It cost less to produce power with renewables now than coal and will only get worse for that industry going forward.
Majority of New Renewables Undercut Cheapest Fossil Fuel on Cost
This will take care of itself over the long haul…and by that I mean coal’s future is not what it once was.
Of course, but those renewables make up a smaller share of our electricity.
Hard to imagine that they’ll ever make up enough to cover our current electrical grid, …PLUS millions of vehicles.
Renewables already made up more than 25% of the US electricity for the first half of 2022. Renewables provided 25% of US electrical generation in 1H 2022
There is newer tech making it better all the time including some breakthroughs on off shore designs.
The transition will take a couple decades (heck California’s transition date was a decade and a half out for the new car sale ban) but it’s going to happen whether oil and coal fans like it or not.
And…once we’re it gets us out from under SA’s umbrella…it’s going to be very, very nice.
Use everything while converting to renewables. Short-term climate setback but long-term climate gain. How can it be otherwise? We just can’t flip a switch and all is magically renewables.
Yeah, coal is pricing itself out, but is needed right now.
It’s almost like nobody noticed that Texas, TEXAS, is leading in wind production…or maybe they never thought about why and what that means going forward.
Oh I know that.
When I was stationed at the Port of Beaumont (2005-2008), probably the second largest volume of cargo behind military cargo were windmill parts.
The more of that we can generate, the better. But the idea that that will somehow cover our entire grid plus millions of EVs seems pretty far fetched to me!
I’d love to see it happen, but it doesn’t seem very realistic.
Seems realistic to me provided it happens gradually, which really it must as building the generation capacity is going to take decades. But it’s do-able and makes, IMHO, much more sense than trying to do it with oil, a global commodity that is easily influenced by SA. The more we ramp up with oil production the more likely SA is going to do what they did starting in mid 2019…ramp up and drop the price internationally making our oil producers money losers…which in turn will make them shut their rigs down.
They can’t do that with electrical power generation.
When 97 needs more that 5 paragraphs, you know you’ve won. Thanks for the win 97!
Common scense has no place in this board, you should know that.
Increase use of coal ?
Just the opposite is happening with coal.
Operators have scheduled 14.9 gigawatts (GW) of electric generating capacity to retire in the United States during 2022, according to our latest inventory of electric generators. The majority of the scheduled retirements are coal-fired power plants (85%), followed by natural gas (8%) and nuclear (5%).
12.6 GW of coal capacity is scheduled to retire in 2022, or 6% of the coal-fired generating capacity that was operating at the end of 2021.
And for completeness, the planned capacity installs for
2022. Note ZERO coal and battery being added.
Given how much our electricity demands will increase if we switch to all EVs, I cannot imagine how we would ever burn less coal. Most likely it’d be more, or at least, that seems intuitive.
But that’s not what’s happening. Intuition would be wrong. We’ve added way over a million
EVs and not added any new coal plants. We are adding natural gas ( a fossil fuel) capacity, but
not coal. We adding solar; but not coal. We are adding wind, but not coal. We adding battery, but not coal. I could see new nuclear adding into the mix, IF they get standardized designs AND lower cost structure.
EVs are only a tiny fraction of the vehicles out on the road though.
Were all the millions of vehicles currently out there to suddenly become EVs, WHOA NELLIE!!!
Our electricity requirements would SOAR!!! And how would we generate that power? Well, a big chunk would still be provided by fossil fuels, with coal being a large component. If you think we burn a lot of coal now, again, just think how much we’ll burn if we have to power MILLIONS MORE EVs?
No one thinks, is planning or is expecting this to happen. Total fleet conversion will take decades. Energy production conversion will take decades. We’re talking about reality. Not some poorly misunderstood fantasy that magically turns all vehicles from ICEs to BEVs.
I’d still like to see how all that electricity will be generated WITHOUT increased coal and other fossil fuel use.
Perhaps there’s a way, but it hasn’t been presented to me!
Simply by continuing to replace coal plant capacity with renewable plants. I’m not sure what’s not clicking. Did the 22% wind power generation just apparate out of nowhere?
No, but I am not sure how high its ceiling is. Also, it’ll have to cover far larger electricity requirements with the switch to EVs. Not sure it can.
We gonna run out of wind and solar etc.?
No, but you have to BUILD a lot more windmills, solar panels, etc. in order to harness it.
Neither has proven to be a viable replacement for fossil fuels. Capacity simply hasn’t been created, no matter how hard people try. And given that the electricity requirements will be FAR GREATER with a switch to EVs, it seems even LESS likely that those will be replacements in the future.
If solar and wind couldn’t shoulder the load with lower electricity requirements, then it only follows that they most likely won’t be able to with higher electricity requirements.
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