I thought you might find the graph at top of this page depicting coal consumption by sector eye-opening. As you can see burning coal to produce electricity only really took off after 1960. If you’re curious about what the situation looks like globally, I’m happy to oblige:
Wow and the peak looks like 2009. I would have guessed it would have been much earlier.
Had another solar salesperson here today. Even with a new 26% subsidy it only makes economic sense if you plan to stay in the house for more than 10 years and assume electricity prices will increase.
A new coal mine has been permitted a little over a hundred miles south of Dave. This link states that the top three recipients of U.S. coal exports are India, China and Japan.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-coal-shipments-to-china-surge-more-than-30-fold-amid-australian-trade-dispute-66154595
It remains the case that the U. S. is the “Saudi Arabia of coal” with about a quarter of the world’s proven reserves of mineable coal. India, China, and Japan are pretty dependent on coal and the big jump in global coal usage in the graph above can largely be explained by China.
In the second chart, “industry” must mean “electricity.”
“…the big jump in global coal usage in the graph above can largely be explained by China.”
Heh. Yeah. Manufacturing has that pesky problem of being energy intensive. Just sayin’. Joe ain’t listening. The country and its people will suffer.
“Even with a new 26% subsidy it only makes economic sense if you plan to stay in the house for more than 10 years and assume electricity prices will increase.”
In the trade, what Andy points out in his economic calculations is known as renewables are “dilute energy sources.” That is, they inherently have a bad input output energy ratio. If you have any sort of engineering acumen or mentality its pretty much a pencils down moment. For sure, incremental but marginal improvements will occur, which is the kind of thing steve – looking at everything through a political lens – yammers on about. But even if fundamental, leapfrog (and rare) improvements in efficiency occur you still need a lot of inputs to harness a reasonable output. And those inputs will be geographically constrained. As such solar and wind will remain niche contributors for as long as anyone here is alive.
People can talk until they are blue in the face, but if you have an issue with fossil fuels you must be a supporter of nuclear. Else you are just pissing in the wind.
One of the things lost on many is that there is no Moore’s Law governing energy storage.
Drew,
In my case, I live in Colorado with much more sunshine than average. Solar does well here generally. But in my particular case, our heat and hot water come from natural gas. And our electrical use for air conditioning in the summer is not great since we’re at a higher altitude and get by most days with a whole house fan.
So in general, our electricity usage is small which makes the investment in solar not worth it. And electricity is also cheaper here for a variety of factors. Things would be different if we had electric heat and hot water, lived down in the valley where the summers are much hotter, and had higher electricity prices.
The number of oil wells jumped from about 270,000 to over 500,000 from 2000 to 2010. Nat gas prices peaked in 2005 and 2009 then dropped. If I had to guess I would expect that influenced coal use.
Steve
Steam driven turbine generators can switch between the two so they do based on price.
Soon they will need to pencil in carbon taxes as well upending production plans to satisfy the Green Preening Queens at the DOE.
In the’70’s the newspapers gave us a daily body count one hot summer of elderly Chicago apartment dwellers without air conditioning.
History may repeat, if you don’t pay the energy bills they eventually shut it off.