What to do with all those coal fired power plants
First this July 2019 snippet from an investment website that could give a damn about the environment:
April was the first time ever that nuclear power outproduced coal. It was also the first time ever that wind, solar, and hydropower combined to outproduce output from coal-fired facilities. Together, zero-carbon power sources generated over 43% of total electricity in the United States. It's just the latest data point demonstrating the shift underway in the nation's power grid. Is your portfolio taking that into account?Â
And now this map of how many there are in America:
Obviously there are a lot and their locations are direct indicators of demand/usage.
Here is a screen shot from Google Maps of the Boardman Plant, the only coal fired power plant in Oregon:
They are dirty places: just the coal dust from the fuel pile is visible for 1~2 miles here. I'd bet that the property upon which any coal fired power plant sits will be a heavily contaminated toxic waste yard: a Superfund site.
High capacity grid scale battery storage needs to go somewhere and former coal plants have two advantages:
They are already contaminated. Once you deploy enough batteries you are guaranteed that there will be some sort of catastrophic failure that spills toxic battery chemicals. It's just math. Odds are they won't spill anything that hasn't already contaminated these sites.
Electrical power lines, equipment and trained personnel. Power storage requires power line connections. Coal plants already have these. They will need high power load balancing equipment to match battery storage power supplied to the millisecond to millisecond demand constraints of the power grid. They already have most of this. They will need people to maintain the high voltage equipment. In most states these tradespeople are highly skilled, highly regulated and will need employment when the power plant shuts down they are skilled employees who already live in the area.
Either way coal plants are shutting down. What we do with these toxic legacies is important. We can insulate local communities from economic shock while transitioning them to a cleaner future power grid if we simply try.
