It might be worth mentioning that coal does have some advantages. On site storage is a big one. Coal is abundant and found all over the world making it much less dependent on geopolitics.
For those of you panicking about a sudden dump of mercury into the air, the MATS standards were not done away with entirely, they were just dialed back to the 2012 standards.
If the 2008-era driver was regulation plus cheap shale, the math going forward adds a third leg: the interconnection itself. A retired coal site comes with a transmission tie and switchyard that new-build can't get without sitting in a multi-year queue. With load finally climbing again, that existing grid connection is worth a lot more than it was when most of those 140 conversions happened.
It's interesting that nobody has tried hybrid boilers. Seems like you could add a gas turbine next to an existing coal plant, dump the GT exhaust into the coal boiler, and so reduce the amount of coal you need to burn for a given power output. Or even just use it for feedwater preheating and get a big benefit.
For another take on the death of coal, see:
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/coal-roars-back?r=ewwfu&utm_medium=ios
It might be worth mentioning that coal does have some advantages. On site storage is a big one. Coal is abundant and found all over the world making it much less dependent on geopolitics.
For those of you panicking about a sudden dump of mercury into the air, the MATS standards were not done away with entirely, they were just dialed back to the 2012 standards.
That's a relief
If the 2008-era driver was regulation plus cheap shale, the math going forward adds a third leg: the interconnection itself. A retired coal site comes with a transmission tie and switchyard that new-build can't get without sitting in a multi-year queue. With load finally climbing again, that existing grid connection is worth a lot more than it was when most of those 140 conversions happened.
Would be interested in approximate costs associated with each of these....
It's interesting that nobody has tried hybrid boilers. Seems like you could add a gas turbine next to an existing coal plant, dump the GT exhaust into the coal boiler, and so reduce the amount of coal you need to burn for a given power output. Or even just use it for feedwater preheating and get a big benefit.