Proposed coal plants in the United States | Hacker News Reader

Proposed coal plants in the United States

gem.wiki

9 pointsmaxwell6 comments

If I am reading the document history right, the title should probably should read:

"[2013] Status of Previously Proposed Coal Plants"

... no one is really building much coal anymore in the US, renewables have made the daily market demand fluctuate too much. Coal plants have a hard time turning on/off... and fracking made natural gas too cheap. NGCC can very easily scale up/down depending on demand, so nuclear and coal are getting replaced by natural gas anyway.

How, with this years heat domes and ever increasing evidence that global climate change will effect the western world in a negative way, are we still even considering burning coal? Please tell me these projects will be scrapped.

For what its worth, this table only goes to 2017, all are either operational or cancelled. So this doesn't suggest that there are _new_ coal plants being proposed/considered.

Not really sure why this was submitted or what makes it interesting.

Found the page that discussed about what happens to those current proposed plants [1].

[1] https://www.gem.wiki/What_happened_to_the_151_proposed_coal_...

Coal is used in (some) peaking power plants that only turn on during a surge of demand for electricity. Some also use natural gas. It's easier to spin them up/down and can deal with the strain of being used intermittently.

I work for a major American utility company and I'm not aware of coal being used to deliver peak power ("peaker plant" in the utility parlance). Coal power plants take hours to get up to operating temperature and when allowed to flame out you've significantly decreased the lifespan of the furnace. What they do instead is reduce the injection rate to maintain minimal operating temperature and run the output to ground. From that standpoint coal is very similar to nuclear: you don't simply stop a reactor. You send its output to ground. That's why coal and nuclear units are used for base load, not peak load. Natural gas units are just a turbine engine, you can spin that thing up and down as needed all day long to handle peaks. Wind and solar are auxiliary power sources - all American ISO's and RTO's require you have non-volatile power covering those units. Natural gas units are preferred to cover the these volatile units because they can be spun up so quickly. But there's a catch to that too - you have to put your natural gas order in 24 hours in advance of use and you have to pay for whatever you don't use. It's not like residential where your furnace just kicks on and gas is available and you get billed for it. Nope. You have to preorder your gas. If your wind and solar are covering the load then you're going to pay a fine for not taking all of your gas delivery. The utility business has its complexities!

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