Trump Admin orders another coal plant to stay open

This time, a Colorado plant scheduled to shut down will be kept on standby.

See full article...

 

[Snark218]

There's a weird fetishization of coal, oil, and gas among Republicans. I think it started out as a crude, simple political calculus - energy-producing areas tend to vote strongly Republican, so pandering to them made sense. But it's become something more; I've seen them called petrosexuals, more or less as a joke, but there's weird semotic layers to fossil fuels and our dependence on them. Sometimes it manifests as anti-EV bloviating and obsession with the perceived need for trucks and trailers and campers and UTVs and so on, sometimes it's a weird glamorization of oil and gas workers as sort of modern cowboys/men of the land, often it's expressed as a faux-pragmatic "these stupid hippies think we can run everything on fuckin' solar, but everybody knows only coal can provide baseline power" condescension.

But I think a lot of conservatives just basically cannot imagine their lives without the luxuries and conveniences fossil fuels provide them, in the manner they are used to enjoying them. They don't want the same capacity with renewables. They don't want to switch for any reason at all. They want trucks and coal plants and gas stoves because those things are comforting and familiar and part of their identities, and something they identify with the interests of other conservatives with whom they empathize. One way that gets expressed is a compulsion to aggressively defend and prioritize coal power, regardless of its economics or feasibility.

 

[Mindstatic]

Blind faith in defiance of contradictory empirical evidence even more so. And yes, there's plenty of empirical evidence that contradicts every religion. They all get plenty of things irrefutably wrong. The US is hardly the first country or empire to devolve in the face of religion vs reality. Today it's Christianity in the US. But it was also much of Europe in previous centuries. They didn't call them the 'Dark Ages' because it was dark but because knowledge and reason pretty much vanished from the entire continent after the fall of Rome. And before that, it was Islam that ran face first into contradictory empirical reality, turning the Middle East from one of the largest beacons of knowledge in math and the sciences of the known world into a backwards, ignorant clown shown for centuries. Which is a pretty good indicator of where Conservatives are taking the US, what their 'great' America looks like....

So you think trump and maga are honest and believable people? Seriously, I'm autistic and even I find their claims to be laughable.

Being a christian means accepting Jesus into your heart as your personal lord and saviour, regardless of which particular sect you follow - just like being a Star Trek fan means accepting the Star Trek universe into your heart as your personal scifi entertainment regardless of which particular show you follow.

What would you say to someone that walked up to you on the street and said "I'm the biggest ST fan there is, and we should ban TV, lock up SciFi writers, kidnap and traffic brown-skinned people, and do everything possible to make sure that 3rd world war thingy never ends so we can prevent anything like Star Trek from ever happening"?

Because I would laugh in their face and tell them they're about as Star Trek fan as a syphalitic yakk testicle.

Stop worrying about what you dislike, stop blindly accepting their bullshit claims, stop giving them control of that narrative, and start weaponizing it right the fuck back in their faces - because they're worth even less than the people you hate the most.

 

[mcswell]

Vast stretches of land where hills used to be that we scooped out for coal.

I'm sure, but here's a (true) anecdote. I went to college at the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana (commonly known as Chambana). And I was an assistant instructor in the SCUBA club. The area is completely unutterably flat--except for a few old strip mines, which were all about 40 feet deep (apparently there was a coal seam at about that depth), and filled with clear (by Midwest standards) water. Those were where we held our checkout dives.
Just in case anyone is wondering: no, I don't like coal.

 

[Mindstatic]

Is one of Trump's ultimate goals to turn Earth into hell on earth with climate change inducing pollution so that he will not feel envious about being in hell after he dies? He has talked about whether he will be going to heaven or not when he dies as seen in this video:


View: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8rZLAIkf9PQ

"Thou shalt worship no gods before me"
(Points to that bit on $bills about "full faith and credit")

"You cannot serve both god and mammon"
(Points to trump's loyalty pledge of both christian and capitalist)

"The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil"
(Points to our world burning down because of greed and avarice)

And, if the bible actually was real, then by far the more likely option would be:
https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/coul...he-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

(Thanks to @Scary Devil Monastery for the link, IIRC)

 

[gsgrego]

There's a weird fetishization of coal, oil, and gas among Republicans. I think it started out as a crude, simple political calculus - energy-producing areas tend to vote strongly Republican, so pandering to them made sense. But it's become something more; I've seen them called petrosexuals, more or less as a joke, but there's weird semotic layers to fossil fuels and our dependence on them. Sometimes it manifests as anti-EV bloviating and obsession with the perceived need for trucks and trailers and campers and UTVs and so on, sometimes it's a weird glamorization of oil and gas workers as sort of modern cowboys/men of the land, often it's expressed as a faux-pragmatic "these stupid hippies think we can run everything on fuckin' solar, but everybody knows only coal can provide baseline power" condescension.

But I think a lot of conservatives just basically cannot imagine their lives without the luxuries and conveniences fossil fuels provide them, in the manner they are used to enjoying them. They don't want the same capacity with renewables. They don't want to switch for any reason at all. They want trucks and coal plants and gas stoves because those things are comforting and familiar and part of their identities, and something they identify with the interests of other conservatives with whom they empathize. One way that gets expressed is a compulsion to aggressively defend and prioritize coal power, regardless of its economics or feasibility.

Recently I had an in law harp on how ugly wind mills are.

As if coal mines, oil pipes, or giant nuclear plants are pretty.

It's the same bs standard that they used to criticize Obama for a tan suit.

 

[EtherGnat]

But the falcons in Israel are dying because of US windmills.

Seriously, this regime just put out propaganda warning about Bald Eagle deaths due to windmills, and illustrated it with a photo scraped from the internet (but badly cropped to try and hide the source) that shows a dead falcon in Israel.

Yes... there's an endless stream of propaganda pushing halfwits that pretend to care about bird deaths from windmilss, but somehow never give a damn that far more birds die from fossil fuels. If these people weren't hypocrites, they wouldn't have any identity at all.

The study estimates that wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil fueled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148112000857

 

[Chanur64]

Jet engines don’t create fly ash, or a bunch of other pollutants that coal does.

But jet engines do create a bunch of different pollutants.

https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/Contrails#:~:text=Aircraft engine exhaust is composed,(see the graphic below).

Diesel doesn't produce ash either but it does put out NOX that creates the smog clouds in cities. After reading up on it jet fuel burns cleaner than diesel, which I thought was the other way around. But you have to then factor in just how many jet engines are required to equate to the same power output as that coal plant. I assume it's going to be a lot of them, and that's still going to be a considerable amount of air pollution and SOX in their own right.

 

[BobbyBobberson]

Maybe leave the sky fairies out of this, ok? If you need an imaginary friend in the sky to feel better about slowly dying, that's your right. But separation of church and state is good for both.

That part was literal parody. I'm an atheist.

 

[T_Bartholomew]

A quick search shows that Craig Station Unit 1 produces 446.4MW, which is equivalent to 29.76 Vestas V236-15.0 MW wind turbines. Just sayin'.

Yes, but are they ‘Murican turbines?

 

[DanNeely]

No they haven't. On an annual basis, they were historically around 60%, rather lower than the figure you put up. Through the 2010s, that figure crashed in the US, but also in India and China; India had a financial crisis because of it, bank bailouts, the whole thing. The last time the US annual coal capacity factor was over 50% was in 2018, and it doesn't look likely to get there this year despite a big resurgence in coal-fired generation.

On a monthly basis, the last month coal plants in the US achieved approximately 70% capacity factor were June and July 2016. Thanks Obama! This year, coal capacity factors shot up and reached 62.7% on two separate months (January and July) -- still quite a ways below your claim, and only for one month at a time.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_a

2015 was already well into coals death spiral. A decade earlier the US industry as a whole was running at 75%.

AFAIK there was also a significant seasonal variation; with older plants mostly only running winter/summer and idle during the milder spring and fall seasons which would put the newer plants that ran year round well above the average and the older ones well below.

https://www.gem.wiki/Coal-fired_power_plant_capacity_and_generation

 

[Shiranui]

The order does not require the plant to actually produce electricity; instead, it is ordered to be available in case a shortfall in production occurs. As noted in the Colorado Sun article, actual operation of the plant would potentially violate Colorado laws, which regulate airborne pollution and set limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Oh, so at least they are not literally burning money, they're just throwing it away.

:|

My condolences to Coloradoans. The more the "party of small government" uses legal loopholes to impose its authority on states, the more I wonder what'd happen if said states would apply similar tricks to essentially secede in all but name only - delaying federal payments, letting requests from federal agencies run into bureaucratic red tape, the works. From what I've read, Colorado pays more into the US budget than it gets back, and it'd mostly be red states that would lose money from a stunt like that.

But I have a hunch this administration would not hesitate to press the issue and drag people before a regime-friendly court, or even take this as a reason to force a dissolution of a state government.

 

[byte84]

Is it not just that they're intending on starting at least one war that a coal powered station would be handy for? Cos they sure do look like they want to start one.

 

[Shiranui]

I'd argue that up until trump, both major political parties contained people with the best interests of the country at heart. Misguided at times. Inefficient quite often. Ridiculous from time to time. But not actually willing to kill off half of the population for the fun of it.

That changed in 2016.

I'm sure the GOP always contained some people like that, just like I'm sure there are still a few left even now. But looking at e.g. Reagan's legacy (example), I think a lot of people would disagree with the idea that every Republican had "the US' best interests at heart" until just a few years ago.

Although, I suppose that depends on how those interests are defined (corporations <-> people) ... but most MAGA fanatics will see themselves as heroes in their own story, too.

 

[ArgonneForest]

Seeing how many laws the tinpot dipshit ignores, why don't these states just ignore his admin's orders?

I think that's coming. The problem with Dems is they're not willing as Repubs to fight dirty, and they need to stop with the high road bullshit. They're slowly starting to change that with Newsom and the Virginia Dems.

 

[Derecho Imminent]

I guess this may not just be about coal but keeping power ready to go for future AI surge.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Jet engines don’t create fly ash, or a bunch of other pollutants that coal does.

But jet engines do create a bunch of different pollutants.

https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/Contrails#:~:text=Aircraft engine exhaust is composed,(see the graphic below).

Yeah...amongst other things they pollute pristine natural paradises with tourists...

 

[imikem]

Dispose of the ash at Mar A Lago.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Yes, but are they ‘Murican turbines?

Nah...only those Jihadi Islams wear turbines...

 

[Bernardo Verda]

There's a weird fetishization of coal, oil, and gas among Republicans. I think it started out as a crude, simple political calculus - energy-producing areas tend to vote strongly Republican, so pandering to them made sense. But it's become something more; I've seen them called petrosexuals, more or less as a joke, but there's weird semotic layers to fossil fuels and our dependence on them. Sometimes it manifests as anti-EV bloviating and obsession with the perceived need for trucks and trailers and campers and UTVs and so on, sometimes it's a weird glamorization of oil and gas workers as sort of modern cowboys/men of the land, often it's expressed as a faux-pragmatic "these stupid hippies think we can run everything on fuckin' solar, but everybody knows only coal can provide baseline power" condescension.

But I think a lot of conservatives just basically cannot imagine their lives without the luxuries and conveniences fossil fuels provide them, in the manner they are used to enjoying them. They don't want the same capacity with renewables. They don't want to switch for any reason at all. They want trucks and coal plants and gas stoves because those things are comforting and familiar and part of their identities, and something they identify with the interests of other conservatives with whom they empathize. One way that gets expressed is a compulsion to aggressively defend and prioritize coal power, regardless of its economics or feasibility.

We see the same tendency in Canada. "Fetishism" is a fair label for their attitude. Especially in Alberta, where provincial premiers have barely bothered to hide the fact that they care more about pandering to fossil fuel corporations and leaving them unhampered by meaningful health regulations, environmental regulations, climate change or even charging sensible royalties, than about their citizens, the principles of democratic government, or even the integrity of the nation, should they conceive that might hinder fossil fuel extraction in any way.

 

[C.M. Allen]

Source?

Who do you think has been destroying their own history, attacking their own institutions of learning and history, their own scholars, LONG before the the rest of Europe came along and gave an assist? Who is doing it right now, all across the Middle East, fervently destroying and defacing all manner of historical sites? Who do you think the Saudi royal family fears more than anything? The same Islamic zealots who have been a blight on the Middle East for over a thousand years. Much like Christian zealots have been a blight on the US and Europe for nearly the same span of time and for largely the same reason.

Just ask Galileo how religious zealots respond to anything that contradicts their faith. And unfortunately, REALITY contradicts every religion in existence. Which is why religions are constantly at war with education, learning, enlightenment, along with the people and institutions associated with them.

 

[C.M. Allen]

So you think trump and maga are honest and believable people? Seriously, I'm autistic and even I find their claims to be laughable.

Being a christian means accepting Jesus into your heart as your personal lord and saviour, regardless of which particular sect you follow - just like being a Star Trek fan means accepting the Star Trek universe into your heart as your personal scifi entertainment regardless of which particular show you follow.

What would you say to someone that walked up to you on the street and said "I'm the biggest ST fan there is, and we should ban TV, lock up SciFi writers, kidnap and traffic brown-skinned people, and do everything possible to make sure that 3rd world war thingy never ends so we can prevent anything like Star Trek from ever happening"?

Because I would laugh in their face and tell them they're about as Star Trek fan as a syphalitic yakk testicle.

Stop worrying about what you dislike, stop blindly accepting their bullshit claims, stop giving them control of that narrative, and start weaponizing it right the fuck back in their faces - because they're worth even less than the people you hate the most.

I neither said nor even implied absolutely anything you took away from that. In fact, EVERYTHING I said was literally the exact opposite of your take on it. The reasons for why you failed spectacularly to read and comprehend any of it is entirely for you to decide....

 

[Eldorito]

Can we please try to make ARS NOT a left wing soap box. I love how everyone commenting is a expert in everything on here.... Lets throw my hat in for giggles...
I sure this has nothing with...
1) 3000000000000x data centers opening up every other week
2) How the left demonized nuke plants for the past 30 years
3) Nuke plants take like 10-20 years to spin up
4) Solar is great and all (i have it at home too!) but you need enough storage for days to replace nukes. Same with wind, you need massive storage to replace conventional generation.

Please lets have the journalists try to research this NOT though RED or BLUE lens, but something more objective. I used to love ARS, but its getting more and more political and shitty.

In the before times, calling for the government to spend tens of billions on state owned infrastructure that creates high paying, often unionised, blue collar jobs without any kind of thought for future economic return, instead of relying on the market to supply the needs, would be considered a very left-wing thing.

I am not an expert, but I did work at the largest power company in my country. Mostly it inherited coal plants for cents on the dollar and made squillions out of them. But as they became a mature company, more money was to be found in grid management. Tens of billions of assets on the books present poor return on equity compared to being able to spin up a new battery or solar plant in less than a couple of years with a pretty reliable return on investment.

Nuclear has its proponents in government though. It costs a lot but that goes into local jobs and industry. And everyone wants their own local industry to sell to others, the US has (well, had) a lot of friends who would buy favour, much like the F35 program. It doesn't make economic sense but it holds a lot of political power.

It's impossible to not look at nuclear through a political lens, because any time it's built it's always a political decision, not a market one. The market will never step up and build a nuclear plant.

 

[android_alpaca]

I am fairly certain I previously wrote that Trump wouldn’t be able to keep coal open unless he took real action to force them to stay open, and he wasn’t showing any indication of that.

Well, now he’s showing indication of it.

 

[Fluppeteer]

Emergency.

You keep using that word. I don't think that word means what you think it means.....

View: https://youtu.be/oVa4_2xXwGE?si=XRGTyDmOSToa90_z


I assume it's an "emergency" from the same dictionary as "apologies for the wait, we are experiencing an unusually high number of calls", meaning "more people on the line waiting than when the business is closed overnight".

I really hope someone finds a way to stamp on the "emergency" thing soon. For a country still doing pretty well for itself, the US seems to be undergoing a number of concurrent "emergencies" that I'd normally associate with disseminated intravascular coagulation (throwing one out for Beth Mole there...)

As for coal, is the idea not to rely on solar power at all so that America still has electricity during a planned nuclear winter? Just curious.

 

[C.M. Allen]

As for coal, is the idea not to rely on solar power at all so that America still has electricity during a planned nuclear winter? Just curious.

Then it would make more sense to, you know, hold that coal in reserve and make solar hay while the sun still shines. Just another example of how the Republican party and conservatives are completely out of touch with reality, substituting it for whatever flavor of delusion has captured their fancy that week. The party is built on blind faith in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. Just like every other cult....

 

[jmauro]

They do know coal plants take days to get to the point of generating electricity. So even if it was for short term emergencies it won’t work because the emergency will be over before the plant gets enough heat to generate power. It’s part of the reason the switch to natural gas happened so quickly is that they could start and stop those plants at will to meet demand.

 

[nivedita]

Who do you think has been destroying their own history, attacking their own institutions of learning and history, their own scholars, LONG before the the rest of Europe came along and gave an assist? Who is doing it right now, all across the Middle East, fervently destroying and defacing all manner of historical sites? Who do you think the Saudi royal family fears more than anything? The same Islamic zealots who have been a blight on the Middle East for over a thousand years. Much like Christian zealots have been a blight on the US and Europe for nearly the same span of time and for largely the same reason.

Just ask Galileo how religious zealots respond to anything that contradicts their faith. And unfortunately, REALITY contradicts every religion in existence. Which is why religions are constantly at war with education, learning, enlightenment, along with the people and institutions associated with them.

No, really, citation needed. This doesn’t comport at all with the history that most of us learn, which is that the Middle East flourished and preserved civilization while Europe was in the Dark Ages. The relative decline of the Middle East didn’t begin till somewhere around the 15th to 16th centuries AD. Early Islam was characterized by being receptive and encouraging scientific and technological work, not being against it.

If you’re only referring to the “zealots”, rather than the vast majority of the people who follow that particular religion, then this might make more sense, but at the same time kinda becomes irrelevant. Sure, small minorities may have always been anti-rational thinking, but there’s no particular reason to believe that religion has anything to do with it in a causative sense, rather than being a convenient hook to hang their existing anti-rational thinking on.

 

[brentbent]

If, allah willing, democrats can get enough power in congress and the presidency, the first thing they need to do is nerf the executive branch. Removing “emergency powers” should be a day-one issue.

They can stay, they just need a two third vote from Congress to activate specific plans.

 

[Shiunbird]

You could significantly reduce emergency powers without impacting the ability to respond to emergencies. But you have to absolutely destroy the mitch mconnell legacy of "don't let the Democrats pass anything out of Congress even if it means literally killing millions of people"

Mitch wasn't the sole person who destroyed Congress, but he was the final executioner. And paralyzing Congress ensures that we would get a fascist executive.

Newt Gingrich enters the room...

 

[Fluppeteer]

Then it would make more sense to, you know, hold that coal in reserve and make solar hay while the sun still shines. Just another example of how the Republican party and conservatives are completely out of touch with reality, substituting it for whatever flavor of delusion has captured their fancy that week. The party is built on blind faith in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. Just like every other cult....

I was only making a throw-away comment about Trump's plans (does he plan, or just act randomly?) to need someone to explain to him, again, why it's a bad idea to start a nuclear apocalypse. So I'm a little wary of defending my logic, but if it's really an "emergency standby power plant" then, as others have noted, it doesn't actually need to be producing any electricity at the moment. Nuclear war will cause a few other logistical problems that can't be solved with polluting and outdated generators, but nothing says "Trump hates his kids" like screwing over future generations and taking us all back to digging rocks out of a hole in the ground and claiming he helped.

There's a world in which planning to turn the sun off for a few decades while the nuclear clouds settle might make "shelve all the renewable power projects and rely on burning rocks" a policy that would make sense to a suitably diseased mind. (He's president, he might be shown reports that suggest nuclear war is likely, especially if they use a Sharpie to blot out the parts that say Trump is likely to start it, if his policies don't get someone else to do it for him.) Gotta have the lights on to watch your liberal neighbours die from radiation poisoning; how else are you going to use your gun collection when they come begging for help? Yeehaw.

I'm old enough to remember the miners' strikes in the UK, and we've just finally got rid of our last coal power plant. I'm not a fan of Thatcher's politics, and I don't understand why governments don't do a better job of re-skilling people whose sectors are going away, but I'll stand behind "perhaps coal is a bad idea". (Now if the UK could stop using gas reserves to generate power instead, that would be nice. The moral high ground is not especially lofty.)

 

[Martin123]

If, allah willing, democrats can get enough power in congress and the presidency, the first thing they need to do is nerf the executive branch. Removing “emergency powers” should be a day-one issue.

To be fair, some level of emergency powers are needed. The problem is both the legislative and judicial deciding that Trump is allowed to redefine the meaning of pretty much any word on the fly to mean what suits him at that particular moment (even if it's redefined to mean something else completely one week later).

 

[TVPaulD]

Not in 2013 when Votgtle 3/4 started. Far from it. It was already known that we had to kill off coal plants and replace them with clean energy. Problem is, that far left have pushed wind/PV while using the Nat Gas utilities as their backup.

What “far left” would that be? Is this “far left” that has influence over US energy policy in the room with us right now?

 

[Maxx Floss]

I guess we can all breathe a sigh of relief

/s

 

[ColdWetDog]

Coloradan here. Of course this is about Tina Peters. Traitorous....

We will not captulate. Remember, we didn't want Trump on the ballot!

However, Lauren 'Bozo' Boebart butting heads against Trump wasn't on my Bingo card. It is probably crass opportunism - a rat sitting on the gunwhales trying to decide whether or not to jump off, but you have to get your political jollies when you can.

Midterms ought to be fun. Fun as in jumping off cliffs with a dodgy wingsuit and an umbrella for a parachute.

 

[Voxera]

If, allah willing, democrats can get enough power in congress and the presidency, the first thing they need to do is nerf the executive branch. Removing “emergency powers” should be a day-one issue.

No, the first thing would be to use those power to undo everything Trump did and THEN nerf them.

 

[Voxera]

You’re conflating nameplate capacity (MW) with actual electricity production (MWh).

Coal plants historically operate ~70–85% capacity factor. Onshore wind in the Rockies is closer to ~35–45% on a good site. That means you’d need roughly 2–2.5× more your figures just to match average energy, not peak power.

Craig’s coal plants produces baseline power. Wind produces power when weather permits. The grid is built around meeting load, not harvesting weather.

Also a synchronous coal turbine provides rotational inertia, voltage support, and frequency stability. Wind turbines do not, at least not inherently. Replacing that requires additional hardware and cost that the “29 turbines” line quietly ignores.
Those turbines are typically not co-located, require vast land footprints, new transmission corridors, and face curtailment when lines are congested. Craig’s plants sits on a compact site already wired into the grid.

When running yes, but as emergency power ... then it will be offline most of the time and require quite a long warmup before it starts generating any power and if demand goes down, that extra heat will be wasted unless you can turn of other producers so if they run as a baseline, yes replacing them will require more, but for the purpose here suggested they are not very useful,

 

[Mardaneus]

Just ask Galileo how religious zealots respond to anything that contradicts their faith. And unfortunately, REALITY contradicts every religion in existence. Which is why religions are constantly at war with education, learning, enlightenment, along with the people and institutions associated with them.

That weren't religious zealots. Galileo excelled at making enemies. Those secular enemies then claimed he was being a heretic. The church investigated and told him to bring more proof for his hypothesis and until that time keep his mouth shut (there was a second hypothesis that fit the known facts just as well while keeping the religious structure of the world intact).

Years later Galileo managed to befriend the pope and got the go ahead to publish with the tacit agreement that the pope would figure in the writing (a pseudo debate question/answer style writing). Galileo decided that this was a swell time to commit lèse-majesté against the pope by depicting him as an utter moron in said writing. His, now former, friend was a tad incensed and the rest is history.