Peak coal was in 2007, and has been falling rapidly since. We are currently generating about 1/3 the electricity from coal in 2023 vs 2007[0].
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
Nuclear would be (and used to be) massively cheaper, before regulations went wild against it.
I'm deliberately saying 'went wild', because the earlier nuclear power generation that was built to saner standards also has turned out to be incredibly safe already.
(Basically, anyone who avoided insane Soviet bullshit had safe nuclear power, as measured in eg fatalities per Joule of electricity generated.)
A large area was evacuated and "human costs" were great. But as I recall, no deaths from radiation.
I saw a study claiming 440 excess deaths from the Los Angeles fires. I'll make an assumption that permanently moving old and health impaired people from the Fukushima exclusion zone had a similar increase in mortality. And then a bit of looking leads me to this.
"The evacuation itself also was not without severe consequences. The accident was in the winter, and the evacuation of 840 patients or elderly people in nursing homes and health-care facilities apparently resulted in 60 immediate deaths due to hypothermia, dehydration, trauma and deterioration of serious medical conditions (Tanigawa et al 2012) and upwards of 100 deaths in subsequent month"
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0952-4746/33/3/49...
Like the Grapes of Wrath where the family starts out for California and the grandparents both die on the way.
Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.
Murphy's law is real...
The fact that old designs like the AP1000 are crazy expensive to build has a lot more to do with the fact that the US sucks at building mega projects than anything else.
You have to physically handle every piece of coal. Extract, load ship, unload.
Natural gas is shooting out of the ground in North Dakota.
You can compare to wind and solar also.
The economics aren't favorable.
Coal beats everything else by a mile. We also get mercury pollution for free, so no more eating fish.
Most of the comments here are speculative.
The TLDR is that coal plants have trouble ramping their production up/down quickly, unlike natural gas which can do so in minutes. So, if you have a grid that is being thrashed by variable production (renewables), this results in variable pricing and demand for baseload. Coal cannot economically compete in that market (and neither can nuclear, which has the same problem).
Solar makes up 4% of New England electricity. Not much sun there. Needs nuclear to succeed
https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2025-01-03/central-maine... (“Central Maine Power aims to finish controversial western Maine power corridor in 2025”)
https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-re... (NextEra, which owns the Seabrook nuclear power plant in N.H., stands to lose tens of millions of dollars every year if the NECEC comes online and attempted to use political donations to scuttle the Quebec Hydro transmission line)
https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/ne... (“The new transmission line between Quebec and Maine will provide 1,200 megawatts (MW) of renewable hydroelectric power to the New England power grid in Lewiston, Maine, sufficient to meet the demand of 1.2 million homes. Once built, NECEC will be New England's largest renewable energy source, saving customers $190 million per year.”)
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/government-industry-affairs/new...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/northeast-...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NE-ISNE/live/fif...
(Quebec, interestingly, has ~40GW of hydro generation capacity)
Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is likely economics, RTFA at least a few paragraphs:
Granite Shore Power, the company that owns the coal plant in Bow, New Hampshire, said they ceased commercial operations September 12th, about a year and a half since they announced they would retire their facility by 2028 as part of a settlement agreement with environmental groups.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/massachusetts-coa...
With HQ there as well, it’s actually quite a large coal-free chunk of grid.
What will be interesting is the extent to which offshore wind and imports from HQ will be able to materialize according to plan. OSW is having a hatchet being taken to it in the US currently, and imports from HQ into NY and NE have been way down recently while big new lines are also built.
Not exactly in the ISO forecasts, but very much supported by state policy has been the rapid expansion of behind the meter solar in New England. Really taken the edge off of summer days in particular, although also susceptible to smoke from Canadian wildfires.
Not the most exciting markets day-to-day, but interesting long-term things happening.
Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal
Nearly 2M households in New England heat their homes with oil (usually boiler, sometimes furnace). For those unfamiliar, a tanker truck comes by your house every couple of months and pumps diesel fuel into a tank down cellar, which literally gets burned like a flamethrower to boil water to heat your home. It's dirty but keeps your home toasty warm when it's -20 outside.
Maine in particular has very little natural gas infrastructure. Electric is impractical as New England winters are cold as balls and the houses are usually old and not that well insulated.
https://www.nhpr.org/new-england-news/2024-07-24/new-england...
https://portal.ct.gov/deep/energy/new-england-heat-pump-acce...
Yay for natural gas!
> There are more than 100 municipal waste combustion facilities in operation across the United States. Five of these are located in Massachusetts.
toomuchtodo•3h ago