
L.A. is finally ditching coal – and replacing it with another polluting fuel - rschnalzer
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-utah-coal-los-angeles-climate-20190711-story.html
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prepend
Better headline is “LA is reducing carbon output by 50% by replacing coal
electricity production with natural gas.”

It will be funny when the switch from natural gas to solar in twenty years has
a headline of “LA is finally ditching natural gas - and replacing it with
another polluting fuel.”

~~~
ajross
Yes, but there's both a battle and a war afoot. In isolation, replacing coal
with gas is a win, but LA:

1\. Has a political base willing to tolerate more cost than a mere gas plant.

2\. Is comparatively wealthy and thus has the budget for a more expensive
option.

3\. Is in a renewables dream zone: mildest climate of any large city (i.e.
smallest daily and seasonal usage swings), clear skies almost year round and
steady ocean winds blowing over coastal ridge lines.

The thinking to an activist is that LA needs to be doing more, because let's
be honest: there are other local governments in the US who will be doing
_less_ simply because of political affiliation. And I think that's exactly
right.

~~~
kevin_b_er
That's mostly because said political base doesn't know where the power comes
from until they hear about it. Check out stacked bar graph further down. LA is
30% renewable, 31% natural gas, 18% coal, and 21% something else in 2017.

So they're still getting 49% from fossil fuels.

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epistasis
This is a terribly depressing article, in that it was written with a 2005
mindset, before the astonishing breakthrough in pricing for wind, solar, and
storage over the past 15 years.

The irrational attachment to "hard energy," the thermally generates forms, has
been dripping away quickly for most of the energy sector as economics are
making it less feasible.

The LADWP seems to be a small pocket of backward thinking, however. I just
heard about them for the first time yesterday as part of a petty political
squabble with the mayor, in television advertisements that decry green energy.

------
niftich
Good reporting. A few more points:

1\. In the famous California power mix charts, 'Other' includes power bought
from different utilities where the exact generating method is abstracted away.
You can mentally think of the 'Other' as 'Unsure'.

2\. Intermountain's conversion to natgas has been long rumored, facing both
regulatory pressure, environmental pressure, and infrastructure
considerations. Large amounts of natgas is already piped through the Kern
River Pipeline in this corridor, going to Nevada and California from the Opal
hub in Wyoming. This is where Southern Nevada gets most of its electricity --
through natgas power plants alongside I-15.

3\. There is a project called TransWest Express [1], to build a HVDC
transmission line from Wyoming to Las Vegas to carry wind power from Wyoming
to markets in the Southwest. This will run immediately parallel to the
existing Intermountain HVDC line for much of their overlap, and no connection
is planned at the Intermountain Power Plant (the latter line's origin) or
anywhere else between the two for now. Vegas is presumably the destination for
TransWest Express because it's a power exchange hub for many electricity
suppliers and consuming utilities, but the overall effect is still a bit
silly, because most of the power exchanged at the Vegas hub flows towards
Southern California anyway on existing AC lines. One might imagine a different
scenario where the Intermountain line gets split in two at Vegas, TransWest
express only builds the "missing portion" between Wyoming and Intermountain
Power Plant, and then there's an available chain of HVDC lines to ship power
between 4 key interchange nodes...

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16452926#16454026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16452926#16454026)

------
dsfyu404ed
Yes, gas still outputs CO2 but it's sooooooo much cleaner than coal in terms
of everything else (and it's also cleaner in terms of CO2 per watt) that this
seems like a solid win considering the lifetime over which power plants exist.
It's not like this will be here for 100yr, they will get to choose what to
replace it with in 50yr or less at which time we'll hopefully have good enough
storage to replace the capacity of the gas plant with something greener.

~~~
dmix
That still doesn’t explain why LA finds it necessary to shut down the natural
gas facilities in their state while investing in one in Utah. Which is the
real story here.

~~~
prepend
Same reason why they ran a coal plant for so long. As a non-Californian, I
don’t pay too much attention but it just seems like NIMBY clashing with
reality of needing power.

~~~
dmix
Wouldn’t be California if it wasn’t NIMBY.

------
BuildTheRobots
Could be worse; they could be burning biomass (wood pellets), the "clean"
energy that's causing mass deforestation and even higher particulate pollution
than coal.

------
nmeofthestate
So... LA is doing the only feasible thing, apart from building nuclear power,
that will avoid power cuts? Seems reasonable.

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macspoofing
Of course. If Hydro and Geothermal isn't a option, then Nuclear power is the
only alternative that can completly remove carbon emissions. Renewables like
solar and wind will always need backup power, which today is either coal, gas,
or biofuels (i.e. burn garbage or corn). There is no battery technology today
or forthcoming that can power a modern economy overnight or over seasons.

There is no other alternative to nuclear. I find it depressing that neither
the media, nor the scientific and environmentalist community is never straight
about this fact.

By the way, here is the energy mix of my home province:
[http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html](http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-
page.html)

When it comes to reducing fossil fuel use for energy generation, outside of
gas usage during peak times (and to backup wind deployments), we're almost
there. Don't have to wait until 2060 or whatever like Germany was projecting
after they closed their Nuclear plants. Don't have to invest in exotic
unproven technologies. Don't have to wait for technology innovation to save
renewables.

~~~
gringoDan
"Nuclear power" evokes images of the Chernobyl disaster and mushroom clouds.
In reality we should be thinking of France, where ~70% of electricity
production comes from nuclear power.

~~~
24gttghh
"Nuclear power" _does_ evoke France to me. Mis-management and poor safety
controls are what Chernobyl evokes for me.

It was close to 90% Nuclear a decade ago though. Some of that has been
replaced by renewable sources, some by natural gas :(

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France)

