Hacker News Reader

Comment by brc | Hacker News Reader

Cost = $ per mwh

Drive coal out of production now and you'll cause a lot more problems than you solve. Lots of activists like to do their ten minutes of hate on coal, but they never stop and think about all the good that it does. It's a case of 'what has coal ever done for us'. Apart from all the lighting, refrigeration, production, water distribution, heating, cooling and computing it enables throughout the world.

The age of coal will eventually end. It is best managed rather then fervently trying to prevent.

View on HN

I don't dispute coal had a time and a place, just as rock did during the stone age. We've evolved past it though, and the time for its graceful bow of the world energy stage has arrived.

No, we haven't.

When every single village and town has reliable and cheap electricity supply and their productivity has been raised to the point where they can afford cheaper replacements, then coal still has a place.

All those TV adverts for villages with no clean water - what they first need is a power station to power pumps and filtration. When you see kids that have no education, what they first need is electricity so their parents don't have to make the kids work all day, and lighting so they can read at night.

Those places, if they don't have hydro available, need coal fired electricity capable of being delivered at 10c/kWh. They don't need a tesla battery pack and solar panels any more than they need a tesla model s.

I think most of them would trade a bit of coal pollution for the pollution from burning wood and dried out cowshit inside their homes. And it's downright wrong for people in rich countries to out their nose in the air and try and tell them they can't.

entirely valid point except the assumption that solar can't be delivered at 10c/kWh. I see no reason it couldn't be.

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/13/solar-wind-power-prices-...

> Wind power, on average, sold for 2.5¢ per kilowatt-hour in the US in 2013, when looking at PPA prices (2014 numbers are due to come out this week). That’s the average for all reported PPAs, which means they’re a bit under 4¢ per kilowatt-hour without subsidies. These super-low prices are extremely hard to beat, and demonstrate why so much of the electricity generation capacity added in the past few years has come from wind power plants.

The article also has several examples of utility scale solar already producing power below 6 cents/KwH.

Because it's not 10c/kWh overnight, baseload.

Fridges and lighting and waterpumps need 24/7 power.

Solar with battery raises these costs considerably and are not suitable for the type of power needed.

Solar in-fill is great at low cost. It doesn't scale out like that when you need to make power 24/7.

I have nothing against solar power and battery tech. I just try and keep things in perspective of the bigger picture for the majority of the world.

Refrigeration and water pumping would seem to be examples of systems where it is very easy to design for intermittent power.

For the former you need a storage tank after the compressor and for the latter you need a water tower.

For lighting, you are correct, but that needs very little capacity.

> Those places, if they don't have hydro available, need coal fired electricity capable of being delivered at 10c/kWh. They don't need a tesla battery pack and solar panels any more than they need a tesla model s.

Distributed solar with batteries is still cheaper than coal plants and running power distribution all over the third world.

> I think most of them would trade a bit of coal pollution for the pollution from burning wood and dried out cowshit inside their homes. And it's downright wrong for people in rich countries to out their nose in the air and try and tell them they can't.

It would be more effective for us in the first world to subsidize solar technology for the third world, instead of the terribly pathetic idea of continuing to build coal plants.

http://self.org/

I agree that subsidising solar for the developing world is probably the best way forward. What interests me most about this is the parallels that can be drawn with telephone networks.

Many developing nations skipped out on landlines and jumped straight to mobile. Instead of a nation-wide power distribution network with coal-fired generators, perhaps we will see some countries jumping straight to distributed solar.

Energy is taken on and off the grid all the time. Generators that cost 10 dollars per megawatt-hour will be taken offline as soon as the price is projected to be $9.99/MWh for longer than the projected shutdown-startup time of the generator. Which in the case of fossil fuel-powered generators is minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com