Coal plant forced to stay open due to emergency order isn’t even running
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Are you being disingenuous or ignorant? Neither is a good look.
Most of those jobs for solar, per that link, are construction and development. I'm sure that's true for wind and storage as well. That's why the numbers are so high. But that's fine because we're going to continue to build out production.
No one is building coal plants, now or in the future, because they're economically infeasible. Even if you're going to be an idiot and put down renewable energy and become a champion of burning a limited resource that we will run out of if we survive long enough, you would be building gas plants assuming you wanted to make any money. So of course no one is being employed to build something that isn't being built. That doesn't make running a coal plant more efficient in terms of manpower than solar or wind.
Which do you honestly think takes less work, monitoring some solar and wind farms? Or digging coal out of the ground, transporting it, and burning it in a massive facility to boil water?
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Build-out of new solar and wind certainly employs more people than maintaining old coal plants. That's not really an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to efficiency though.
In any case, per-worker energy production is a meaningless metric. Cost per unit of energy matters, and it factors in labor costs; coal is more expensive.
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They're being disingenuous like on all threads.
However, I am always a bit uncomfortable with putting forth renewables as being great for new jobs. It's cheaper in large part because we don't need anywhere near as many jobs per kWh. Construction of solar is more work-intensive than operation of coal in the short term; even in the medium term, that flips.
Employing fewer people overall just to keep the lights on is a good thing, we've got plenty of other things to do in the world. Those cats aren't going to film themselves, after all.
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I think the point people are trying to make is that just because a place is known for digging coal out of the ground doesn't mean their economy is built on the back of coal. There aren't that many people actually mining coal. It's a fairly mechanized industry (we're not sending kids in with pickaxes anymore) and a lot of those skills could translate to other industries. If you run heavy equipment to scoop coal, you could run heavy equipment to scoop dirt to build foundations for wind turbines, for example. And you won't be breathing fucking coal dust while you're doing it.
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Wouldn't the correct comparison be construction of new solar versus construction of new coal power, though? Not that I'm advocating for new coal-fired generation plants - quite the opposite - just using equivalent comparisons.
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All of this presumes that 'keeping it open' was for the purposes of generating power. But it wasn't. It was about providing another avenue of grift, which is pretty much all Trump cares about. No, Eric, Jr, and B don't make that list, and never will. They don't have boobs and a @#$%y he can grab, so they mean less than nothing to him.
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I think the point is less that solar is good for jobs and more that the idea that Coal is some economic lynchpin we need to prop up is nonsensical.
At this point it's hard to talk about Coal as anything other than a religious matter, tbh. No other industry exerts the kind of influence relative to its economic value than the coal industry does, so the notion of economic value as a meaningful driver is just nonsense.
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Stories like this one remind me of how embarrassingly, shockingly, incredibly old I am getting.
I remember when Republicans were thought of as conservative, and Dems were thought of as liberal.
But here we have Comrade Trump and his Central Committee wanting to micromanage and tax/subsidize everything to fit his 5 year plan, and Dem are bitching at him to just leave it to the free market, remove oil subsidies, etc. Today's "left" is [relatively] right-wing and the "right" is left-wing.
Whenever I say "the left" I just assume everyone understands that I mean people who want the most and fastest change, are the least risk-averse, and have the least reverence for tradition and long-established institutions, i.e. people who lean Republican. But when I say "the left," people act like I'm talking about those free market capitalism fanatics who want more measured and cautious changes, advocate for limited government in accordance with the constitution, and arguably respect tradition and long-established institutions the most, i.e. people who lean Democrat. It never goes well.
As an old fart, I think it's bad that words get redefined to mean their opposite. Shit, I said "bad," and bad means good, doesn't it? D'oh!! Some day, "right-wing" and "left-wing" will be the new flammable/inflammable.
I remember when Republicans were thought of as conservative, and Dems were thought of as liberal.
But here we have Comrade Trump and his Central Committee wanting to micromanage and tax/subsidize everything to fit his 5 year plan, and Dem are bitching at him to just leave it to the free market, remove oil subsidies, etc. Today's "left" is [relatively] right-wing and the "right" is left-wing.
Whenever I say "the left" I just assume everyone understands that I mean people who want the most and fastest change, are the least risk-averse, and have the least reverence for tradition and long-established institutions, i.e. people who lean Republican. But when I say "the left," people act like I'm talking about those free market capitalism fanatics who want more measured and cautious changes, advocate for limited government in accordance with the constitution, and arguably respect tradition and long-established institutions the most, i.e. people who lean Democrat. It never goes well.
As an old fart, I think it's bad that words get redefined to mean their opposite. Shit, I said "bad," and bad means good, doesn't it? D'oh!! Some day, "right-wing" and "left-wing" will be the new flammable/inflammable.
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I just listened to this podcast that explains why China is building tons of new coal generation capacity, even as it burns less of it.
Turns out that China is building coal for profit motives:
Energy Transition Show - China Update 2026
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So, that's either a no on the evidence, or a no on reading comprehension?
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I would love to see a 14 cylinder Wartsila powered land vehicle, it would tower over Howl's Moving Castle.
It's an unfortunate fact that steam and gas turbines can't achieve the efficiencies of Diesel engines, and Diesels can't achieve the power to mass ratio of turbines. When God designed the universe, she obviously wasn't thinking about optimising it for heat engines. Too busy designing self-assembling fusion power plants, I guess.
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It is actually the point that it may dawn on the more intelligent Republicans that Israel has never had friends nor allies but only useful idiots to exploit.
Like Hitler's plans being set out in Mein Kampf, Zionist logic is set out very clearly in Torah and Chronicles. The death penalty for ridiculously minor offences is Divinely ordained. Mass murder in pursuit of land is OK. Suborning prostitutes to gain access to a city is just fine. The equivalent of a suicide bomber is OK so long as it's ours (Samson).
The Prophets calling Israel to repentance? Stuff them.
Trump has as usual been played for a sucker by people who didn't pay someone else to take their exams for them.
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I suspect someone earned a PhD designing the bolts to hold that crankshaft together. Spectacular engineering.
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Let's face it. If the situation were reversed, he'd be complaining that renewables fail to create enough jobs.
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People make the point that renewables have more jobs so we should keep doing that if we care about jobs. I’m pointing out that’s a bad reason: if instead of renewables we built out coal, we’d have more jobs in energy. Because renewables are more efficient.
We’d also have more jobs in respiratory health care. Yay, jobs!
Jobs in a specific sector is just a bad thing to maximize.
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It is so exhausting to live in a dead republic.
We need to put this twitching corpse in the ground and get on with building something better already.
We need to put this twitching corpse in the ground and get on with building something better already.
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You are confusing several different politcal axes.
The opposite of conservative is not liberal, it is progressive.
Liberal is the opposite of authoritarian.
Socialist is the opposite of plutocracy.
It's a three dimensional plot, not a line.
Free markets are liberal economically but can be socialist (as they were in some African states at the end of the British Empire) or plutocratic as they are in the USA. Removal of oil subsidies is progressive but also communist.
Trump is a plutocratic authoritarian conservative.
The Democrats by RoW standards are economic liberals with the mildest of progressive tendencies.
China is progressive authoritarian with some socialist tendencies.
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We need her to come to the UK and stand for Parliament, she'd fit right in.
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Had our first properly sunny day yesterday. PV battery was full and we were dumping power out to the grid so I decided to do a 100% charge on the car (wasn't that low..). 25Kw/H later, one full battery. House battery still full, still pushing power out to the grid
Charging calculator reckoned that the charge had cost £7.50. Nope. Free. (unless we are amortising the cost of the solar..)
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Somebody did, but it would have been decades ago, around the time crankshaft design went from calculator to FEA.
As a minor aside, bolted crankshaft construction was used on the Scott motorcycle over a century ago because it was a two cylinder design with vertically split crankcase, and there is no other way of getting the crankshaft out. The same technique has been used on some subsequent two strokes. From the tiny to the huge.
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danielravennest
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
I call myself a progressive and the other guys are retards:
verb
verb: retard; 3rd person present: retards; past tense: retarded; past participle: retarded; gerund or present participle: retarding
/rəˈtärd/
- delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment
"our progress was retarded by unforeseen difficulties"
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That's the thing all these anti-renewables types don't get (and won't, because it's a choice at this point). Coal, natural gas, oil, diesel, nuclear power -- all of that infrastructure is completely WORTHLESS without continuing to extract more fuel to keep running them (and there's a finite supply of that fuel). There's an entire other industry attached to non-renewables that does not apply to renewables. For renewables it's basically just install and forget, because renewables will keep running for their entire life, almost for free. They don't need mines to 'extract' more wind, no 'sun' rigs to drill for more sunlight. Because their 'fuel' is literally free, limitless, and essentially available forever. That's the most valuable kind of infrastructure humanity can possibly build.Had our first properly sunny day yesterday. PV battery was full and we were dumping power out to the grid so I decided to do a 100% charge on the car (wasn't that low..). 25Kw/H later, one full battery. House battery still full, still pushing power out to the grid
Charging calculator reckoned that the charge had cost £7.50. Nope. Free. (unless we are amortising the cost of the solar..)
If the US converted its ethanol corn fields over to solar, even at the most conservative of outputs, those solar fields would generate enough to power the entire country many, many times over. And we wouldn't need to spend another dime 'fueling' them.
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I was severely reprimanded on one slightly over the top woke website because I referred to the "advance/retard lever" on an old motorcycle.
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Given how electricity markets work, I'm guessing either one of three things:
- Basic site maintenance and operations requires them to produce a minimum amount of electricity, so they sell that minimum to the grid at an incredibly low/negative bid because they lose even more money if they don't make that power.
- They're covering for maintenance down-time at better power-plants.
- Their rates are so high that they can only profit in the middle of a heat wave .
Coal's not good at being peakers, so they're not helping there,
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The only part that counts (with most) is the size of the attached check
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Thank you for the excellent illustration of the sunk cost fallacy.
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The most powerful media outlet in the UK is the Daily Mail. It is read by millions of B2C1C2 women. It is followed by the Express and the Sun.
All are owned by disgusting billionaires.
All have tried to work the public up into a frenzy over the unimportant (except from the point of view of civil liberties) trans issue.
Then we have J K Rowling who has tried to make it a defining issue of her on line presence.
Anybody who forced their way through the first Harry Potter books when the grandchildren were reading them (they are embarrassed about it now) will know that Rowling's work is very superficial progressivism on a thoroughly conservative mindset.*
Rowling managed to get a case in front of the Supreme Court which turned on a narrow issue of law and managed to get the evidence of biologists excluded from consideration.
Until people like Rowling, it just wasn't an issue. Until around 1972 you could apply to have your birth certificate altered and it was just one of those things that, if you were transgender or intersex, your GP would tell you what to do.
That's where we are, and we need people like AOC to emerge from the bunkers and charge the enemy.
*Having been told how it all ended I remarked to someone that in the real world the RAF would have overwhelmed the bad guys with a missile cluster that they wouldn't have been able to detect coming because they didn't understand technology, and if they wiped out all of the wizards it would have been a net gain for humanity. Rowling's world is a mirror of the one in which well off chaps who went to boarding school get to run things, with the occasional oik getting admitted to the group to prevent inbreeding. But she was incapable of seeing that.
How unlike Terry Pratchett...a genuine progressive.
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You'd have to add up construction of a new plant divided by lifetime, continued maintenance per year, and cost of the energy source (coal delivered to the plant vs. solar light).
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TransAlta (former Calgary Power Co.) is a private Alberta, Canada corp known for playing games with its plants for fun and profit.
So DoE is paying a Canadian corp to keep a defunct plant available to play political games that corp may be better at than Trump!
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/17/washington-transalta-centralia-plant-shutdown/
So DoE is paying a Canadian corp to keep a defunct plant available to play political games that corp may be better at than Trump!
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/17/washington-transalta-centralia-plant-shutdown/
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I guess that in order to be ready in case they do need to fire it up, they need to run it at regular intervals to prevent things getting stuck, as in making the wheels spin from time to time.
Some other comment said the energy was equivalent to one shovel of coal a day, which I assume is not enough to get the boilers hot enough to actually boil any water so maybe monthly, 30 shovels sounds like it could get even a more decent size boiler hot enough, especially if you can run it with less than full water.
Still, if it has not been used at all for a whole year and it was intended to be shut down for upgrade to LNG, then keeping it running coal actually is detrimental to both economy AND grid stability since LNG is likely more efficient, even if you do not count the health and climate benefits.
Though for actual grid balancing, large battery parks together with wind and solar is probably much better since they can generation turn on and of every second while a coal plant takes some time to get hot, probably an hour or so before it really starts generating, and then it will generate for some time before cooling of so your power regulation would react in hours instead of seconds.
(Read that in an article about a solar/battery setup in Australia where the battery solution gave like 90+ % better grid balance due to being able to turn on and of in seconds, reducing risks for power fluctuations that could affect connected devices.
Sure the battery has a limit on time, but then you can have a LNG plant that kicks in if the grid still needs energy after say 10-15 minutes and it will be hot enough before the batteries run out.
And once the grid is stable, the batteries can also be used to absorb any excess the LNG plant generates until its cold.
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