Posted on 09/24/2020 7:42:09 PM PDT by buckalfa
Commentary:
The largest electric utility in West Virginia has entered into an agreement with an environmental group that coal industry officials fear could lead to the shutdown of two major coal-fired power plants in the state.
Under the agreement between the Sierra Club and Appalachian Power, the utility will conduct “retirement analyses” for the John Amos power plant at Winfield and the Mountaineer power plant near New Haven.
Appalachian Power serves 465,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in the state, and those two power plants provide about 70 percent of the power generated by the utility in West Virginia.
Jeri Matheney, Appalachian Power’s director of communications, said possible early retirement “will be one of the many scenarios evaluated. We’re not seeking to retire the plants early, but we are committed to evaluating their economic viability in light of prevailing and forecasted market conditions.”
Appalachian Power is a huge coal customer. Together the two plants burn about 7.7 million tons of coal a year. Matheney does not believe the agreement will impact coal production in the state. However, West Virginia Coal Association senior vice president Chris Hamilton disagrees.
It is “alarming to learn of one of the state’s major utilities to be in negotiations with a national environmental group, the Sierra Club of all people, over the possible shutdown of two major coal-fired power plants,” he said.
“The economic value of these plants is of vital importance to our state’s economy,” Hamilton said, “and collectively they account for thousands of state jobs and keep dozens of surrounding cities and counties vibrant.”
The agreement falls in line with the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign to move the country away from the carbon-producing fossil fuel. Pablo Willis, associate press secretary for the Sierra Club, said whether the plants close early—both are now scheduled for retirement in 2040—will depend on the utility’s study.
“The retirement analysis will take into account all future costs/expenses for those plants and will look at all reasonable options for replacement of the coal plants with clean energy alternatives such as solar or battery storage,” Willis told me. The analysis is due in 2022.
Appalachian is already broadening its power generation portfolio to include more alternative fuels. Earlier this year the utility asked for bids to construct a solar power plant in West Virginia capable of generating up to 50 megawatts of electricity.
Matheney said the deal with the Sierra Club is not related to that shift. “While Appalachian Power is committed to gradually introducing more renewables as part of diversifying our generation mix, this agreement is completely separate from that goal.”
However, Appalachian, which has 532,000 customers in Virginia, is feeling pressure from the Commonwealth. The Virginia Clean Economy Act, which took effect July 1, will require Appalachian to produce 100 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2050.
Appalachian Power said that to meet that requirement, “the company will rely less and less on its coal fleet.”
The coal industry is struggling mightily. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that President Trump has not been able to bring back coal as he promised. “As mines and power plants continue to close, the question many are asking in the diminishing American coal industry is—what now?”
Clearly that is on the minds of West Virginians who depend on the coal industry. The Appalachian Power-Sierra Club agreement is a harbinger of more difficult times ahead.
The Sierra Club’s costly litigation killed 40 % of the High Sierra Pine trees, and now their lawfare has destroyed 5 million acres of low Sierra forests as well as burned 3 towns and over a hundred people to death.
Guess their work in California is done...
The enemy must be defeated, not signed a truce with.
It is only bleak, because the billionaire set wants to own coal. Once they do, tgen and suddenly, coal will become the next miracle fuel.
A quick web search indicates the capacity of the two coal plants in question are 2933 and 1300 Megawatts, respectively. It will be economically impossible to replace those plants with wind and solar - the high cost of grid improvements, massive back-up capacity needed, low energy density, and limited productive life of windmills and solar panels make it so.
Fools.
The Sierra Club screwed California.
Australia’s so-called Conservative Coalition govt - which won the pollsters’ unwinnable election in 2019 - won because of coal votes in the State of Queensland. now they have turned their back on cheap coal (for Australians) in favour of what, on the East Coast of Australia, is very expensive gas.
already, it seems, an aluminium smelter will shut down. manufacturing in Australia employed around 30 percent of the workforce in the 60s; that is now down to about 5.5 percent...and will only go lower.
the destruction of the economies of Western nations continues.
Sheridan is a senior writer at The Australian:
24 Sept: The Australian: Australia’s great and costly retreat from coal
by Greg Sheridan, foreign editor
The biggest story of the moment, the biggest structural change in our politics, is that the Morrison government has admitted comprehensive and probably permanent defeat on coal. It seems like a different era in history when Scott Morrison as treasurer proudly brandished a lump of coal in parliament to demonstrate his party’s commitment to our black gold.
Still the largest source of our power, still our second biggest export, coal has been placed in the Coalition’s fantasy technology basket, to be revisited one day in the mythical future when renewables don’t need subsidies, pumped hydro creates more energy than it consumes, China’s carbon market comes into operation, and Australia wins soccer’s World Cup 6-0 against Brazil.
The new lowest common denominator on coal is we continue to export it but there are no circumstances in which we build a coal-fired power station. This is how conservative governments embrace long-term strategic defeat. They win a thousand tactical victories as they march backwards. The Coalition has lost the coal argument. It came into office in 2013 never dreaming it would abandon coal, but that is what it has done.
Labor and the Greens have won the argument even as they have lost the elections. The conservatives — meaning the Liberals and the Nationals — have accepted defeat...
The abandonment of coal has serious strategic implications for Australia. We will never recover a robust manufacturing industry without cheap energy and we won’t have cheap energy without coal...
Don’t think that in abandoning coal-fired power we are reflecting a global trend. The only people who think that are those whose globalism embraces New York and Los Angeles, London and Paris, and almost no other part of the world. This year Germany has opened a new coal-fired power plant. Japan has 20-odd in the works over the next five years...
Ultra-supercritical coal-fired plants — the so-called high-efficiency, low-emissions plants — create about 30 per cent fewer emissions than old coal and a similar amount more than new gas. Such plants are being built in many parts of the world. It is a crazy woke fantasy to think coal is being phased out. Such thinking reflects a spectacular ignorance of Asia...
Not the only story about coal but by far the biggest is China. The Asia Society’s Policy Institute in New York has rounded up the figures in an extremely useful paper, China’s Response to Climate Change. Almost every climate commentator in Australia refuses ever to confront the China figures. Let me offer you a few of them.
This year alone China has approved new coal-fired power plants that can produce 17 gigawatts of energy. That is a huge capacity. And China is accelerating its approval and construction of coal-fired power plants, for that is more than it approved in the previous two years...
The Asia Society records that China has 1040GW of coal-fired energy capacity, but this will be 1100GW by the end of the year. The China Electricity Council and the China State Grid both suggest raising this to 1300GW by 2030...
The report also demonstrates the massive increase in coal, and other fossil fuel use, taking place as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative. Specifically, Chinese finance and support is involved directly in new coal-fired power plants in The Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mozambique, Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Serbia. Beyond China, Indonesia has a huge program of coal-fired power plants being built. Before COVID-19 knocked everything off balance, India was planning to increase its coal-fired electricity generation by almost a quarter over three years...
What is clear is that coal is booming in most parts of the world not ruled by The New York Times or the BBC...
In the West coal is moving away from public companies and into private equity hands, or into Asian investments directly...
UN projections are that Africa’s population will increase to 4.5 billion by the end of this century. If any of them want to live above subsistence level they will need cheap energy. Coal is sure to play a big part...
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/australias-great-and-costly-retreat-from-coal/news-story/5e4f7457d48d07c89425cd77c812f80c
23 Sept: Quadrant Australia: Turning Kids’ Grey Matter a Mushy Green
by Tony Thomas
Australian schools in the past decade have forced literally millions of kids to watch Al Gore’s error-riddled propaganda movie, An Inconvenient Truth. In 2007 an outraged English truck driver and parent took the education minister to the High Court in 2007 over the film’s gross inaccuracies, with Justice Burton ordering UK teachers must not show it without first warning kids it is politically partisan and contains nine significant errors (LINK).
No such mandatory warnings have accompanied Australian screenings. The Australian Academy of Science, our supposed bulwark against science misinformation, has made no objection to the brainwashing, although its president rushed to condemn a sceptic equivalent film in 2007.
The propaganda cycle is now being repeated. Kids in class are being drenched with Damon Gameau’s saccharine documentary 2040 about purported solutions to a purported climate crisis. The film doesn’t actually tell kids, “Vote Green”, but it calls for strong new political leadership.
Pushing the film into classrooms is Cool Australia, which has provided teachers with at least 32 ready-to-use lessons based on the documentary. The film is backed and part-funded by bedfellows, the Australian and Victorian governments.
Gameau reveals his inner Zeitgeist in interviews, which include an urge to re-shape our democratic ways. He imagines a “shift from a society built upon industry to a life-sustaining civilisation” which he called “The Great Turning”. As he spoke at Byron Bay (where else?) a year ago, a certain Olivia Rosebery “boldly stood in the audience” and sang her own song, ‘No more need for greed and hunger if we respect the Mother’s ways.’”...
As a documentary, his 2040 would normally be laughed away, but played in class to susceptible kids from about age 6 upwards, it’s pernicious. He’s also happy to do speeches on how to save the planet. But, “Please note that a speaker fee will be applicable.”...
Few parents know that Education Departments around Australia have farmed out much of their kids’ schooling to green/Left lobbies. The most significant is Cool Australia, operating in 8400 primary and secondary schools — 90 per cent of all schools. Nearly half our teachers use the lessons, downloading them 2.1 million of them last year...
Its agenda is anti-capitalism, anti-growth, and anti-coal, gas and petroleum. It’s pro the re-writing of the Constitution for the benefit of the Aboriginal industry, and watering down our Western heritage in favor of a licorice allsorts multi-culturalism. Cool Australia’s CEO and founder, Jason Kimberley, boasts how Cool turns kids into green activists, whether or not they’ve yet learnt to tie their shoelaces...
While most of Cool Australia’s ready-to-use topics are innocuous or praiseworthy, recall that the Antifa and BLM mobs now torching US cities are “mostly peaceful”. Our kids are lining up as Greens cadets, demanding “zero carbon” and the up-ending of two centuries of capitalist progress. Another example is Cool Australia’s foisting the anarchism of dark-green Canadian raver Naomi Klein onto teens and pre-teens.
I’ve been documenting Cool Australia’s work for half a decade (here, here, here) and have noticed how the organisation has ratcheted up in the past year by pushing into classes a barking-mad climate “documentary” called 2040...
Below is a sample of what taxpayers got for their money.
VIDEO TRAILER
The Cool Australia charity was founded in 2008 by Just Jeans heir[v] and climate alarmist Jason Kimberley, now teamed with leftist warriors including WWF, Earth Hour and the Human Rights Commission, and titans like Google, Atlassian and Foxtel (MURDOCH)...
Cool Australia’s surveys show that after absorbing its materials, 70 to 80 per cent of kids adopt its positions, change their behaviour towards social and environmental issues, and are ready “to take action”...
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/09/turning-kids-grey-matter-a-mushy-green/
NO! makes no sense at all! I worked for the parent company of Appalachian Power for 40 years. My regional subsidiary has only one combined cycle and one coal-fired plant currently running. They’re BUYING gas and wind generation, and my bill is through the roof.
Look, I agree, coal needs to be phased out, but not by wind and especially not by solar.
Combined cycle is the answer.
The Sierra Club has been busy at work causing Washington state forests to burn down.
Welcome to West Virginiafornia.
Undoubtedly passed by Northam and his Chicomm-bought legislators during the time when people couldn't testify due to COVID regulations.
I don’t trust the Sierra Club after what they did to California. They getting funding from the Democracy Alliance and The Tides Foundation both of which get funding from Soros. Bloomberg also funds them. There are also rumors they got funding from a Russia’s state owned oil company. WV really should look into who is funding them.
Democrats selling out the working Americans, miners and truckers and equipment makers, AGAIN. Sen. MANCHIN (D-W.VA), turncoat to the working class, and our Dems who are ruining Virginia are just one “Benedict Arnold Award” behind him.
Soros connected, he really needs to be room temperature
That means they’ll have to go to natural gas which requires more pipelines which the environmentalists don’t like either. Getting new pipelines through the permitting and ensuing lawsuits is not exactly impossible. The issue is how drawn out the process is.
Replacing the two power plants would require at least eight of GE’s biggest combustion turbines.
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