On Aug 14, 2015, at 1:00 PM, Cor van de Water via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote:
> Coal power is history. It is not > because of more strict regulations (even though "the polluter pays" would > have been nice for so many people suffering from the results of decades of > burning coal) but simply the business case for coal is worse than for > investing in clean power, so why bother? So long as the coal miners and power plant operators have the option to socialize the costs of pollution from their operations whilst maintaining the private capitalization of the profits, coal continues to be the cheapest utility-scale power generation option. But, especially with Tesla's recent utility-scale battery announcements, utility-scale solar is now, at least on paper, cheaper than everything else other than dirty coal. It will take some time for everything to ramp up, but there's no longer a business case for utilities for new construction of anything other than dirty coal, solar, and quick-response peaking supplement plants. And it won't be that much longer before dirty coal loses out to solar, as well, from two fronts: first, because of increasing political pressure to stop subsidizing the private profits from public pollution from dirty coal; and, much more importantly, because solar is continuing to get cheaper whilst coal, even dirty coal, is on an irreversible upward price trend. Even once the solar and dirty coal price graphs cross, we'll still be stuck with all the existing facilities. It'll be much, much longer before it'll be cheaper to build a new solar plant and decommission an existing coal (or nuclear or gas or whatever) one still in good condition. But these facilities have limited lifetimes, so we're essentially now approaching the upper limit for the total number of non-solar power production facilities humanity will ever have. Utilities are especially paranoid about solar, though, because it's so cheap that you can put it on your own rooftop at a price competitive with grid-sourced non-solar power production. Your grid connection comes with a lot of overhead rooftop solar doesn't, including capital and maintenance for the power plants and transmission facilities and all the salaries and what-not; rooftop solar just needs the initial capital expense and damned little else, meaning you pocket all the difference, even if you have to front the capital yourself. Finance the capital the same way you finance the capital for the house itself or a car, and the utilities don't have much left to compete on. As such, there's a lot of incentive to defect from the grid...and every such defection drives up the average per-customer cost fro those left, creating an ever-increasing spiral of incentive to defect from the grid. As such, I predict that we'll eventually see coal plants shutting down because their operat ors have been put out of business by rooftop solar. Cheers, b& _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
