California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month

It doesn't, not really. It was gutted after its original sale years ago.

All the Daves and other journalists are actually AI (HAL9000s).

The comments and related moderation are similarly as bad. "HAL Open the pod bay doors."

"I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that." - HAL

No serious reader bothers anymore with that outfit, and this evaporative cooling of social networks comes to any platform that fails to moderate appropriately.

Edit: Seems the brigade from sentiment manipulation bots is in full swing (-3). Sad state of affairs this. The site used to be quite good until they sold out, and I don't know a techie that doesn't like a good Hal Dave euphemism. Squelching makes volunteers not want to contribute anything in goodwill, and hollows out the whole like a cancer. When no one of intelligence raises the bar, everything fails to the lowest common denominator stagnating. Facts are facts, and downvote manipulation doesn't change that.

I think TVA's elaboration, which I linked to, is not only far more authoritative and trustworthy than me, a random internet poster, but here goes:

1) Our coal plants are old and trip off all the time, putting the grid at high risk. 2) The cost to upgrade a coal plant or build a new one is far higher than the gas alternative, so no financially competent entity is going to go with coal unless they are forced to by political manipulation/strong arming/bad incentives that hurt ratepayers.

Prices in China have literally nothing to do with the US, for either construction or gas or coal, so I'm not sure why you're linking to that in favor of our actual utilities' opinions here in the US. Is China's experience with coal really the reason you think that coal is either reliable or cheap?

They are building more plants but starting to burn less coal. Both can be true at the same time. They are expected to hit peak coal as early as this year. So, far coal generation is slightly down relative to last year.

What's happening is part just bureaucratic inertia. They raised funding and are building the plants even though strictly they aren't needed anymore. And part of it is them replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones. They close plants regularly as well. Instead of operating plants 24x7, they keep a few around for when wind/solar fall short. It seems even the Chinese have a hard time predicting how fast the energy transition is going. They've hit their own targets years ahead of time repeatedly in the recent past.

Apparently China coal imports could drop by about 18-19% this year. That seems to be part of a bigger five year plan. They might be hitting the targets for that early as well.

> China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal

Are you sure about that 'most' part? Hasn't China been building something like a coal plant's worth of solar power generation every eight hours for the past year or so?

> China is building an absurd amount of new [coal] plants

Fossil fuel advocates in the West love repeating this "fact" and omit another, rather more inconvenient fact. 80+% of all new electricity generation in China is solar or other renewable. China builds coal plants but they don't really use them much.

These coal plants either replace older ones shutting down or are mostly left idle. Why? My guess: to keep the jobs and skills around, to juice GDP, and as a backup.

China is build coal plants, solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas. They do less natural gas because they don't really have much of that, they do more coal because they can mine that locally, solar/wind are really only abundant out west while most people live in the east, and nuclear is a new thing that they are still getting into (and has lots of expenses that they haven't made cheap yet).

China is building less coal plants than they would need to if they just focused on coal, so they are improving over time.

My understanding is that china has a lot of coal, but has to import natural gas and petroleum products. I believe this changes the cost calculus in favor of coal specifically in china. That said, Chinese coal power plants are also much newer than US plants, which might mean they require less maintenance.

Coal has rising costs that occur on the facilities side and the aging facilities are becoming more unreliable on a modern grid that often needs to fluctuate power demands relatively quickly. It's also more expensive than alternatives like solar and wind, even if their subsidies are disregarded.

The only coal plant economical to run in the US is Dry Forks, WY compared to new renewables and storage.

> The cost of running existing coal power plants in the United States continues rising while new wind and solar costs keep falling. Our first Coal Cost Crossover report (2019) found 62 percent of U.S. coal capacity was more expensive to run than to replace with renewables, while our second (2021) found 72 percent of capacity more expensive than renewables. Our latest Coal Cost Crossover research finds incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act accelerate this trend – 99 percent of all U.S. coal plants (209 out of 210) are now more expensive to run than replacement by new local solar, wind, or energy storage.

> This report finds 99 percent of the existing U.S. coal fleet is more expensive to run compared to replacement by new solar or wind. Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity, and generate $589 billion in new investment across the U.S. Our report provides policy recommendations to facilitate a just transition through the Coal Cost Crossover.

(report is from 2023, the economics of renewables and solar have only improved since then)

https://energyinnovation.org/report/the-coal-cost-crossover-...

I know it's not what OP meant, but dirty equals expensive, in the medium term. We are going to be paying the costs of climate change much sooner than we would like to admit.

I read somewhere that old coal plants would in theory be trivial to drop-in upgrade to nuclear: you just need to replace the heat source with a nuclear one, but the rest of the infrastructure can continue to be used.

The problem is that coal plants are sprinkled with a whole bunch of radioactive fly ash, and normal radiation level for a coal plant would violate the hell out of regulations for a nuclear plant.

It annoys me immensely that all provided grid storage statistics are in MW, not MWh.

The only statistics that speak about capacity brag that California- one of the leaders in grid storage deployment- can store nearly a third of solar generation in February (which represents only a third of the energy production) on a sub-day time scale.

That's because of the wildfires. California will have high rates no matter what just because of that.

I could tell from the wording of the headline