A concentrated solar BACT for new coal? 4

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1. 

   sunflower Posted 11:51 pm
   16 Nov 2008

   BACT to the futureSolar Heat and Power (Australia) was used to preheat OZ coal power plants before it was purchased by Vinod and moved to the States as Ausra.
   Does BACT apply to all emissions from carbon fuels used in industry and commercial HVAC?  
   Concentrator solar thermal industrial preheat can displace massive amounts of fuel and save a fortune without subsidies.  Just take some mirrors, add some leadership, and create millions of clean jobs.
   Coal, including that displaced by BACT, should not be exported.  

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2. 

   Ted Nace Posted 2:51 am
   17 Nov 2008

   Too little, too lateThis is not a climate solution. It's essentially a way of upping the efficiency of a coal plant, but you still have a coal plant and that means emitting vast quantities of carbon dioxide. Building one of these hybrid solar/coal facilities next to a coal mine simply means that it will take somewhat longer to transfer the carbon in the mine into carbon in the sky. From a climate perspective, with carbon dioxide staying in the atmosphere for thousands of years, whether the coal is used up slowly or quickly makes no difference. Instead of finding ways to use coal more efficiently, what needs to happen is for coal emissions to stop in the very near future, and that means we can't futz around with all the myriad ways of building new coal plants that run more efficiently. That era should be over. If there's a location with good enough sun to support a CSP pre-heater, then why not go all the way and make the whole facility CSP?
   Nobody has suggested that making a coal plant more efficient constituted an emissions strategy for mercury or other dangerous toxins. Yet carbon dioxin--oops, Freudian slip, I meant carbon dioxide--is the most profoundly dangerous of all.
   The EPA should consider BACT in a broad sense: the best available technology for generating electricity. If that standard is applied, then none of the existing ways of using coal will qualify until full CCS arrives (if that ever happens). In the meantime, the EPA should only allow wind, solar, negawatts, and other non-GHG technologies to move forward.
   If the EPA adopts increased coal plant efficiency as a legally acceptable control strategy for carbon dioxide, we're cooked.
   
   Help build CoalSwarm-- a shared informational resource on coal and alternatives to coal.

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3. 

   Bob Wallace Posted 3:09 am
   17 Nov 2008

   Death by a thousand cuts...We've got a big problem to solve.  And zero magic bullets.  If we can link some thermal solar to existing coal burners we do two things.
   
   
   We cut coal burning by the percentage of time that the thermal solar is pumping heat.
   We build a thermal solar facility for less money since we get to use an existing turbine system.
   
   
   In the best of all possible worlds we would simply shut down all coal and natural gas plants and use the wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/tidal/wave capacity that we have installed.  But we have yet to install all those green systems.
   Seems to me that every ton of coal  that we avoid burning between now and the time that we go "all green" is a bunch of CO2 not put into the atmosphere.

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4. 

   sunflower Posted 3:55 am
   17 Nov 2008

   Banking first stepsLow technical hurdles and low costs favor displacing natural gas with solar thermal collectors for lower grade interruptible heat (soup, beer, heating, cooling, and so on).  
   Use the gas to be saved for displacing coal power now.

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