Here’s a pretty useful page from the same organization, showing electrical generation from 2007-2016. Looks like coal dropped by about a third, while LNG increased by a slightly greater amount.*
What’s really striking, to me, is the increase in solar. From 612 (Thousand MwH) to 36754! Granted, subsidies would help, but still…were I inclined to invest in a particular part of the energy field, I’d give that one serious thought.
*I blush to confess, my big mathematical blind spot is this whole increases by/decreases by X% thing. I just don’t seem to be able to work it out. So please correct me if I mess it up.
I heard a statistic recently (sorry, no cite - it was on the radio) that said solar power generation cost about half as much per kilowatt-hour than coal. The cost of solar has plummeted in the last seven years (not due to Obama, mind you, although credit to him for some mild facilitation of progress compared to the opposition of the previous administration) and the main issue now is capacity.
I’ve read quite a bit on this and half seems very unlikely. Measuring these costs is a lot like measuring unemployment, there’s a lot of ways to slice up the data. It is further complicated by the fact that costs vary so much from country to country. For example, solar is cheap in Germany but expensive in France. Overall there’s a few things:
Coal (as a commodity) has been pretty steadily becoming cheaper. It has become cheap for a few reasons but one critical reason is investors don’t want to invest in new coal burning plants because they see it as a dying technology/trend.
Onshore wind has consistently been a big winner at a cost per MWh for several years; however, it has been steady. So are there are more costs gains to be made for onshore wind? I don’t know, maybe not.
Solar is still a little bit more expensive when you factor in costs of opening a plant. The big benefit to solar is once the plant is open it becomes pretty cheap due in large part to the lack of transport costs for fuel. However, you can’t just ignore the costs of opening the plant (in my view) and when you factor that in solar is still good but not cheapest. The promising thing is that since 2009 solar has been taking a nosedive in cost as the technology to open a plant becomes cheaper. I.e. the dividends for the investment in R&D seem to be starting to pay off.
Natural gas has been pretty consistent as the cheapest fossil fuel on a per MWh basis when including plant costs and transportation costs.
Biomass currently tends to be very expensive in large part due to high transport costs and relatively high plant costs.
My apologies if any of my information is out of date. I try to keep up to date on this but of course that isn’t always possible.
Is this because coal companies are not investing any money into R&D/new facilities and passing on the savings to the end user (not out of the niceness of their black, coal-burning hearts, but because of competition)? Because the older a plant gets, the more the upkeep will cost.
At that point, you won’t be able to give the stuff away. Idiotic Trump policies are going to eventually cripple the US economy. Of course he does not give a shit; he’ll be gone with money in his personal pockets by then. That’s how he does business.
I have a saying. Nothing is ever for a single reason, so take this as being one cause among I’m sure many. Although all people are political, when somebody has their investor hat on they don’t care about “climate change is real” or “climate change is a hoax”, they are chasing return on investment. Renewables are where energy production is going and for the capital risk-takers out there they want to get in early. So to get the financing to build a new coal plant is becoming more challenging. It doesn’t have the zazzle of a shiny new solar plant or wind farm.
On a capacity basis, a solar plant is still more expensive than a coal plant. With many caveats. If you poke around, you’ll very quickly find a very pretty graph that shows the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for solar and coal is pretty much equal. But this graph that circulates everywhere is for Germany. And in Germany solar is cheap. So making this measurement on cost is tricky because it is very local.
Since I know most of you are American, if you look at the EIA annual report. The 2016 report shows that the LCOE will still be very regional, but solar is expect to continue to be increasingly competitive until it reaches parity by about 2040. And again as above, I think is both driving capital investment and a result from all of the R&D investment.
I agree. I think establishing the railway terminal ports at the coast was the main thing. They didn’t much care what the trains carried to ship overseas from our coast. Coal was what we were fighting, but they also wanted to transport shale oil. No doubt nuclear waste was next (kidding, I hope).
A supervisor at the Energy Department’s international climate office told staff this week not to use the phrases “climate change,” “emissions reduction” or “Paris Agreement” in written memos, briefings or other written communication
This administration believes very strongly in magic words. As you know, now that the president has said the words “radical Islamic terrorism,” ISIS has been defeated (or very nearly so. Definitely when he says it again louder). Similarly, if you don’t write “climate change” it doesn’t exist.
I think you’re supposed to say it a certain number of times in a row, looking into a mirror. Maybe the holdup is that it was left up to Trump to figure out exactly how many times, and after about 3 or 4 times he exhales loudly “BORING!”