30Jan

DOE Fossil Head: New US Coal Plants ‘Quite Possible’

Via Utility Dive: Winberg’s Monday comments reflect a broad campaign at the Department of Energy to revive domestic coal generation, which has been battered by competition from natural gas and renewable resources. Late last year, DOE launched the Coal FIRST (Flexible, Innovative, Resilient, Small and Transformative) initiative, which seeks to design smaller, more flexible coal plants. This […]
30Jan

Rick Perry Braces for Outages from the Polar Vortex

Via The Washington Examiner:  Energy Secretary Rick Perry spoke with top energy security officials Tuesday as a deep freeze gripped the eastern half of the United States. Perry tweeted that he received an update from Karen Evans, the assistant secretary of the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, known as CESER, on the […]
24Jan

Balancing the Grid and Reducing Emissions with Advanced Coal Technology

Preserving the fuel diversity and affordability of our power supply while also reducing emissions is not only smart energy policy, it’s a tall order. It’s a challenge not unlike walking a tight rope, and current trends suggest we are losing our balance. The loss of fuel-secure baseload sources of power and our growing overreliance on […]
18Jan

New York’s Plan to Kill Coal Is Already Boosting Power Prices

Via Bloomberg:  New York’s plan to put the state’s last coal-fired power plants out of business hasn’t even been approved yet and electricity is already trading like they’re shut. The price of power in 2021 in New York City and other regions surged more than 30 percent beginning in May. The only major difference between […]
16Jan

Better for Consumers? Hardly.

Baseload power plant retirements continue at an alarming pace. Plant operators retired 14,000 megawatts of coal generation in 2018, enough generating capacity to power about 10 million homes. Nearly 40 percent of the U.S. coal fleet has been forced into early retirement since 2010 and a third of the commercial U.S. nuclear fleet is in […]
10Jan

Coal Enters a New Era in 2019

Via TheSourthern.com: For those who follow energy policy in the United States, these are intriguing times. A number of significant changes are under way, with natural gas occupying a newfound prominence in electricity generation. Some older coal plants are being retired, too. And more utilities are exploring wind and solar even as nuclear power continues […]
09Jan

Reversing the Anti-Coal Supertanker

If anyone has ever told you, “it’s like turning a supertanker,” you know the task at hand isn’t going to be easy. The analogy beautifully captures the immense challenge of reversing momentum. For all the energy required to get that proverbial supertanker moving, it can be doubly difficult and slow to change its course. Reversing […]
09Jan

Be Cautious with Funding of Black Lung Trust: Coal Industry at Stake

Your recent editorial misrepresents both the coal industry and the state of benefits for American miners. Handled incorrectly, future funding for the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund could do unintended damage to coal country. It’s a mistake we should be careful not to make. The mining industry pays taxes into the Trust Fund through an […]
04Jan

The Ongoing Struggle to Correct the Damage of Government Overreach

It wasn’t all that long ago that coal fueled more than half of the nation’s electricity generation. Coal’s retreat from that position hasn’t come by accident, nor has it come without consequences. While some pundits have pointed to the marketplace as the cause of coal’s slide, that’s a convenient tale that barely hints at the […]
02Jan

PJM Delineates the Value of Coal in America

Via Real Clear Energy: Serving 13 states and Washington, D.C. (a total of 65 million people), the PJM Interconnection recently concluded that serious problems could arise in five years under a scenario where the rapid, large-scale closures of coal and nuclear plants (baseload 24/7 sources) are exposed by fuel supply issues and an extreme weather event, such as […]