California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month

The problem is that coal plants are sprinkled with a whole bunch of radioactive fly ash, and normal radiation level for a coal plant would violate the hell out of regulations for a nuclear plant.

I can’t find any support for your claim that natural gas is “a few percent” of the “pollution” of natural gas.

In GHG terms natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits CO2. Web searches suggest the number is somewhere between 50% less GHG emissions to a few percent more GHG emissions for natural gas vs coal. This is because natural gas has the additional issue of widespread fugitive emissions across the supply chain which emit methane, an even more potent GHG which itself breaks down to CO2.

As with everything it’s complicated but it’s simply unbelievable that a natural gas plant is anywhere near a 90% improvement over a coal plant which is my arbitrarily generous standard for “a few percent”.

Ultimately there’s just no good way to burn fossil fuels.

I’m not sure what California Air Emission Regulatory is. Do you mean CARB?

What's happening is part just bureaucratic inertia. They raised funding and are building the plants even though strictly they aren't needed anymore. And part of it is them replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones. They close plants regularly as well. Instead of operating plants 24x7, they keep a few around for when wind/solar fall short. It seems even the Chinese have a hard time predicting how fast the energy transition is going. They've hit their own targets years ahead of time repeatedly in the recent past.

Apparently China coal imports could drop by about 18-19% this year. That seems to be part of a bigger five year plan. They might be hitting the targets for that early as well.

Are you sure about that 'most' part? Hasn't China been building something like a coal plant's worth of solar power generation every eight hours for the past year or so?

Fossil fuel advocates in the West love repeating this "fact" and omit another, rather more inconvenient fact. 80+% of all new electricity generation in China is solar or other renewable. China builds coal plants but they don't really use them much.

These coal plants either replace older ones shutting down or are mostly left idle. Why? My guess: to keep the jobs and skills around, to juice GDP, and as a backup.

1) Our coal plants are old and trip off all the time, putting the grid at high risk. 2) The cost to upgrade a coal plant or build a new one is far higher than the gas alternative, so no financially competent entity is going to go with coal unless they are forced to by political manipulation/strong arming/bad incentives that hurt ratepayers.

Prices in China have literally nothing to do with the US, for either construction or gas or coal, so I'm not sure why you're linking to that in favor of our actual utilities' opinions here in the US. Is China's experience with coal really the reason you think that coal is either reliable or cheap?

China is building less coal plants than they would need to if they just focused on coal, so they are improving over time.

I wouldn't be surprised is the anti coal movement has been pushed by the petrostates

Coal sucks but it does ensure energy independence (as does solar and wind)

> The cost of running existing coal power plants in the United States continues rising while new wind and solar costs keep falling. Our first Coal Cost Crossover report (2019) found 62 percent of U.S. coal capacity was more expensive to run than to replace with renewables, while our second (2021) found 72 percent of capacity more expensive than renewables. Our latest Coal Cost Crossover research finds incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act accelerate this trend – 99 percent of all U.S. coal plants (209 out of 210) are now more expensive to run than replacement by new local solar, wind, or energy storage.

> This report finds 99 percent of the existing U.S. coal fleet is more expensive to run compared to replacement by new solar or wind. Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity, and generate $589 billion in new investment across the U.S. Our report provides policy recommendations to facilitate a just transition through the Coal Cost Crossover.

(report is from 2023, the economics of renewables and solar have only improved since then)

https://energyinnovation.org/report/the-coal-cost-crossover-...

Replacing base load with solar and batteries, especially for days when weather makes supply the lowest and demand the highest, is in general a non-trivial problem, but it is location dependent. Maybe California is one where it make sense.

The only statistics that speak about capacity brag that California- one of the leaders in grid storage deployment- can store nearly a third of solar generation in February (which represents only a third of the energy production) on a sub-day time scale.