The latest IPCC report says we have to get down to zero CO2 emissions by 2030. We do not have time for “phasing things out”. Ok then, what is a good first step? Lets just stop burning coal. Tomorrow.
It turns out that there are two kinds of coal: thermal coal is the kind that is burned and metallurgical coal (also called met coal) that is used for making steel. Met coal, mostly mined in West Virginia, does not itself contribute to global warming, through the means of heating it in the steel manufacturing process might. This article is just about eliminating the burning of thermal coal to generate electrical energy.
Trends in electricity generation
The percentage of electric power coming from coal plants in the US has been dropping every year since 1987 as they are gradually phased out, but this is not happening fast enough. A coal plant might have a useful lifetime of 40 years! This chart shows the trend. (My source for most of the statistics here is the web site of the US Energy Information Administration. )
Coal is the elephant in the room, being the dirtiest of our electric power sources. Lets see how we could kick the legs out from under the coal industry to move things along faster.
Sources of Carbon Dioxide emissions
What would it mean to shut down the coal generating plants in the country all at once? Like overnight. As we learned from the gasoline lines of the 1970’s, shortages encourage conservation. It takes a major jolt all at once because Americans do not change until they have to. Let’s make them have to.
First, some math.
What is a Watt?
The “Watt” is the unit used to measure the rate at which energy is moved from one place to another. This movement is called power. One Watt is the amount of power it takes to operate an average flashlight. If you move energy at the rate of one Watt, for one hour, you have transferred one “Watt-Hour” (WH) of energy. This somewhat clumsy nomenclature came down to us from the 19th century, and while scientists may use other more convenient (to them) units like “Joules”, the electrical industry continues to use the older Watt and Watt-Hour nomenclature so this paper does as well.
A modern LED bulb the equivalent of one of those old, evil, 100 Watt incandescent bulbs (you have replaced all of yours, right?) consumes about 15 Watts. Leave it on for one hour and you have used 15W*1H = 15WH. This is a very small amount, so in daily life we usually deal with units of 1,000 WH, or one Kilowatt-Hour (KWH). This is the number that appears on your monthly electric bill. Where I live, one KWH from the utility company costs about 11 cents at retail. In Alaska it is 22 cents, while in Hawaii it is closer to 30 cents. One KWH could run an electric iron or a large window air conditioner for an hour, or that 15 Watt LED bulb for almost 3 days. A minimally efficient 3.5 ton central air conditioning unit in a house consumes 3 KWH for every hour it is running. A top of the line efficient model the same size might use 2 KWH.
At the scale of electric utilities, we usually deal with Millions of Watt-hours (the Megawatt-hour, MWH) or Billion Watt-hours (Gigawatt-hour, GWH). Total electricity consumption in the United States in 2017 was around 4 million GWH. 30% of that comes from burning coal.
How much are we talking about?
One ton of coal produces enough heat energy to generate on average 2 MWH of electricity, allowing for the various inefficiencies of heating and cooling water, spinning a turbine, as well as variations in the type of coal, etc. A side effect of this burning is the release of 2.86 tons of Carbon Dioxide. Wait! How can the result of combustion weigh more than what you started with? Because in combustion the Carbon in the coal combines with Oxygen in the air, and Oxygen is even heavier than Carbon. (Burning natural gas produces about half as much CO2 for the same amount of energy.)
At a national level, 30% of 4 million GWH is 1.2 million GWH or 1.2 billion MWH. At 2 MWH per ton we find it takes 600 million tons of coal to generate that, releasing 1.7 billion tons of CO2. per year in the process.
Reducing means what?
Average household consumption per month
From the World Factbook, we see that the US consumes an average of 12 MWH per person per year. Cutting 30% of that means we would have to get along on 8.4 MWH per person until new renewable sources pick up more of the difference. That would put us in the neighborhood of New Zealand, but still more than Austria, Japan, or Switzerland, hardly backward countries. (These numbers are not just for residential use, but are averages across all uses.)
Energy usage per houshold is highest in the Southeast US, largely due to air conditioning. This is not just to keep the indoor heat within livable limits but also to keep the humidity down. High humidity leads to the growth of mold and also plays havoc with anything made out of wood (like plank floors).
Coal-fired plants are not all the same size. Of the 615 still operating, about 80% are under 1 Gigawatt in capacity, but the other 20%, the really big ones, generate 64% of the power. The total coal capacity is 335 GW that has to be shut down. [Correction: this previously applied the 30% factor twice.]
The smallest plants, under 20 MW, are typically found in industrial settings such as adjacent to factories oruniversities.
Location of coal-fired power plants
Although the national average is that 30% of electricity comes from coal, the dependency of each state varies considerably. A little under half of the states get over 30% of their electricity from coal. Most of the coal-fired generating plants are East of the Mississippi River and are especially dense along the Ohio River. While California only gets 0.1% of its power from coal, West Virginia gets 93%. Say you use a window air conditioner in your bedroom during summer. 180 days x 8 hours/day *1 KW = 1.44 Megawatt-Hours. If you live in West Virginia, you used three-quarters of a ton of coal doing that, and produced 2 tons of CO2 . Thank you very much.
So if all the coal-fired plants in California were shut down overnight, it would barely be noticed, but doing that in West Virginia would leave them completely in the dark. If it was not for the interstate transmission network.
Map of the interstate transmission system
Still, the “rust belt” states are going to need help dealing with this.
Can we handle it?
During Hurricane Matthew in 2016, over 1.5 million customers suddenly lost all electric power in the Southeast. It some areas it was not restored for several days. In Puerto Rico they still are without power in many areas over a year after Hurricane Maria. But in this article we are not talking about damage to distribution equipment, but a loss of generating capacity. All the distribution infrastructure stays in place and all the non-coal generators keep working. We just have to be more frugal.
The Northeast Blackout of 1965, was caused by a cascading effect of generators going offline to protect themselves from overload, once one faulty relay tripped. The way these things operate was changed as a result of that event and now portions of the load (customers) are cut off instead so that the rest keep operating. This is called “load shedding”. The automatic load shedding will not be necessary if everyone pitches in and cuts back themselves.
The actual process of shutting down a coal plant has to be done by trained operators. You can’t just send in the National Guard and throw a switch. We want it to be done carefully, not so the plants can be mothballed (we never want them to operate again) but so they can be carefully cleaned up. (Watch the ending of “The China Syndrome” to see what happens if you don’t know what you are doing in a shutdown.)
What about the jobs?
If we were just concerned about jobs for jobs sake, we would not have laws against farming Marijuana and Heroin, drug dealing, bank robbery, and prostitution. But we have decided as a society that some “occupations” are actually harmful to the greater good. So it should be with the coal industry. Sorry, these people are killing us and we need them to stop, but there is plenty else for them to do.
- Dismantle and clean up the generating plants and coal mines. These are effectively toxic waste sites that need to be remediated. Even a pile of unburned coal is dangerous, due to the flammability of coal dust.
- New solar installations both centralized and distributed. More people already work in this area than in mining coal in this country. While solar installations need to be supervised by licensed electricians, a lot of the work is not much different from carpentry and other home building skills. A lot of work will be needed in this area – remember there are still those natural gas plants that eventually need to be done away with as well.
- Retrofitting old houses with better insulation and more efficient appliances. This will also have the benefit of eliminating black mold in some old houses that cause sickness in children that then require hospitalization. Modern air-to-air air conditioners have efficiencies ranging from 13 to 22 BTU per Watt-Hour. This is known as the SEER rating and is marked on every cooling appliance. But a geothermal pump cooling system can be 43% more efficient. Where space allows, these should be more common in new construction. Of course, they cost more to put in.
How would we pay for this?
The same way we paid for World War 2. Wait, didn’t war bonds pay for the war? Nope. The war bonds raised $185 billion but the war cost over $296 billion as of 1945. ($4 trillion in today’s money) The main purpose of the bonds was to remove money from circulation and reduce the inflation that would normally have occurred in a time of full employment but nothing to buy (due to rationing).
From Wikipedia: “War bonds are debt securities issued by a government to finance military operations and other expenditure in times of war. In practice, modern governments finance war by putting additional money into circulation, and the function of the bonds is to remove money from circulation and help to control inflation.”. This is at the heart of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
But there will be plenty of things to buy this time – all those new appliances, electric cars, LED bulbs…
The Apollo program cost $120 Billion in today’s money. This is more important than that was.
What would it take?
It would take a declaration of a state of emergency and either a Presidential Order or an Act of Congress mandating the immediate shutdown of the coal generators. It would be best if this was done under the umbrella of the #GreenNewDeal (currently supported by 81% of Americans including 64% of Republicans) so that simultaneous job programs can be put in place as outlined above. For a precedent, during WW2 the Detroit auto manufacturers did not decide themselves to stop making cars and start making tanks and airplanes. They were ordered to do it. Is this the same kind of emergency? Yeah, it is.
We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.
— Greta Thunberg
But Congress would never approve this
Recent global temperature history
The current Congress won’t as they are way too timid. How we get the people in Congress to grow spines is not the purpose of this article. But the reasons why it has to happen quickly are best explained in a powerful TED lecture by a 15 year old climate activist from Sweden, Greta Thunberg.
“Instead of looking for hope, look for action” - @GretaThunberg