The End Of Coal

I've mentioned before how much better off SMUD is in our quest for "renewable this" and "renewable that," particularly when you look at Los Angeles with 40% of their energy provided by out of state coal fired generation. Cap and trade, carbon offsets, carbon sequestration, climate change, NOX emissions, sulfuric rain, all of that horseshit -- coal is a nightstick up LA's green ass.

Villaraigosa announced the End of Coal last week for Los Angeles by 2020. Within the span of eleven years, eleven! the city will phase in a wholesale swap out of 2000 MW of clean(er) capacity.

A city whose identity revolves around the automobile, a city whose NIMBYfied residents refuse to site power plants anywhere near them, a city whose name is synonymous with excess -- they're gonna go green in eleven years? Wa-hey!

Remember Al Gore's chant last year about 100% renewables in 10 years? Well, we're 10% the way through his timeline and 0.00864% closer to that goal. Remember every president's tagline since 1973 about reducing our dependency on foreign oil? Now some thirty six years into it we're more dependent now than we've ever been.

This is greenwashing, pure and simple. These statements are made, the mayor gets PR value, and he'll be long out of office by the time his predecessors get to make the same statement while no real efforts have been undertaken.

Edit: I could have continued this idea on my ALT.energy post, but another thing that conventional generation provides (and PV doesn't) is inertia. Hydroelectric power is the king of inertia because there's such a huge chunk of rotating steel and copper; inertia to absorb and provide power in the event of a system disturbance. If a transmission fault occurs there's a huge amount of energy in that rotating mass that allows the grid to ride through power swings. If the system can't ride these through it'll break apart into pieces; virtually every major blackout owes its condition to system instability.

Get rid of the IPP and Najavo coal plants and you reduce system inertia. This has to be engineered back into the grid. I'm not suggesting that we can't do it, but my point is that there's more to it than just slapping up 56,004 rooftop PV systems and that's that. What, you think Angelenos are going to allow a gigantic flywheel to be built anywhere near them?