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we have alternate methods we just refuse to spend money to improve them.
We subsidize oil and coal thousanda of times more than solar or wind. Obviously we cant just flip a switch, but we have to start taking it seriously at some point.
what money, we are 17,000,000,000,000 in debt? what you mean like the other failed "green" companies
The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:
Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
Solyndra ($535 million)*
Beacon Power ($43 million)*
Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
SunPower ($1.2 billion)
First Solar ($1.46 billion)
Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
Amonix ($5.9 million)
Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
Abound Solar ($400 million)*
A123 Systems ($279 million)*
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
Johnson Controls ($299 million)
Schneider Electric ($86 million)
Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
ECOtality ($126.2 million)
Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
Range Fuels ($80 million)*
Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
GreenVolts ($500,000)
Vestas ($50 million)
LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
Navistar ($39 million)
Satcon ($3 million)*
Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)
Sure they can on the right scale. There's a lot more endless supply of wind and sun there is coal.
Silly girl who doesn't know a thing about electric generation, transmission and distribution.
Price of wind energy compared to coal when you include the necessary transmission lines to somewhere other than a farm in western or north central nowhere AND including the full nameplate rating backup in natural gas turbines (for every megawatt of NAMEPLATE wind, you must back it up with the same in nameplate natural gas even though the ACTUAL average output of wind generation amounts to 7%, yes I said SEVEN PERCENT of nameplate rating) is over SEVEN TIMES the cost of COAL generation! AND... you only get 7% of nameplate... AND it takes an ungodly amount of acreage to produce 200 megawatts of nameplate (14 ACTUAL usable megawatts) AND the transmission line needs to be built to a MINIMUM of full nameplate.
The company I work for owns and is invested in over 600 megawatts (nameplate but 42 megawatts actual usable) of wind. The acreage is unbelievable. But compare that to our coal... we have 7,100 megawatts of ACTUAL usable electricity. If we used every acre in our state and every bordering state we could NOT produce 7,100 ACTUAL usable megawatts of electricity from wind. Furthermore, the kind of wind needed is only available in certain regions of certain states, so there would be a TON of windmills in 5 states not turning, AND we still wouldn't have 7,100 megawatts of actual usable electricity.
Now... let's touch on wind generator maintenance... These pieces of CRAP break down at a MUCH greater frequency, even with all the regular scheduled maintenance you can throw at them. To give you an idea... If you maintained EACH wind generator 6 times a year, you can still expect them to break down at least once every two years, and odds are they go down between once a year to a year and a half. That is WITH full maintenance.
Why do you think so many of the farmers who had wind generators installed back in Jimmy Carter's punish the evil energy days have units that haven't turned in 20 years?
Next subject on electricity, to educate the uber uneducated is VARs. There is NO producer of 60hz wind generators that makes a unit that produces VARs, so the VARs used by you (every time you use an electric item that has a heating element in it) must be created by the installation of capacitor banks ALL OVER THE PLACE. We would need to ADD more substations than we currently have, yes I said more than double our current substations in order to create the VARs needed. To be fair, there is a single producer of 50hz wind generators, but unless we want to completely redo our whole grid and every electric appliance, motor etc, we can't use them.
Solar is even more expensive, guaranteed to be completely void of any generation when the sun is not up... AND please explain to me where and how the batteries will come from, the batteries that DON'T exist, and if they did, would take up nearly as much land, but under a roof to protect them, as the city those batteries would power. Furthermore there isn't a photovoltaic panel made that has a usable lifespan of over 20 years. At 20 years the solar panels are typically degraded to 50% of their original wattage output.
We can't even get good reliable batteries in cars, but you think we can provide MAGICAL wind and solar energy, reliably to people in hospitals, the police stations & fire departments or even your home?
All of these things come at a cost that you appear to not have considered. Could it be because you know NOTHING about electric generation, transmission and distribution?
Therefore, if there actually is a "war on coal" then the government will lose, because they will drown in all of the debt that is created by trying to pay for an unaffordable alternative.
There's been a ongoing war on coal for decades to drive the price up.
You are missing the point, which is that whenever the government declares "war" on something, it always backfires in their face and makes everything concerning that particular topic a disaster. This not only applies to real wars (like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.) but also these fake wars that I mentioned.
This is also not something they will "win hands down" because the cost of energy will skyrocket. Have fun not being able to afford to heat your home in the winter because instead of a $150 electric bill powered by coal, you'll be looking at $500-$600 because you are forced to use solar (which there is less of in the winter time too).
The fact is, we would use "green energy" if it was actually practical. As it is, it's not. It's too expensive. If you want people to stop using coal, figure out how to make wind and solar cheaper. You can't just say "you're not allowed to use coal", that doesn't work. It actually makes it LESS LIKELY that solar and wind will become affordable because if the competition is gone, why do they need to convince anyone to buy their product? When people are forced to buy a product, the product never gets better, it just gets more expensive (and usually gets worse).
Therefore, if there actually is a "war on coal" then the government will lose, because they will drown in all of the debt that is created by trying to pay for an unaffordable alternative.
How's that war against smoking working out? Looks like government is winning that one.
This war Obama is fighting against coal is one that is not aimed at the people, as a whole, it's aimed at large electrical power generation companies. This war is invisible to the average person, all they will see is their electrical bill going up, and when businesses pass on their increased costs to consumers, they'll see the prices for everything they purchase go up as well.
And with a general populace that is ignorant enough to reelect Obama, they will be too stupid to understand why their electric bills are going up, or why they power outages last longer and are more often. When power companies are spend tens or hundreds of millions on new EPA mandates, they lack the funds they would have normally used to upgrade or add new infrastructure.
The coal industry is closing mines, the power companies are closing plants, or raising their rates to consumers, exactly as Obama predicted back in 2008. The Bush EPA regs were to clean the coal emissions, Obama and his EPA just want coal to die from a thousand cuts.
It's called, nothing to replace them with. You need to allow time for a power company to replace a coal power plant before you force them to scrap it. I know all the ones around us just spent tens of millions on new EPA mandated clean air act modifications, and some of the bigger power plants have spent a few hundred million. So you can't exactly demand they pay millions to upgrade to new EPA regs, thenforce them to close. Well, you could if you wanted to collapse our electrical power companies.
Between you me and the fence post I'd like to see the plug pulled on every coal plant...All at the same time tomarrow......Just what we need to push us over the edge and get the herd thinned out....
With the vast amounts in natural gas being discovered, our Electicity generation plant has swiched to NG with a coal back up..
Enjoy it while you, firstly there is a tremendous amount of supply due to the boom as companies rushed to get the product to the market. That has kept prices very low but that is not going to last. Secondly it's the Sierra Club that has been the primary driver in knee capping the coal industry. Here's there opinion on natural gas.
What's the official position now?
We view natural gas as a significant source of air and water pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. In addition to its large climate footprint, the extraction of natural gas is having a big impact on rural communities, state forests, and the landscapes that we've worked hard to protect. Our primary goal is still to retire coal plants as quickly as possible and replace them with genuinely clean energy like solar and wind. Investing in gas actually hinders deployment of wind and solar, so we want to leapfrog gas as we move to a clean-energy future.
What about recent studies that suggest that the extraction and burning of natural gas has a bigger impact on climate change than coal does?
They're alarming. Studies in places like the Marcellus Shale and Colorado have shown that the greenhouse emissions from natural gas are much, much worse than originally thought. Unfortunately, there isn't yet a comprehensive empirical analysis of the full carbon footprint of gas. So the Sierra Club—along with almost every other environmental group—is calling for a full study that documents those emissions and the extent to which they can be controlled or avoided altogether.
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I heat my home with NG, I cook with NG and I have a NG hot water heater. I would never use coal for my household uses.
Coal is being phased out for cheaper, cleaner burning Natural Gas
Don't knock it until you tried it. Anthracite which is nearly pure carbon is used for home heating and other things like water filtration <gasp>.
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