It's all your fault, you have a tendency to actually answer questions...

What's your view of the "peakishness" of natural gas, that is, my understanding is that natural gas is on a treadmill, or red queen path, that is, they have to drill more and more just to keep up with the current demand.  In other words, we may be hitting a very nasty problem with natural gas, especially since it's so critical for heating.

I was under the impression that, global warming be damned, there are a lot of coal plants being built.

What would happen if governments (maybe mostly with Federal money) basically said, "here are billions to build wind farms (particularly in the Dakotas) and solar farms (particularly in the Southwest), go build them?"  I would prefer that the governments kept ownership of such systems, but wouldn't the utilities jump at free generating capacity?

finally, thanks for explaining capacity vs. Watt hours, I was going crazy trying to understand the relationship between watt-hours and just "watts".  By the way, my own prefernce for nomenclature is to use billions of kilowatt-hours, it can be very confusing translating between megas, gigas, and kilos -- if it's in billion kilowatt-hours, I know that the U.S. generates about 4,000 billion kwhrs.  Just a thought

We have loads of gas.  What we don't have is gas close to markets, but lots of oil wells flare excess gas coming out of their well head because they can't get it to market.  Moreover, if you look at basic market fundamentals of gas pricing (storage vs. demand, etc.) there's no sign of any bubble.  What we do have is lots of financial speculation adding volatility to gas prices, but the current price spike doesn't suggest supply limits.  That said, what is intriguing about this data is that the excess of under-utilized gas capacity means that any significant fall in the gas price and/or increase in electric rates will encourage more gas to come online, almost certainly putting a floor on future gas market prices.

Lots of coal plants being planned, but relatively few being built.  Tons going through approval at commissions across the country right now though.  Global warming is affecting them, but in different ways than you might expect.  Some plants (e.g., IGCC) are much more amenable to carbon sequestration, but are also more expensive - this is part of why coal utilities are starting to advocate for carbon rules, if only to get some financial certainty in their planning.  The other dirty little secret of new coal is that it's really expensive.  By the time you factor in modern emissions controls (most current coal plants are pre-Clean Air Act), new coal costs ~10 c/kWh, as opposed to the 3 - 4 current plants run at.  Result is that none of those plants will be built until utilities get commissions to bless their prices.  And no economically rational individual who doesn't have the luxury of commissioners to grant guaranteed cost-recovery is building coal plants.  But the short answer to your question is "not yet".

Bad idea.  They are being built, but I have never seen a condition where the government picked winners and it made long term sense.  What would be much better is if the government said "here's millions of dollars to level the playing field with existing, dirty generation, but we're not picking winners."  None of us should care whether or not any new wind and solar gets built - but we should care that future generation lowers carbon.  Let the market pick winners.

Fair point.

You're right, but be aware that the Duke decision has the effect of making it more likely that existing, grandfathered coal plants will have to come into compliance with the Clean Air Act.  Any new plant, by definition has to comply.  In other words, the new coal plants will all be much more expensive once you factor in all the environmental controls.  

I second Colin's question: It is my understanding that the general consensus is that North American natural gas production has peaked, but it's not a subject that I have personally researched.

And I concur that it is an important question.  We will need fossil fuels through the transition, and we're going to be much better off with gas than with coal.  If Monbiot is right, and we have to stop using fossil fuels NOW to survive... Well, then we might as well all party, because we're toast.

Some states such as Texas peg the allowable electricity price in kW-hrs to fuel surcharges for natural gas.  All the big monopolies do it even if they burn coal or nuke. The exception is wind power, which obtained an "safe harbor clause" so it could charge more reasonable (and lower) rates.  In fact, some wind power companies charge 2-5 cents per kW-hr less and have NO fuel surcharge.  Nice - we need more of that.  Note that if you signed up five years ago like with Green Mountain you'd be really hitting low payment by now, since lock-in rates are at or near current power charges from the big monopolies.  That's one way how they make their profit.

The supply of natural gas in the US is fairly dependable if not for events such as Hurricane Katrina, and more is being found every day.  The US is currently on a natural gas binge by drilling all over the place, including downtown Fort Worth. There is plenty but the "tipping point theory" seems  so convincing that many companies have diversified into imported LNG via overseas ships.  This is known as a major business gamble and not some fact one can determine from DOE statistics.  

A gamble?  Yes, the natural gas market like all hydrocarbons (except price-supported coal) is highly volatile even if US prices are set at the Henry Hub in Louisiana.  So if you send an LNG ship to the US you could make a million bucks or you could lose that much just as well.  

The reason for most of the volatility in the natural gas market is completely divorced from the realities of supply and demand in most cases - barring those severe hurricane and winter storms.   Nope, it is the future, commodities, and hedge funds that trade it by five-second intervals between other indicators such as volatility in the bond, stock, derivative, and currency indexes.  Yep, they're playing the game of "funds of funds" and "indexes of indexes" that have absolutely nothing to do with the realities of the natural gas market.

/sammie

Onward through the fog

Hey, all:

We sure are rushing blindly toward a cliff, but its name is "Non-sustainable expensive commodity energy with no installed alternatives and a lifestyle propelling the societal vehicle at top speed".  (No, not exactly bumper sticker material.)  

We all talk about fossil fuels (and nukes), ignoring that they are unsustainable in all aspects and inevitably rising in cost, but most importantly that they cause environmental destruction and wars.  We have slavishly accepted the mentality as electricity as a commodity, for some to monopolize and others to pay for.  We have done nothing to systematically address the crisis of overconsumption, and instead wring our hands over emerging economies wanting to capture and mimic our Western wasteful egocentric lifestyle.    

Regarding precipices, Amory Lovins wrote "Soft Energy Paths" in 1977, in which he states:

....  Perhaps we are approaching a new vision, a new synthesis.  As we start to see, in Alwyn Rees's phrase, that when we have come to the edge of of an abyss, the only progressive move we can make is to step backward, we begin to realize that we can instead turn around and step forward, and the the turning around--the transition to a future unlike anything we have ever known--will be supremely interesting, an unprecedented central project for our species.  

Faust, having made a bad bargain by not reading the fine print and so brought disaster on the innocent bystanders (Gretchen's family), was eventually redeemed and accepted in heaven because he changed his career, redevoting his talents to bringing soft technologies to the villagers.   We need, like Faust, to refashion hubris into humility; to learn and accept our own limits as a fragile and tenuous experiment in an unhospitable universe; and to grow content to live as a people, not as gods.  Our choice of the "road less traveled" can truly make all the difference.  But if we wish to have the chance to tell of our choice, "somewhere ages and ages hence." then we must chose soon, and choose wisely, for all the ages.  

As beautifully and as passionately as Lovins writes, one would think we would have gotten the message, but we are still waiting and wasting time--30 years and counting.  

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

SustainableGreen wrote: nukes [...] are unsustainable in all aspects and inevitably rising in cost, but most importantly [...] they cause environmental destruction and wars.

Please show how you established those facts.

5: broadly   : something presented rightly or wrongly as having objective reality  < his facts are open to question >

"In effect, we became more dependent on coal and nuclear derived power as an indirect result of trying to get away from same!"

This appears backward.  We tried to diversify to gas, and supplies were inadequate, so we returned to coal & nuclear.  Would we have burned less coal if we hadn't tried to turn to gas?  Obviously not.  Instead, in the absence of gas plants we would have burned even more coal, and now we'd be at the limits of coal plant capacity, and frantically building more coal plants.

"By the time you factor in modern emissions controls (most current coal plants are pre-Clean Air Act), new coal costs ~10 c/kWh, as opposed to the 3 - 4 current plants run at."

Can you provide some backup, or links, for this?  This seems quite high.  

If true, than wind is clearly much cheaper than coal in almost all parts of the country....