See if you can connect the dots.
First this, from Greenwire ($ub. req'd):
West Virginia regulators have approved American Electric Power's plan to build a $2.3 billion clean coal plant.
Appalachian Power Co., a subsidiary of Ohio-based AEP, received approval for the project Thursday from the Public Service Commission. Regulators say the 629-megawatt Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle plant is needed to help AEP meet demand for electricity.
Then this ($ub. req'd):
Merrill Lynch has raised its forecasts for contract prices of coal for power plants and steel mills in 2008, predicting that prices will jump by as much as 200 percent, after recent supply disruptions resulted in a severe global shortage.
Merrill Lynch previously had forecast 2008 thermal coal prices at $80 per ton.
And finally, this:
Power Companies Shock PSC: $156 Million Rate Hike Request is Largest Ever By West Virginia Utilities
The rate increase request filed Friday by Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power is the largest ever by a West Virginia utility, a state Public Service Commission official said Monday.
"It's pretty shocking," said Byron Harris, head of the PSC's Consumer Advocate Division. "I expected them to file some type of increase, but certainly not of this magnitude."
The two power companies, both subsidiaries of American Electric Power, asked Friday for a 17 percent rate increase, which would raise about $156 million -- more than any utility request ever made of the PSC, Harris said.
That's $3700/kW from AEP, which would easily drive power prices north of 10 cents/kWh, in a state accustomed to half those prices.
Stay tuned, because the biggest rate increase in WV history will soon be topped. All in the name of cheap coal, of course.
Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash
To unlock wind power, put a price on carbon
Comments
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 6:01 pm
08 Mar 2008
Can we think about nothing else than money? Has our predominant occupation with wealth accumulation reached the point of idolatry?
Has the political ideology of economic globalization poisoned the minds of the family of humanity in the way CO2 emissions have polluted Earth's atmosphere? If so, could these ideological and physical pollutants become lethal?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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Pompey Road Posted 1:47 am
09 Mar 2008
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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amazingdrx Posted 6:04 am
09 Mar 2008
I know there's a link somewhere to that graphical representation of these from a few years back, I wonder what it would look like with coal and natural gas costs soaring?
I would think that this is the kind of information that would convince investors, from homeowners in solar panels, to mutual funds into solar manufacturers, to government into subsidies, into serious energy revolutionary action.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:05 am
09 Mar 2008
Plus that they have to show to most banks now that they would be solvent in a cap&trade market to get capital financing.
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human power Posted 4:44 pm
09 Mar 2008
Electricity from coal still sucks, but higher rates, especially if they are multi-tiered to encourage conservation, are good.
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enki09 Posted 5:39 pm
09 Mar 2008
What is the coal for? The coal is used in the very old water shift reaction to release the hydrogen from water by combining the carbon in the coal with the oxygen in water.
If you find another way to produce hydrogen from water as cheaply as by using coal then we would already have large scale hydrogen power plants in place...
Interestingly, the energy produced by burning a pound of hydrogen with oxygen is around 62,000 btu's. The energy produced by burning the 5 pounds of coal needed to release a pound of hydrogen from water is only around 5500 btu's.
A pound of hydrogen is about the amount in either a gallon of water or a gallon of gasoline.
This process is also about as efficient as a steam plant can be because it eliminates the need for a boiler as with normal power plants. The product of the combustion of the fuel (hydrogen) is superheated steam which can be used directly to turn a turbine. I designed such a boiler in the mid 90's: http://www.geocities.com/mj_17870/Boiler1.htm
Just fyi...
http://www.myspace.com/enki09
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Sean Casten Posted 10:49 pm
09 Mar 2008
There are large swathes of this country - including much of West Virginia - that has an economy largely built on cheap energy. Take that away, and all those folks who used to work in steel mills, chemical plants, paper mills, etc. become... what? Wal-Mart greeters? But make no mistake: those employers do not stay in WV if the cost of electricity goes up that dramatically, anymore than they have stayed in CA and the northeast. Indeed, when you look at a lot of the industries that have gone to the Far East, the idea that it's all driven by labor costs doesn't quite pencil, as many of them really aren't that labor intensive. Energy costs are a big driver as well. Which means that the calculus of rising energy rates is fundamentally one of whether you want energy intensive stuff manufactured domestically (creating local NIMBY issues, but also creating local jobs and economic activity) or overseas (where it creates more pollution, requires more energy to ship it to us and starves our economy of jobs and economic activity.)
As a final note on CA, a part of the reason that CA has low per capita use is because it has deindustrialized. Which is in part because energy is expensive (which makes per capita comparisons dubious: smack one steel plant in your town and you'll see those numbers go up, even if it's the most efficient steel manufacturer in the world.) But another big part is because California led the way in energy price decoupling, removing (some) of the incentives that utilities had to block conservation. This latter point is an example worth following elsewhere - even in states blessed with cheap energy.
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Sean Casten Posted 10:53 pm
09 Mar 2008
And when all is said and done, Futuregen is nothing more than an expensive way to inefficiently convert coal into energy. You get better yields out of a 1950s era coal-steam plant once you factor in all the parasitic loads around the facility. So if our goal is to create maximum jobs of coal miners, maximize our rate of fossil fuel depletion, and make really expensive power, FutureGen is a great idea. If those things are distasteful to you, FutureGen is a really dumb idea - about twice as dumb as the AEP plant cited above, on a total capital cost basis.
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enki09 Posted 12:55 am
10 Mar 2008
If we had a different way to produce hydrogen or a different way to remove hydrogen from carbon and save the carbon we would have a limitless, pollution free fuel supply. I think this is possible and have spent quite a bit of time working on improving the efficiency of methods to produce hydrogen from water. My point was that, with a different or better way of producing hydrogen the future gen system would be a ready made, large scale hydrogen energy plant. :)
http://www.myspace.com/enki09
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trock Posted 1:12 am
10 Mar 2008
The sentiment to use cheap carbon based energy is also strong. The change to non-slavery non-cheap labor was made after 620 000 died in a war where the total population was 36 000 000. Getting people to give up cheap carbon energy won't be easy either?
But if a non-polluted non-heated world is at stake, how much are people willing to give up and what are they willing to do to make other people give it up.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:19 am
10 Mar 2008
Even if coal follows it's present price trend, how does that effect the cost comparison between solar, wind, and other renewables and conservation. Conservation is already much cheaper than coal.
Nuclear power, coal power, natural gas power, oil powered transportation all follow the same rising price curve produced by supply and demand. Demand is rising and supply is dropping.
On the other hand, with conservation demand actually drops and with renewable there is no fuel cost, so no supply constriction.
The sun and wind do not run out, as fossil and nuclear fuels do. And they do not demand ever more expensive processes to get the remaining fuel left. Such as deeper coal and uranium mines and deeper, more remote oil and gas drilling.
Renewables and conservation fight the inflationary trend. The present energy systems underlie all inflation. And monopoly manipulation of markets in energy commodities currupts our economic system and government, undermining our currency and global credit and investment markets.
Renewables and conservation are already cheaper, but figuring in the trend, they can actually prevent a looming energy price inflation world wide depression. It will dwarf 1929 if it is left to fester.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Sean Casten Posted 2:59 am
10 Mar 2008
I rant on this a bit only because there's been so much effort wasted in support of the "it's the most ubiquitous element in the universe, so it must be good" variety for hydrogen. (Which, I would point out, is also trumped by electrons.) In reality, the relevant questions of any energy supply are (a) how accessible is it?, and (b) how cost effectively can it be accessed and converted into something useful?
For a long time, fossil fuels were a slam dunk on (a), which is why we used them. We are now starting to appreciate the environmental consequences (not to mention using them up), and so we're talking about (b). All good - and none of that has anything to do with hydrogen, which is to my mind simply a distraction. (Indeed, the fact that the FutureGen promoters found it beneficial to present their sh*tty coal plant as a hydrogen plant tells you just how costly a distraction hydrogen can be.)
Do you disagree?
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crumbrye Posted 6:02 am
10 Mar 2008
I did a blog entry about Obama's love for coal here...
http://www.greenpieceblog.com/2008/03/president-obamas-en ...
And you can sign the petition urging the McCain and Obama campaigns to go carbon neutral here...
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/gocarbonneutral
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Jay Alt Posted 6:33 am
10 Mar 2008
It is laughable to suggest McCain, who doesn't even mention climate on his website / energy page, offers more. He has bravely submitted legislation for what are now seen as a) weak cap-and-trade proposals and b) a much expanded role for nuclear power.
Those ideas and buying a few credits don't add up to much for me. They could not be more effective than the 20 policy points outlined below -
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/energy/
Obama did catch some heat from Illinois conservation groups who schooled him on coal/CO2 problems. He promised to use whatever policy tools are necessary to solve the problem, including banning traditional coal facilities.
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Pompey Road Posted 8:16 am
10 Mar 2008
It is about 10 when the sun comes up in my valley and about 3 when it starts going behind the mountain. If you blow the tops off the mountains you can get about 2-3 more hours in the day form sunrise until sundown.
That should make up the cost for having to buy bottled drinking water and paying a higher utility bill. It all will equal out in the end.
Standard practice is for a coal company to file backruptcy when the coal is all gone and get out from under their bond and stick the tax payers with the bill for what little clean up that gets done.
You all are going to have to pay for this mess also so don't put you calculator up until you figure the reclaimation cost to the tax payer.
Coal corporations take billions out of this place and don't get stuck with the bill for anything. So it is cheap overhead for them, the land is cheap, just overburden to push over into a valley. The native people are cheap, just overburden to push underfoot, the water is cheap don't cost them an extra dime to bury a stream. Politicialns in Ky. and W.Va are cheap, buy em by the dozen.
National advertising cost a little more selling the cheap electricity line but cheap by comparison when considering what they are making blowing up mountains for coal.
The regional advertising selling the hillbillys on doing Mountain Top Removal is real cheap.
The small amount of labor it takes to MTR mine is real cheap also comapred to what it takes to drift or slope shaft mine, or to mine it responsibly.
Yes nation it is cheap coal just as long as you don't take a second look at where it is coming from or how they are digging it.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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vakibs Posted 8:07 pm
12 Nov 2008
Prices of all raw materials are going skywards, due to the global financial fiasco. This bad economic climate means lower investments for green technologies.
It is no time to be cheerful about.
And most importantly, the prices of coal vary greatly across the globe. Places which have the steepest increases in energy demand (India, China and similar countries) have public ownership of coal mines. The price of coal is still very low, this means we will see a lot more coal-fired power plants to doom the planet.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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