Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy was on CNBC earlier and he said that when all the dust settles, coal will still be responsible for 30% of our power generation. He said that because of the fluctuating demands on the grid, power plants need to have physical fossil fuel on site. Why is that? Wouldn't a natural gas pipeline into the facility be able to supply any increase in demand? Doesn't make sense to me.
%% Many of them did just that.Looks like Mr Murray is more practical than Sir Richard Branson,a convicted + jailed tax evader, Mr Murray mentioned ............................................
A coal-fired powerplant consumes a slurry of powdered coal (and maybe limestone, water, O2, etc) in a 2-3 story cyclone. [pretty pictures here http://thermalscienceapplication.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/article.aspx?articleid=1469293 ] The ports by which fuel is injected would be akin to asking a diesel engine to burn octane instead. You'd be reworking *everything* from air/fuel mix to fire-brick liners to stack height to heat capture to....... let alone the fuel feeds.... Yow! It ends up to be a pretty big deal, might take a year or two, and at some point, you've got nothing left but pilings/footers and maybe a smokestack (and maybe not!)......
%% LOL Gasoline makes a a good wasp or hornet killer. Wait till dark, they nest by them, throw it on them + nest+ the fumes tend to be a real killer , 2.LOL-true.
Yeah, he's full of crap. Coal doesn't do fluctuating demand at all. It's pure baseload, it can take 12 hours just to start up or shut down a coal plant. If you use it to deal with fluctuations you have to have what they call spinning reserves, which is the plant essentially operating without producing power unless needed, which is expensive and generally stupid.... especially when more suitable resources like nat gas and hydro can spin up and down super fast, as well as demand response which can shed load in fractions of a second. There are gigawatts of all 3 of these already on the grid. Potentially there will be a bunch of battery storage available eventually as well, but that's not necessary, the three mature technologies I listed can deal with variability just fine. Not to mention that this whole "grid stability" bs is the fossil fuel red herring to try to justify stopping renewables. The fact is that even current forecasting can predict the majority of iso-wide supply fluctuations from renewables and deal with it using the regular day ahead, hour ahead... mechanisms they've used for years. And it's a bit disingenuous to insist on no supply variability when the grid has been able to deal with demand variability, which has exactly the same impact on the grid, since it's inception.