I would assume that is using consumer retail prices, not wholesale prices that utilities pay. No shelled corn, wood pellets, firewood, kerosene, resistance heat, or heat pump power generators.
But Coal Power can't be flexible
- Thread starter Shannow
- Start date
Yes True. NG, Propane, Electricity, Kero adjusted for Central NC rates from PNG, Duke Energy, tractor supply. Kero just a guestimate. Tractor supply is cheapest for propane 20 - 100lb rate since Cotsco stopped. Offseason for distributor should best that.
Example chart coal cost based on price of $ 200/ton and according to data site https://www.statista.com/. Power companies in 2023 paid $47.50/ton, According to an AI bot I use power companies pay a typical range for Natural Gas:
$0.20 to $0.60 per therm. The chart is based on what PNG charges retail after all surcharges & taxes 1.97/therm currently.
It would be wise to maintain fuel supply options particularly coal for electrical generation. Regardless society will reap what we are led to believe as to what is 'really' best industrial grade fuel for power generation.
Hopefully Nuclear will get vetted and integrated on a larger scale than we now have. My power from Duke/Progress is up to 14.7 cents per killowat after adding all renewable riders and taxes etcc..
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We have lignite in Texas too. In fact there's a lignite mine about an hour from my residence, between Taylor and Lexington, TX.
The ERCOT grid conditions page lumps coal and lignite together into a single production category. I've never really looked into the ins and outs of lignite, interesting how you characterize it.
As a lifer in the power industry, lumping them together irks me...they are the same thing, millions of years apart.
in our fleet, we've got black coal (in the article), and brown coal in another station in another state.
Black coal seams are 2-3m thick, black, very hard, high energy content, 8-10% moisture, and 25% ash....there's better coal, but that goes on boats to other countries.
Brown coal seam is 20-30m thick, 2-3% ash, 60% moisture, and quite soft/friable...and sometime has tree stumps.
Alberta has converted all their coal plants to natural gas but the plants themselves are near open pit mines, some totally deep but some shallow and covering thousands of acres. I keep wondering if some day Mad Max comes by and sees the villains producing electricity from rudimentary steam generators once all the natural gas got depleted. By the way, Mel Gibson's house burned down. 
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Proud to work at a mine that produces 12-15 million tons of the stuff annually. If we won't burn it here other countries sure will. 80% of our coal is export
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Yes, China burns absolutely insane amounts of it. Much of it is mine-to-mouth to produce solar panels.
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A majority of our coal goes to India and Indonesia. Our coal can be used for steam or met
4WD
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There was an interesting exchange during one of the advise n consents regarding China and coal plants
Pretty wild how we export our natural resources to a country then import a finished product they made with our coal.
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Yes, Indonesia. Our company let's us see where ships from our harbor are destined for. Dont forget we are mining a higher grade coal then they do in Asia
Interesting. Indonesia does not show up in the top ten but there is this interesting screen shot about the trade in coal briquettes.
Of course the modern issue is not so much the NOx and sulphur compounds the scrubbers worked on but simply the CO2.
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There is really no reason to use coal anywhere natural gas is cheap and abundant, such as in North America.
Pretty wild how we export our "dirty" natural resources to a country then pay China for being a "developing nation" when they're using 84% more energy annually than we are.
The highest grade coal is still used for heating and cooking in some developing countries, especially outside the cities where services are limited. Coal is easy to store, easy to transport.
It's not an availability problem, it's a transportation problem.
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Not really, in comparison to the extensive and intractable environmental problems with coal.
