Free Republic

The power generation sector is looking at numerous ways to provide enough electricity to satisfy demand from data centers. Bloomberg Intelligence research shows data centers, buildings filled with servers and other computing equipment for data storage and networking that supports operations and artificial intelligence, could be responsible for as much as 17% of all U.S. electricity consumption by 2030. The U.S. Dept. of Energy has said one data center can require 50 times the electricity of a typical office building. Several technology groups are looking at nuclear power, including the use of small modular reactors, to meet their electricity needs....

Britain’s only remaining coal power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire will generate electricity for the last time on Monday after powering the UK for 57 years. The power plant will come to the end of its life in line with the government’s world-leading policy to phase out coal power which was first signalled almost a decade ago. The closure marks the end of Britain’s 142-year history of coal power use which began when the world’s first coal-fired power station, the Holborn Viaduct power station, began generating electricity in 1882. The shutdown has been hailed by green campaigners as a major...

There was an incident earlier this afternoon involving a contract employee near an ash landfill, located to the south of the Ray Nixon and Front Range Power Plants. We contract with this company to maintain our heavy equipment/large trucks that move material – such as ash and coal – at the site. The Colorado Springs Fire Department will lead the investigation effort. The contractor’s employee has been airlifted to Denver for medical treatment. We cannot speak to his condition at this time. While our focus is on the health of this individual, we can report to our community that the...

London’s High Court on Friday quashed a planning permission for the UK’s first new coal mine in three decades, ruling that the permit was unlawful as it hadn’t considered the emissions from burning the fuel. Earlier this year, climate campaigners, including Friends of the Earth, challenged the approval of the coal mining project. The UK’s previous Conservative government approved in December 2022 the Woodhouse Colliery project in Whitehaven, northwest England.. The project to mine metallurgical coal, the one used for steelmaking, will be required to support steelmaking.. However, the new Labour government in the UK pulled in July its support...

A bombshell report has found that Germany could have been more effective at reducing its carbon footprint while saving hundreds of billions of euros if it had invested in nuclear power rather than green energy projects. Leftist-run governments in Europe’s top economic powerhouse made a devastating error by transitioning away from nuclear power and focussing instead on so-called “renewable” sources of energy like wind and solar, industrial engineer Jan Emblemsvåg of the University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway has said according to German daily Welt. While nuclear energy accounted for around 30 per cent of Germany’s electricity in...

China's coal output rose to a six-month high in June, statistics bureau data showed on Monday, as mines ramped up production to meet seasonal demand ... The world's largest coal producer mined 405.38 million metric tons of the fuel last month, a 3.6% increase on the year and the highest since December ... Output will continue rising in the third quarter ... Output in the January-June period was 2.27 billion tons

Wind is quietly blowing away coal, when it comes to supplying electricity in the US.In April, wind power generated more electricity than coal for the second month in a row, according to the latest available data from the Energy Information Administration. Wind briefly surpassed coal once before in April last year, but this time it’s by a much larger margin and for two consecutive months. Renewable energy production has been ticking up for years but only recently have fuels like wind and solar approached the ballpark of fossil fuels and nuclear power. Last year renewables made up 21% of electricity...

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been chipping away at the oil, gas and coal industries ever since President Joe Biden took office. Wyoming is an energy state that produces half the nation’s coal, as well as part of its oil and gas output. Since the federal government owns nearly half the state’s land, virtually all oil, gas and coal operations in the Cowboy State are heavily impacted by every rule the BLM throws at fossil fuels. Although the Biden administration is waging war on fossil fuels, Wyoming is fighting back. The state, along with Utah, filed a lawsuit...

The Biden Administration is determined to limit America’s production of fossil fuels, of which we have the largest supply in the world. This will transition us from a position of energy independence, and potentially energy dominance, into a position of subservience to the Chinese Communist Party, on which we will depend for the vast quantities of materials that are needed for wind turbines, solar panels and batteries–which we will not be allowed to mine here. If this plan isn’t outright treasonous, it is possibly the stupidest program ever carried out by a government in world history. The stated rationale for...

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon said the latest Bureau of Land Management proposal is the agency’s determination that coal leasing in the Powder River Basin will not be permitted past 2041. The BLM’s final supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) and proposed amendment to its Buffalo Field Office land use plan selects the “no leasing” alternative in the Buffalo Coal Resource Management Plan Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. Release of the final SEIS and proposed amendment opens a 30-day public protest period. Gordon said the decision is part of Biden’s “partisan, vindictive, and politically motivated war on America’s abundant, cheap, efficient, and consistent...

When are we going to run out of energy? You don’t hear that as much as you used to, since Those Who Know Best are working to plug up all our energy sources anyway. Most energy sources put out carbon dioxide, and that’s going to make all the plants grow and devour us all, or it will heat the planet up and make Minneapolis a desert — and we’ll all fry. Or something. But we don’t hear much any more about running out of energy. What do the experts say about it? “According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA)...

Democrat Climate Change Cult: Ban Everything! Ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) nations have agreed to eliminate all coal-fired power plants by 2035. The countries that are members of the Group of Seven (G7) are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as the European Union. This declaration was made by Andrew Bowie, a UK minister at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, during an interview in Turing, Italy. “We do have an agreement to phase out coal in the first half of the 2030s,” Bowie said. “This is, by...

The Biden Administration’s regulations are coming so fast and furious that it’s hard even to keep track, but we’re trying. On Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency proposed its latest doozy—rules that will effectively force coal plants to shut down while banning new natural-gas plants. “With the announcement today, the power sector can make planning decisions with a full array of information,” EPA’s press release declares. Translation: Get moving with the green-energy transition because we’re determined to eliminate fossil-fuel power. Barack Obama’s regulation spurred a wave of coal plant closures. Now President Biden is trying to finish the job by tightening...

On Thursday, Biden's Environmental Protection Agency announced a new set of rules aimed at reducing pollution from natural gas and coal-fired power plants by 90 percent by 2039. About 42,000 Americans work in the coal industry. Under the regulations, the nation's 200 or so coal-fired power plants will be forced to abide by strict new emissions standards unless they stop burning coal within ten years, in which case they will be allowed to follow the less stringent existing standards. According to the rules, a "new compliance path" for coal-fired power plants means they "will be able to continue meeting existing...

The Biden administration on Thursday placed the final cornerstone of its plan to tackle climate change: a regulation that would force the nation’s coal-fired power plants to virtually eliminate the planet-warming pollution they release into the air or shut down. The regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency requires coal plants in the United States to reduce 90% of their greenhouse pollution by 2039, one year earlier than the agency had initially proposed. The compressed timeline was welcomed by climate activists but condemned by coal executives who said the new standards would be impossible to meet... Taken together, the regulations could...

On Thursday’s broadcast of “NewsNation Now,” White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi denied that the Biden administration is attempting to shut down the coal industry or slow any industry down, and stated that the issue is “about how do we speed up to a stronger economy, a more durable economy, and one that, frankly, puts less pollution into the sky?” Host Connell McShane asked, “[C]oal executives, for the most part, are coming out and saying this — we can’t meet this. So, the real goal here is to kind of shut our industry down. Is that what’s happening?” Zaidi...

The Port of Baltimore is “closed until further notice” following the Francis Scott Key Bridge tragedy, sending several industries into disarray and jeopardizing national security. In 2023, the port handled a record amount of international cargo, ranked ninth for both dollar value and tonnage in the United States. Vital for both imports and exports of a variety of commodities, the Port of Baltimore has always had international significance and the impact of its closure will be wide-ranging and long-term for the supply chain in the United States and beyond. Given the seriousness of this issue, Congress must come together to...

Over four years ago, someone sent me a November 2019 Huffington Post article titled “Coal Knew, Too” by Élan Young, a writer for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of (UTK). The story, remarkably, also promptly appeared in Mother Jones, the UK’s Daily Mail, and even in an article from the Kent Law School. We were told that the Department head, Chris Cherry, “accidentally discovered what is, so far, the earliest known evidence of the coal industry acknowledging its awareness of the impending climate crisis”. The supposed “confession”, which fit nicely into an ongoing activist litigation...

The final coal-fired power plants in New England are slated to shutter in the coming years, making it the second region to phase out the energy source that powered the U.S. economy for decades.

Poland’s top climate official said the country is preparing to set a date for a complete phase-out of coal-fired power generation, just months after the nation elected a new government that has pledged to support environmental policies of the European Union (EU). ... Poland, which currently receives about 70% of its electricity from burning coal, and has long been Europe’s largest producer of the fuel, has been slowly increasing its use of solar and wind power. ... Urszula Zielinska, the country’s Secretary of State for Climate, during a meeting in Brussels, Belgium on Jan. 15, said, “Only with an end...