Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

While I think it's great that these big coal-fired power plants are going away, i never see anyone talking about the millions of homes in the United States (mostly in the northeast) that are heated by individual coal stoves and coal and oil furnaces.

Individual coal burning is a huge problem because homes don't have the same environmental regulations or efficiency of a coal power plant. One of the environmental advantages of electric cars and other machines is a reduction in "point source" pollution. You can put huge scrubbers on a power plant that you can't on a million stoves or lawn mowers or whatever.

Even when all of the coal power plants are gone, there's still another huge coal burning problem waiting to be tackled.

View on HN

> Individual coal burning is a huge problem because homes don't have the same environmental regulations or efficiency of a coal power plant.

Maybe a huge problem for those with coal burning stoves, but overall this is 0.1% of houses, and 50% of those are in Pennsylvania.

Compared to the huge amount of coal burned for electricity, that's a drop in the bucket, and most likely used because or the homeowner loves coal for some reason, or doesn't want to, or cant upgrade to a fuel like natural gas, propane, or wood pellets.

https://forgreenheat.blogspot.com/2017/06/trends-in-heating-...

For new construction in Berkeley, you can't use natural gas. It was banned. Oh well, coal works. Unintended consequence?

Where would you get the coal though? An electric heat pump is gonna be way more cost efficient than burning coal. This is a coastal California climate we're taking about here, not Winnipeg.

One of the local businesses, right there in coastal California, is Koch Carbon. I like how the name is so honest and descriptive, despite not mentioning coal. You get carbon from the Koch brothers.

Electric heat pumps work fine in cold climates down to -20C as well. Below that they switch to resistive heating, so if it only drops below that for a few days a year it's still cost effective.

Berkeley is the kind of place where your furnace shuts off sometime in March and doesn't come on again until October.

No, because new construction in Berkeley uses electric. Coal is too foul to want to use in your own house.

Natural gas is ban so now they have to use coal.

That's a weird logic statement.

Coal is an option out of many options out there. Why are you so sure those new constructions in Berkeley will be using coal?

Do you have any source of that? From my experiences, Northern California is very environmentally conscious so I don't think they'll ban natural gas just to replace it with coal.

New construction in Berkeley is also for most practical purposes banned, so this is largely a hypothetical rule :)

This is not a problem in a rich country, in fact I don't understand why America is still on coal. Perhaps fund some modern-age infrastructure improvements as a part of fiscal stimulus in the next economic downturn?

Think about developing countries where people could not afford to improve their infrastructure. That's the real deal.

Germany is still on coal too. They’re planning to shut them down by 2038...

Rich country or not, people want cheap electricity and until fracking unlocked cheap natural gas in the US, coal was the cheap option.

Germany is using brown coal or lignite, too, which is a lot nastier in every respect than the black coal we more usually think of. It produces more air pollution of every kind including CO2 to generate the same amount of power. They're also gradually destroying one of their few remaining ancient forests to strip-mine the land beneath it for lignite.

The original sin for why they are still trying coal is likely the attempt at confederation in doing this state level - which has the end result of vastly disproportionate power to parochial interests which under any sane system would be told to piss off and get a sense of priorities. I am no expert in Australian politics beyond the mindbogglingly stupid IT decisions but I have heard of similar reasons behind their own bad decisions.

The main reason they infrastructure is currently on coal is ironically because they did invest in infrastructure in the past and those decisions are usually best done in advance as funding is spread out over vast periods of time. Needless to say the infastructure became outdated and the advancement wasn't quite as graceful like telecom companies who could make an outright profit during an upgrade by laying down some fiber and ripping out and selling all of their old copper. They do have a counterpart in many cases of 'burn natural gas instead to save money and do it cleaner'.

Australia's doubling down on coal production, with a new mine approved in the Galilee Basin. Go figure.

https://www.channel4.com/news/how-coal-mining-threatens-aust...

Do you have numbers on people in the northeastern US using coal stoves for heating? I'm not necessarily doubting you, but I lived in New Hampshire for a long time and still go back regularly to see family and friends, and I don't think I've ever seen a coal stove. IME most houses use either natural gas or wood pellet stoves for heating. Which aren't ideal but they're leaps and bounds better than coal.

I did some searching, and it appears that the number of households using coal stoves is roughly 130,000 (a far, far cry from the "millions of home" cited in OP).

https://forgreenheat.blogspot.com/2017/06/trends-in-heating-... is the link that seems to have the most detailed information.

Doubt it's actually huge, probably insignificant compared to corporate polluters using other sources of energy. Would be interesting to see the comparison in pollutants released by coal homes and corporate polluters.

It's huge. Big reason why China has polluted air. There's a world of difference between summers and winters due to heating. You can literally see when they switch off heating in Beijing.

I was once in Beijing for work when there was a big communist nation powow there at the same time, in early March. Laos, NK, etc in attendance.

The sky was clear during the meeting, and after, visibility quickly dropped to 100 ft

This[0] shows that coal fueled energy production produces about 65% of CO2 emissions related to energy production in the US. This[1] shows that energy production makes up 92.6% of all coal consumption in the US and residential is at most 1% of that, so it's pretty insignificant in CO2 emissions compared to the other sources of energy production, namely natural gas which produces 33% of all CO2 emissions related to energy production. However, like you say, it'd be significant in places where coal heated homes are more common. And the other pollutants that cause smog and acid rain and other issues definitely cause local problems. But emissions caused by energy production are a much larger problem on a nation wide scale.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=77&t=11 [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php

Coal stoves in the Northeast -- how many of those are there? I know of quite a few places in RI and MA with oil heaters, though I'd wager natural gas is on in probably 50% of my network's residences.

Coal furnaces are common in rural areas where you might not even have a natural gas line.

I looked this up and all I could find was [0], saying there are a small number of households using it in Pennsylvania. As for the rest of PA and New England, natural gas is the norm and I haven't heard of anyone using coal. Houses that don't have natural gas lines use storage tanks in the yard that are topped off by a delivery truck every couple months.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/03/699325560/for-the-few-who-hea...

Fuel oil is pretty common as well, and the delivery method is the same, a truck comes round and tops of your tank periodically -- usually every few weeks or once a month in the winter, depending on how much heat your house leaks.

How common? It seems like it would be cheaper for most parts of the country to install electric baseboards than to ship in the coal you'd need for the winter.

You’ve clearly never paid the electric bill for a house that used electric baseboards for heat in the winter. 5k cad/yr in BC for a 3000 sq ft house with 6 occupants. Bill for June and July is only $100, it’s all winter heating load. Comparitively natural gas bills are about $200 for two months in the winter. Many people heat with wood and the air quality goes to shit.

Living in and heating a 3000 sq ft house is a massive luxury.

> Bill for June and July is only $100

Holy hell $100 in the mild BC summer?! According to Google Vancouver varies between 14 and 22 degrees Celsius in June and July. That's t-shirt weather - don't even need heating at night if you've got good insulation.

I think your problem might be your general usage patterns (running clothes dryer, dishwasher too much or at peak times, inefficient lighting or leaving lights on everywhere, zombie draw from electronics) and the efficiency of your insulation, not merely the cost of electric baseboards. Or maybe power is just crazy expensive up there, I dunno.

In BC or Ontario, sure, but in QC most places are electric resistive heating because electricity there is like 4 cents a kwh. Cheap.

Not really. Rural areas tend to go wood.

Or propane or fuel oil.

(depends on local prices and availability of course)

I grew up in rural Montana. We had electric base boards, but it was far more economical to utilize the 2 wood stoves. We typically had 8 cords of wood on hand for the winter.

We were far outside of anywhere NG lines were run, and while some of our newer neighbors had Propane tanks, we didnt have any sort of central air, so propane wasnt really any option without a very expensive remodel. House burned a few years ago in a wildfire, so kind of a moot point now.

Edit: Relative to coal. I guess I shouldn't have taken it for granted that people would know most people in areas too rural for gas mains use propane or oil (because those are orders of magnitude more convenient than anything that requires you to move the fuel yourself.

You’re probably conflating wood furnaces with coal furnaces. Lots of people use wood stoves which are much cleaner than coal and a renewable resource.

Unless you live next to a coal mine you wouldn’t even be able to purchase coal in the US.

No, I’m not. I lived in a house with a coal furnace in rural NY.

I live in NY, and I'm aware that people who don't have gas service use oil furnaces, but I've never heard of or seen coal furnaces being used. I would have assumed that was limited to a small population maybe in rural PA or WV that are near coal mines where it's particularly cheap. Where are the statistics for "millions"?

Millions is off by an order of magnitude.

In 2015 it was estimated that around 127k homes still used coal heating.

Source, found on a ddg search: https://forgreenheat.blogspot.com/2017/06/trends-in-heating-...

Other sources give comparable numbers, in no case more than ~150k

You’re talking about it. There, now “someone” is!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com