L.A. is finally ditching coal – and replacing it with another polluting fuel
latimes.com
latimes.com
It will be funny when the switch from natural gas to solar in twenty years has a headline of “LA is finally ditching natural gas - and replacing it with another polluting fuel.”
And that's the name of the game: Try to minimize pollutants.
Pollutants can never go to zero. There will always be some. Question is, which strategy gets you closest to zero.
Wind+Water is the lowest pollutant profile we know of currently, and such a system in a state or city would still produce a lot of pollutants during its build out.
No. The name of the game is to remove CO2 emissions. Because, as I've been told, CO2 emissions are an existential threat to humanity. Or is that not the case anymore?
>Wind+Water is the lowest pollutant profile we know of currently
No. Nuclear is. Hydro works but is geographically dependent. Both Wind and Water have huge environmental footprints with enormous impact on local ecosystems.
Also, pumped hydro is not geographically dependent. Where are people parroting that idea from? You dig a cylinder into the bedrock, water proof it and fill it with water. There's a piston at the top that lowers slowly over time, thus providing the flow back into the top of the cylinder for power.
Finally, every energy plant has enormous impacts on local ecosystems. Do you want to save the squirrels, or the humans? If you want to save both, Wind+Water is unquestionably the best system to build. But it's enormously expensive. (Ask the average civil engineer how much drilling the pylons for an average skyscraper costs. Yeah, this would cost even more and you'd be drilling pylon equivalents for 20 skyscrapers at the same time.) So people instead use the cheapest system to build, which is Wind+LNG.
If that's the way you see CO2 emissions, then I have no quarrel with you - though you may be at odds with the entire environmental movement and possibly climatologists. Carbon emissions are not sold today as just another pollutant (out of many) that needs to be managed. They are sold as THE existential threat to humanity.
If you don't see that, then nuclear is not necessary, you can get good, clean power generation from natural gas and wind/solar mix.
People who want 100% pollutant free energy are being unreasonable. At our level of species intelligence and technological know how, we're basically in the position of having to pick a poison and go with it. (Or pick several poisons as the case may be.)
1. Has a political base willing to tolerate more cost than a mere gas plant.
2. Is comparatively wealthy and thus has the budget for a more expensive option.
3. Is in a renewables dream zone: mildest climate of any large city (i.e. smallest daily and seasonal usage swings), clear skies almost year round and steady ocean winds blowing over coastal ridge lines.
The thinking to an activist is that LA needs to be doing more, because let's be honest: there are other local governments in the US who will be doing less simply because of political affiliation. And I think that's exactly right.
The headline is misleading and a much better article, to me, would be about what went into this decision and the timeline.
This is not the only plant feeding LA and should be a mixture of renewables and this plant.
So they're still getting 49% from fossil fuels.
The irrational attachment to "hard energy," the thermally generates forms, has been dripping away quickly for most of the energy sector as economics are making it less feasible.
The LADWP seems to be a small pocket of backward thinking, however. I just heard about them for the first time yesterday as part of a petty political squabble with the mayor, in television advertisements that decry green energy.
1. In the famous California power mix charts, 'Other' includes power bought from different utilities where the exact generating method is abstracted away. You can mentally think of the 'Other' as 'Unsure'.
2. Intermountain's conversion to natgas has been long rumored, facing both regulatory pressure, environmental pressure, and infrastructure considerations. Large amounts of natgas is already piped through the Kern River Pipeline in this corridor, going to Nevada and California from the Opal hub in Wyoming. This is where Southern Nevada gets most of its electricity -- through natgas power plants alongside I-15.
3. There is a project called TransWest Express [1], to build a HVDC transmission line from Wyoming to Las Vegas to carry wind power from Wyoming to markets in the Southwest. This will run immediately parallel to the existing Intermountain HVDC line for much of their overlap, and no connection is planned at the Intermountain Power Plant (the latter line's origin) or anywhere else between the two for now. Vegas is presumably the destination for TransWest Express because it's a power exchange hub for many electricity suppliers and consuming utilities, but the overall effect is still a bit silly, because most of the power exchanged at the Vegas hub flows towards Southern California anyway on existing AC lines. One might imagine a different scenario where the Intermountain line gets split in two at Vegas, TransWest express only builds the "missing portion" between Wyoming and Intermountain Power Plant, and then there's an available chain of HVDC lines to ship power between 4 key interchange nodes...
This seems like an obvious case of checking the box while not actually checking the box.
There is no other alternative to nuclear. I find it depressing that neither the media, nor the scientific and environmentalist community is never straight about this fact.
By the way, here is the energy mix of my home province: http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html
When it comes to reducing fossil fuel use for energy generation, outside of gas usage during peak times (and to backup wind deployments), we're almost there. Don't have to wait until 2060 or whatever like Germany was projecting after they closed their Nuclear plants. Don't have to invest in exotic unproven technologies. Don't have to wait for technology innovation to save renewables.
It was close to 90% Nuclear a decade ago though. Some of that has been replaced by renewable sources, some by natural gas :(
Gen IV nuclear is completely safe from meltdown, and some varieties can consume waste from previous generations, and yet most people (me included) have a visceral reaction to the idea of a plant being built near where we live.
Instead, what stop nuclear investment is fear of economic disasters, rather than ecological disasters.
Nuclear has a horrifying track record when it comes to construction, bankrupting utilities, nearly bankrupting Toshiba, and in general being far too risky to justify the meager returns. If one is investing $10B on a 60 year timeframe, that investment is highly sensitive to changes in the up front cost, especially when those increases up front costs result in no greater revenue. Typical nuclear construction will be 2-3x as costly as anticipated up front, and delayed by many years. It's no surprise that investors don't want to take this risk for very mild returns.
Further. Anybody watching tech curves sees that, even 5 years ago, it was clear that using batteries to store wind and solar energy would be cheaper than nuclear very early into the lifespan of any new nuclear facility.
This means that the only route to nuclear would 1) a market where nuclear makes all its money for the year in the 4-6 week seasons minimum of intermittent renewables (unlikely), or 2) massive government subsidies that say "we must have nuclear no matter what, and we will pay the market to make that happen." That second route is much more likely to work, for the other governmental benefits of having nuclear (more nuclear engineers for subs and other things).
No. It isn't. That's why it isn't deployed anywhere. That's why there are no large-scale plans to deploy batteries for that purpose anywhere.
>and for longer production lows you can use Methane produced by power-to-gas facilities.
Those that suggest solar/wind usually will then invoke some exotic and unproven technology to make the said solar/wind deployment viable.
Power to gas is proven technology. CO2 to Methane plants exist today. See for example this EU project: https://www.storeandgo.info/about-the-project/status-quo/