Hundreds of coal powered plants shut or slated for shutdown in next two years.
Obama promised he’d do it and too bad for us, he’s delivered. But watch what happens when we lose our grid: power company executives will be accused of greed, placing profits before people, buying up propeller-beanie outfits and destroying them to maintain their monopoly and so on, and no one will remember the predictions made now of what is coming down the pike as the direct result of these actions. “But our intentions were good!” they’ll moan, and that, in the liberal world, is all that’s required.
I shudder to think of what this is going to do to grid reliability as well. A lot of those coal plants help support the grid during disruptions. They regularly provide both energy and MVARs (Mega Volt-Ampere Reactive) that keep the grid from collapsing when large loads are added or lost. (That’s about as simple as I can make it and still be understood.) Losing these stabilizers will make it very hard to hold the grid. I pity the load dispatchers.
Despite what the coal folks say, there are some excellent reasons why coal powered plants are shutting down – most are obsolete (one could blame EPA regulations that have blocked modernization for decades, but then we’d have to go back to the predictions of twenty years ago that said this would happen, and we’ve “moved on”), they’re uncompetitive with natural gas which, until the EPA shuts down fracking – it’s working hard on it – will continue to be plentiful and cheap, and it spews CO2 at something like twice the rate of gas which, in the Church of Greeniology, brands it as ultimate evil.
So good; we can all cheer the dethroning of King Coal and pull those West Virginians out of their dreadful mines and put ’em on the unemployment line, where they belong. But the precipitous shutting down of 11% of our electrical capacity will send electrical rates soaring and cause disastrous power failures; the ushering in of the dawn of the new Eden must come later.