy access to wind energy. I suspect that that calculation is playing a much larger role than you are considering. Specifically, if Xcel can site wind farms close to the customer, there can be a significant savings in power loss due to transmission.

Windfarms can be built in smaller units of generation power and built in the airspace over farms. (This is why conservative Kansas really like renewables - farmers see them as a backup source of revenue.)

> Solar energy covers the daylight hours.

The number of daylight hours varies considerably over the course of the year, as well as over varying weather conditions.

> Wind power covers the evening / night time hours.

Wind power presents several logistical problems. One is that it tends to fall off in the heat of a summer day. This has the net effect of increasing the ramp rate required from other generation assets at the time of peak network load.

There are also issues around the fact that wind power tends to be located away from areas of the highest demand. (Generation being in more rural areas, with demand largely being centered in urban areas.) This creates a need to move power in bulk over long distances, which creates issues around the need for reactive support to maintain voltage and therefore grid stability.

> Storage technologies smooth out the bumps.

Energy storage represents around 4% of US generation capacity, so I'm hoping they're small bumps, at least for the time being. (To put that 4% in perspective, the area I'm in is projecting a 50% increase in system load from this morning's low to this afternoon's high.)

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-facts...

> Nuclear plants tend to experience long down times for maintenance - which hardly makes them 'reliable'.

Capacity factors for nuclear plants hover around 90%, with Solar around 25% and Wind around 30%.

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

Our municipal power plant where I live converted from coal to natural gas recently. My understanding was the decision was based solely on the (now cancelled?) Clean Power Plan, and the inability to make the existing plant meet those regulations.

Given the instability of US politics, I'd guess most utility companies are operating under the assumption that those laws could quickly be put back in place after any given election cycle.

According to a utility in South Carolina (Santee Cooper):

"Related to cost — in 2008, natural gas generation was as low as $55/MWh and coal was about $22/MWh in our most efficient units. In 2018, the comparable prices were $26/MWh for natural gas and $34/MWh for coal."

Thong in Germany is that CO2 certificates are so dirt cheap that the incremental cost of power generation puts coal plants second behind wind and solar with basically zero variable cost (I'd have to look up where hydro power stands). So gas effectively gets squeezed out of the market.

The easy fix would be cutting the available CO2 certificates or making them more expensive. But for some reason that ain't happening.

Doesn't Germany get most of its natural gas from Russia, which is a bit contentious for political reasons?

Well, yes. Still supply was stable. Not for Ukraine, so. Also a lot of the has is used for heating.

Yes.

Fun fact, all of the natural gas that Germany bought from Russia used to flow through former Warsaw Pact nations like Poland. Now the gas goes at least partially through the undersea Nord Stream pipeline and the under construction Nord Stream 2. It's generally believed that this transition has made Russia much more bellicose in the region, as they can now threaten to turn off Poland's gas supply without also harming Western Europe at the same time.

This was a legal settlement to shutdown two old coal plants earlier than expected so they could buy a large natural gas plant. With the promise that they will build solar and wind too. But keep the coal plants on the books until 2035-2037, but I expect the truth of the matter is those plants would be cost ineffective by then anyhow. A lot could change in their plans.

I only read the legal page briefly but my guess is if you are looking at this as entirely Hope and Change, you should probably be more a little more skeptical.

Linked legal agreement: https://www.eenews.net/assets/2019/05/21/document_ew_01.pdf

Note that a decade early is pretty misleading in this context, because the headline gives no baseline - someone could erroneously assume that this means they're shutting it down now, instead of in 2030.

Since no baseline is given, it's up to the reader to look at the content of the article.

In reality, it seems they were planning to shut down the big plant in 2040, and will now do so in 2030, which means it'll still be polluting for 10.5 years.

Any progress is better than no progress though.

This headline should be changed to "Will Close Its Coal-Fire Powered", as the announcement is really just for 2028 and onwards. They haven't shut down the coal-fired power yet, thus the present form of the verb is overly charitable.

The headline is clearly clickbait and follows common clickbait patterns

- "a major US utility" instead of naming the utility and location in the title

- "is closing" as a major mischaracterization of the reality of "will actually close"

Ok, we'll put that above.

Edit: actually, let's change the URL from https://e360.yale.edu/digest/a-major-u-s-utility-is-closing-... to the press release it points to, which is actually more informative. Being less informative than a press release is maybe not the greatest quality for an article...

In the spirit of saving you a click to find our the name and location of the "major utility":

Xcel Energy Inc. announced it will close its remaining coal-fired power plants in the Upper Midwest a decade ahead of schedule and add 3,000 megawatts of new solar capacity by 2030.

Ok, we'll put that name in the title as well.

"and add 3,000 megawatts of new solar capacity"

And what people supposed to do during evenings/nights/no sun? Fornicate?

That's a splendid idea.

Oh, wait. There exists such a thing as batteries. Dang!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com