Main Customer of Arizona Coal Plant Goes Green, Ignoring Interior Department

[Rhiannon12866]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The main buyer of electricity from an Arizona coal plant on the verge of closure said on Friday it will instead source its electricity largely from a solar power project, ignoring an appeal by the U.S. Interior Department to buy more power from the plant to keep it open.

The Trump administration has been waging a broad effort to keep aging coal and nuclear plants from retirement, arguing that their closure would constitute a threat to national energy security.

On Friday, the board of the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a major electricity consumer that supplies water to a large swath of Arizona, voted to sign a 20-year agreement to buy power from a solar project and also agreed to a five-year power deal with utility Salt River Project for electricity from a variety of sources.

The vote came despite a plea from the head of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, who last Friday wrote to board members to say that a 1968 law gives Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke power to require the CAP to buy energy from the Navajo Generating Station, or NGS, a 2,250-MW coal-fired power plant that is scheduled to close in 2019.


More: https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2018-06-08/main-customer-of-arizona-coal-plant-goes-green-ignoring-interior-department

[Sherman A1]

1. This will be interesting to follow

Will Zinke try to force their hand and head to court or will this be the first in hopefully a long list of companies to do so?

[Rhiannon12866]

3. If it makes sense financially, I can't see how they could justify doing otherwise

[Sherman A1]

5. I completely agree

and long term particularly in Arizona it should make perfect financial sense to do.

[More_Cowbell]

2. What about the invisible hand of the market?

Especially since the Trump administration doesn't release tax returns; we have no idea how many of them might have interests in coal.

This looks like what they're talking about: https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/pdfiles/crbproj.pdf

[3Hotdogs]

6. The invisible hand is right on Zinke's dic ---- oh, sorry, that is his actual hand.

[safeinOhio]

4. C U in court

Administration has a terrible record in court.

[NNadir]

7. The "Large Solar Project" will run day and night?

Even in a desert, the capacity utilization of a solar plant is lucky to achieve 20%.

Thus the statement that a coal plant is being destroyed by "switching to solar" is a obviously fraudulent statement.

Of course, there are no numbers in this news item; people who buy into this crap don't give a rat's ass about numbers, because the use of numbers makes fraud obvious.

Coal plants are shut by gas plants, and the more we lie about what solar is - including the absurd statement that it is "green" - the more responsibility we will have for the fact that the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere peaked this year at close to 412 ppm.

The lies put forth by the media about so called "renewable energy" are Trumpian in scale; perhaps lies with different intent, but lies all the same.

[modrepub]

8. Storage/Grid Load

I don't necessarily disagree with what you have pointed out. There will probably always need to be some type of fossil fuel backup to keep the electric grid stable. That said, typical grid loads peak during the day (afternoon/evening) and fall off during the overnight hours. If we can figure out how to store the power produced when electric production exceeds demand we'll be long on our way to achieving serious reductions in fossil fuel consumption. While these are not small hurdles/problems we get nowhere by just giving up and saying "we can't do this". The proper attitude is "we can't do this now but we're going to try". We will probably fail lots of times but that's part of the process and if we continue to prevent ourselves and others from trying we are stuck with the fact that fossil fuels are at some point going to be effectively exhausted.

[NNadir]

9. Energy storage is another dangerous fantasy, a thermodynamic and thus environmental nightmare.

The external costs of energy storage are enormous and further lower the already appallingly low energy to mass ratio of so called "renewable energy."

When you store energy you waste it. This is a function of the second law of thermodyamics, which cannot be repealed by wishful thinking. Given that the solar and wind industries on this planet remain, after half a century of mindless cheering, trivial sources of energy, attempts to store it will make it even less useful than it is now, and it isn't useful at all.

From my perspective after 30 years of study of energy issues in the primary scientific literature, I've come to the conclusion that the enthusiasm for increasingly tortured Rube Goldberg schemes to make was does not work seem to work is tantamount to embracing the environmental benefits of gasoline.

Most people don't know this, but when the automobile was invented most people were wild with enthusiasm because it would solve the "problem" of horse manure on city streets.

Divorce you car

The car was also thought of as a wonderful way to break the power of the "railroad robber barons" who dominated the late 19th century American economy.

The result has been a huge contribution to the complete destruction of the planetary atmosphere, as well as water supplies, and huge stretches of the earth's crust.

The disastrous and intellectually inexplicable enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy" is exactly like the enthusiasm for the automobile, the automobile being the first and most noxious example of "distributed energy" writ large.

It's a Santayana moment, "those who do remember the past..."

The "renewable energy" fantasy has not worked, it is not working, and it will not work. The reason, to repeat, is the energy to mass ratio.

Have a nice Saturday afternoon.