Free Republic

India produced a record amount of electricity from coal in October ... Coal remains fundamental to the country’s energy security ... India will depend on its mines and rail network to satisfy rapidly growing electricity demand and ensure reliability. Total electricity demand met increased by 24 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) (+21%) in October compared with the same month a year earlier. ... the electricity system turned to gas (1.6 billion kWh, +103%) and especially coal (28 billion kWh, +33%) to meet demand. Coal-fired generators produced a seasonal record of 111 billion kWh in October 2023 up from 84 billion kWh in...

Weather pundits on TV and even The Old Farmers Almanac are telling us key factors like Solar Cycle 25, El Nino, and a polar vortex moving south from the North Pole will combine to give most of the U.S. a colder and a much more snowy winter. Are we ready? Is the Biden administration ensuring our gas and coal-fired power plants are winterized and have enough fuel? Of course not. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a not-for-profit regulatory authority whose stated mission is "to assure the effective and efficient reduction of risks to the reliability and security of...

FONT SIZE: The Biden administration is set to back a plan that would crush the coal industry at the upcoming United Nations (UN) climate summit, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The U.S. will reportedly support a French plan to get the countries of the world to ban private financing of coal-fired power plants during the upcoming UN conference, known as COP28, according to Reuters. The plan is likely to drive a rift between countries like the U.S. and France and those like China and India, which are reliant on coal to feed their economies cheap and reliable electricity. The proposed plan...

The operator of a power grid in the mid-Atlantic is warning that the planned shutdown of a coal-fired power plant could disrupt and short-change electrical supply before people can replace it. PJM Interconnection, the company that manages wholesale electricity in parts or the entirety of 13 states and provides electricity for more than 65 million Americans, said that they expect the shutdown of the Brandon Shores coal power plant outside of Baltimore to disrupt the power there and leave it wanting. The plant's owner, Talen Energy, made a deal with the environmentalist group Sierra Club to deactivate it by 2025...

News of record installations of so-called renewable energy electric generation in China may have kindled the hopes of those supporting the "green" agenda and hostile to fossil fuels. However, China is in no position to give up hydrocarbons, particularly coal.During the first half of 2023, China approved 52 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power, which was more than all the approvals issued in 2021. These new approvals are in addition to the 136 GW of coal capacity that are already under construction. Together, these new plants represent more than 67% of all new approvals in the world. Why is China...

A 71-year-old investor who bought an old Wyoming coal mine sight-unseen for $2million has learned that it may contain $37 billion worth of 'rare earth' minerals. Randall Atkins, the CEO of Ramaco Rescources, bought the Brook Mine in Sheridan 12 years ago - but it wasn't until years later that researchers checked if the ground contained elements that are used for semiconductors, missiles and solar cells. He was shocked to find out that his mine may contain the largest rare-earth deposit in the United States - and the materials may be worth 18,500 times what he paid for the land....

American coal is rebounding! Yay. Enough of Unicorn Farts.

A cargo train derailed Sunday afternoon near Pueblo, Colorado, and spilled coal along the highway. According to Colorado State Patrol, it appeared the train derailed on a collapsed bridge at an overpass. Footage of the wreckage shows a semi-truck trapped beneath the overpass where the cargo train derailed. The derailment caused I-25 to close in both directions. Several agencies in Colorado reportedly are assisting with the cleanup. VIDEO AT LINK.............. “I 25 mile post 106 northbound and southbound near PUEBLO is closed due to train derailment. Expect extended closure in the area due to train cars and coal on the...

Prices at the pump remain on track to keep falling in the United States despite the Israel-Hamas war, according to energy industry analysts. After Hamas’ surprise attack over the weekend, global crude oil jumped to more than $87 a barrel by Monday, from below $83 late last week — roughly a 5% increase. Prices have since retreated, clocking in at $83.62 Wednesday morning. But Israel and its immediate neighbors aren’t major energy producers, so as long as the conflict doesn’t expand geographically, seasonal trends should continue much as they have for the last few weeks, said Tom Kloza, global head...

Forecourt fuel prices will increase from midnight tonight — adding €1.28 and €1.48 to the cost of a 60-liter fill of petrol and auto diesel respectively. There will be a €7.50 increase on the current rate of carbon tax that is applied per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions by carbon fuels. This will bring the carbon tax rate up to €56.00 per tonne. The increase in carbon tax will subsequently be applied to all other carbon fuels, including solid fuels and home heating oil, but not until 1 May 2024. It will add 90 cents to the cost of a...

Nearly 1 million coal jobs may be lost by 2050 in the wake of the coal industry’s expected closures, a new report found. That number excludes additional climate pledges to phase out coal. An estimated 990,200 global coal mining jobs will be shed by 2050, with nearly half a million, or 414,200, of these expected to be gone by 2035, according to a report from the Global Energy Monitor. Equal to an average of 100 layoffs per day, the projected cuts would lay off around 37 percent of its nearly 2.7 million person workforce by 2050. Analyzing 4,300 active and...

A country on the forefront of the green transition will put several mothballed coal-fired power plants back online ahead of the upcoming winter, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday. Germany, which has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to enact the green energy transition, will reactivate several coal-fired units in order to meet peak demand and keep the lights on this winter, Bloomberg reported. The country has experienced elevated and inconsistent energy prices since Russia invaded Ukraine, impacting both German customers and companies. The German government opted to go ahead with its plans to phase out its last nuclear reactors in April,...

Germany's cabinet on Wednesday approved putting on-reserve lignite-fired power plants back online from October until the end of March 2024, the economy ministry said, as a step to replace scarce natural gas this winter and avoid shortages. In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a sudden drop in Russian gas imports to Germany, Berlin reactivated coal-fired power plants and extended their lifespans, with a total output of 1.9 gigawatt hours generated last winter. Despite gas bottlenecks easing since last winter with new liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal deliveries, coal-fired power plans will be reactivated

India’s state power giant NTPC Ltd reported on Tuesday an 83% jump in coal production from the mines it operates in the first half of the 2023/24 fiscal year as India continues to rely on coal to meet most of its electricity demand. Coal still generates around 70% of the country’s electricity. NTPC, with a current installed power generation capacity from all sources of more than 73 gigawatts (GW), is the largest integrated power company. In the first half of the fiscal year 2023/2024, between April and September, NTPC also saw coal dispatch for the period soar by 94%, Indian...

Solar should be competing for sales in the marketplace, not for subsidies in Washington,' ... The Biden administration quietly issued a 59-page report outlining the current scope of federal energy-related subsidies revealed that the renewable energy sector enjoys significantly larger taxpayer backing than the fossil fuel industry. The report — authored by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) and published in August — represents the first of its kind since 2018. The EIA analyzed data from 2016 through 2022, and determined that, during that time period, the federal government doled out $183.3 billion in direct and mainly indirect...

Media mogul and failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is not letting up on his years-long obsession with putting the nails in the coffin on the U.S. coal industry. The Bloomberg News owner pledged another $500 million to “expand the Beyond Carbon campaign, one of the largest philanthropic efforts to fight the climate crisis in the U.S,” Bloomberg Philanthropies announced in a Sept. 20 press release. The intent is to “[f]inish the job on coal” by 2030, Bloomberg Philanthropies stated. The organization fanatically celebrated how “With 372 of 530 coal plants announced to retire or closed to date – more than...

A Harvard Law School alum has come forward to accuse Biden of plagiarizing an article he wrote more than two decades ago. Roger Severino .. was working .. at the Harvard Journal of Legislation in 2000 when he found multiple instances of copying in an essay Biden] had lifted language straight out of a [federal court] opinion, changed a couple words and called them his own. There were no quote marks and no footnote or anything else attributing the court as the source, ... When asked why he decided to come forward with the claims 23 years after the fact,...

On June 2, the U.S. Department of the Interior blocked oil and gas leasing for the next twenty years within a ten-mile radius of Chaco Canyon — the site of a Puebloan civilization in now-northern New Mexico dating back over a millennium. Despite some support from people within the Pueblo tribes and Navajo Nation which surround the land, the vast majority of Navajo leaders have opposed these drilling restrictions. It’s essential that climate advocates hear them out. Between high-profile cases of extractive industries seizing and polluting Indigenous land and the fact that climate change exacerbates the many environmental and economic...

German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia. One wind turbine has already been dismantled, with a further seven scheduled for removal to excavate an additional 15m to 20m tonnes of so-called ‘brown’ coal, the most polluting energy source. The demolitions are part of a deal brokered last year between Robert Habeck, the Green Party’s minister for economy and climate action and Mona Neubaur, who is the economy minister for North Rhine Westphalia, to allow the expansion...

Some analysts expect that existing grid capacity may be enough to power U.S. electric cars in the near future, yet they do not rule out the possibility of new coal or nuclear plants coming on line if renewable energy sources are not developed. Dear EarthTalk: Isn’t the interest in electric cars and plug-in hybrids going to spur increased reliance on coal as a power source? And is that really any better than gasoline/oil in terms of environmental impact? —Graham Rankin, via e-mail It’s true that the advent of electric cars is not necessarily a boon for the environment if it...