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Bob Bingham Blog page.

A series of opinion pieces on, mostly climate change and related subjects to do with New Zealand.

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How cheap is coal as a fuel?

14/9/2014

4 Comments

 
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A few weeks ago we had a steam pipe burst at our local geothermal plant and it took some time to get it fixed because nobody was on duty at the plant.
 Nobody was on duty! The plant is operated from a control centre 30K away 
The geothermal generators were supplying us with electricity and the fact that nobody was there illustrates the low running costs of geothermal compared to coal. 

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Power stations powered by coal are very powerful and a relatively large one running at its normal 50% of rated capacity would be burning about 5000 tons of coal a day. If you take the operating costs over twenty years with the coal mine, railway, engineers servicing boilers and general maintenance costs its an expensive beast to run.

The coal consumption of 5000 tons a day is producing 15,000 tons of CO2 and other pollutants a day and despite 30 years of talking about carbon capture it has not been achieved. The simple reason is that it is far too expensive to achieve and coal is only cheap as long as you vent the pollution to the atmosphere for free.


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Another cost of burning coal is the health of the miners. 
Nobody goes into mining as a lifestyle choice as it is a dirty, dangerous, health destroying occupation and much of the heath costs are taken by the state and paid for out of taxes.

Wind generation, hydro, geothermal and solar all have their energy supplied by nature so that over a few years, when the capital construction cost are covered the cost of the electricity tumbles.
If all the miners were re-employed erecting and installing wind generators and solar panels the miners would have a heathier and more fulfilling life and we would have cheaper electricity.

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CO2 in the atmosphere has climbed from a normal maximum of 280 parts per million to the current 400 ppm. A level we have not seen on this planet for 3.5 million years. In that period there was a completely different environment with temperatures 3C warmer, sea levels 12 metres higher and higher levels of ocean acidity in the oceans. A world in which today's plants and animals were not designed to live.  
We need to stop burning coal urgently and build up out renewable electricity capacity and ultimately convert our transport to electricity.



4 Comments
Robert Bristow
17/9/2014 02:30:09 am

Amazed to hear a geothermal station runs unmanned, good for the operating budget I guess, I agree with your statement about transport and hope a N.Z government will lead by example (with the crown fleet being replaced with EV's), the Conservative Leadership is doing this in the U.K.

I attach a recent article about a 100% renewable grid that has been activated in Europe recently (using battery storage, rather than fossil burning as a backup).

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/09/16/first-100-green-grid-online-figuratively-speaking/

Reply
Bob Bingham
20/9/2014 06:03:08 am

Hello Bob. Just looked at the WEMAG battery system, Very impressive. The Germans are miles ahead of the rest of the world on this.

Reply
Robert Bristow
17/9/2014 04:17:58 am

On the subject of miners health I just read that "Black Lung" among coal miners in the US is at a 40 year high, time to retire this fossil from our energy menu.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/16/3568204/black-lung-levels-surge/

Reply
Bob Bingham
20/9/2014 06:40:21 am

W have recently had a coal mining disaster in which 26 miners died. The cost in lives and tragedy does not appear on the electricity bill.

Reply



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    Bob Bingham 

    Occasional blog posts on topical news items concerning the climate.  Please click the RSS feed to receive updates.

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