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An Associated Press examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.
“Building a coal-fired power plant today is betting that we are not going to put a serious financial cost on emitting carbon dioxide,” said Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at the University of California-Berkeley.
Sixteen large plants have fired up since 2008 and 16 more are under construction. Combined, they will produce an estimated 17,900 megawatts of electricity.
Carbon-neutralizing technologies for coal plants remain at least 15 to 20 years away.
Once the carbon dioxide hysteria dies away – as it surely will – the misguided and wasted effort on carbon sequestration can be redirected to real issues connected with power generation. These are the mundane but practical though unfashionable fields of development – such as energy storage, small scale distributed use of wind power sources (since they cannot ever provide base-load), increase of efficiency for conventional coal and gas plants, integration of solar- thermal contributions into fossil plant to get continuous sustainable generation, mini-hydro (run of the river) power and distributed micro-hydro plants. Subsidies wasted on renewables can also be redirected to more fruitful areas.
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Coal has not gone away.
Tags: Coal power, Electricity generation, Energy, Technology
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