
A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal - JumpCrisscross
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-costly-deadly-obsession-with-coal-1528282800
======
beat
The partisan obsession with coal is cultural, not practical. West Virginia
coal miners are a convenient proxy for the image of hardworking Americans
being oppressed by unnecessary and burdensome regulation (as if regulation was
the source of the woes of the coal industry).

In practice, the entire coal mining industry employs fewer people than Arby's
(true fact). Expensive changes to environmental regulations, environmental
costs aside, will help very few people in that industry. Coal is gonna go the
way of buggy whips, and and politicians will still do the moral equivalent of
demanding we ban cars because they frighten the horses.

The real trick is going to be reworking the grid to take advantage of the
intermittent nature of wind and solar. And the Invisible Hand has opinions
about that. If you can cache enough power to stabilize the grid, then the
whole "baseline" model currently provided by coal and nuclear plants running
at near-capacity goes away.

And storing power isn't exactly rocket surgery. There are a whole lot of ways
to do it - batteries, compression, gravity, thermal, etc. Add in smart
micrometering (which also isn't exactly rocket surgery), and you create an
arbitrage opportunity. Buy energy when it's cheap (when the wind blows and the
sun shines), and sell it when it's dear (the demand is up and the sun is
down). The invisible hand smooths out the ripples for us. The difference is
power prices metered by the second or the minute, not the year. Market forces
will regulate the prices, not actual regulation.

And because this combination cache baseline and zero-margin generation is so
efficient, it'll quickly displace fossil and nuclear financially.

We just need to survive another couple of decades.

~~~
Kalium
> The partisan obsession with coal is cultural, not practical. West Virginia
> coal miners are a convenient proxy for the image of hardworking Americans
> being oppressed by unnecessary and burdensome regulation (as if regulation
> was the source of the woes of the coal industry).

Bang on.

The knock-on effects of this are surprisingly nasty, though. Whole swaths of
country _identify_ as mining country. Taking that away from them with
economics is an assault on their culture, and the people concerned react like
any culture that senses its core is under attack.

You can treat them as something obsolete, a dying beast we can circle like
vultures. Or you can find a way to get them off of coal that doesn't involve
invalidating how they think of themselves.

~~~
beat
And lots of people who don't live in mining country identify culturally _with_
the miners. They see themselves as the " _real_ Americans", being victimized
by shadowy cultural elites and unnecessary regulations. So the coal miners as
a political force aren't relevant per se. The coal miners as a _symbol_ are
extremely relevant. This only becomes more potent as American conservatism
drifts away from a free market ideology and toward a protectionist/nationalist
ideology. It doesn't matter that market forces are doing this to the coal
miners. Their traditional way of life must be defended! The importance of
intergenerational poverty and black lung disease cannot be overstated!

~~~
MaysonL
And the miners keep dying of black lung and caveins, and their neighbors have
their water poisoned by runoff.

~~~
Kalium
You can tell people that their identity is killing them, and it might actually
be true. But most people tend to think of losing their identity as
functionally equivalent to not only their death, but also the deaths of
everyone they hold dear.

It's not something you can prize people away from readily.

------
mikece
Coal emissions kill... which is why zero-cabon-emission nuclear power is
essential for powering the base load of the green future. Though if the
current rules prohibiting the recycling of partially spent fuel, lack of
incentives for LFTR reactor research, streamlining regulations and
environmental studies, and moving from gigawatt-scale reactors to designs
using a cluster of SMR (small, modular reactors) isn't pursued then,
unfortunately, it's probably better to ignore nuclear.

~~~
chris_va
I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group, so while I agree it would be great
if nuclear power was resurrected (being safer and cleaner than any other form
of power, solar included, despite its representation in the media), it very
likely will never happen--purely for economic reasons.

Ironically, it's wind and solar that finished off nuclear power. Renewable
energy has high variability in supply, but sells power at zero marginal cost.
That means grid demand becomes highly variable during the day.

Nuclear (and coal) are both systems with high capital costs and very low
marginal cost. To be cost competitive, they both need to produce power 90%+ of
the time to amortize the initial capital. However, with the current
variability in demand, they can't get anywhere close to 90% demand from the
grid.

This leaves a market opening for peaker plants with very low capital costs,
notably natural gas and hydro in the US. Hydro is saturated, and combined with
low-cost fuel due to the fracking boom, natural gas is exploding.

Basically, the net result of wind/solar is actually a wash, from an
environmental standpoint. That will get better with HVDC interconnects
(reduces variability of wind), but in general it is not happy outcome.

~~~
pm90
I hope you can answer a theoretical question I've had about Nuclear energy for
a long time: if instead of stopping the construction of new Nuclear plants,
the US had continued to build more of them, would that have lead to a decrease
in capital costs and enough of a Nuclear Energy Ecosystem that it would be
cost-competitive with Coal, if not with Renewables? Or are the costs of
safety-measures the main cost center for building new reactors?

~~~
chris_va
If I had to guess, overly aggressive safety regulation adds about 50% to the
cost. A lot of the cost is actually just in concrete (it is amazing how much
concrete a nuclear plant uses), and concrete costs wouldn't have come down
with volume.

Even if you relaxed the safety regulations, natural gas has an edge with
fracking.

~~~
wahern
The engineering and construction requirements are costly and burdensome, but I
don't think that explains the insane costs.

I think most of the market burden stems from the regulatory delay and
uncertainty. That delay and uncertainty makes it impossible to quickly build
plants, regardless of how stringent the engineering specifications. And if you
can't quickly build one plant, you can't quickly build ten of them, and you
lose the expertise and proficiency needed to build them cost-effectively.

I remember reading an article about the South Korean nuclear industry. At
their peak they could build a nuclear power plant quickly, on time, and on
budget. Presumably these plants adhered to Western standards. Repetition built
project management proficiency and a skilled, specialized workforce.

Ultimately I don't blame the regulatory agencies, per se. I blame the mandate
they've been given by a very fearful population. Industry doesn't know what
will pass regulatory muster because the regulators are winging it because the
public makes safety demands completely divorced from concrete science and
engineering.

My takeaway is that _if_ you're going to regulate, you better be darned sure
what, why, and how you're going to regulate. If you (i.e. Joe Public, Senator
Smith) can't answer those questions, then regulation will prove disastrous. If
you _can_ answer those questions well than the true regulatory burden will
quickly become apparent and industry will adjust accordingly or exit, without
all the confusion, bickering, and wasted resources.

It's like with GMOs: people against GMOs (or proposing strong oversight) can't
articulate well why, how, or precisely which aspects of the industry they want
to regulate. Which makes it easy for me to vote against propositions
purporting to regulate the industry. A poorly articulated solution is no
solution at all, and a poorly articulated problem is strong evidence there may
not be any problem.

------
thomasmeeks
This country's willingness to dump massive entitlements on the coal, etc.
industries while simultaneously deriding individual entitlements is the height
of hypocrisy. Really makes me wonder what the breaking point is for this
particular brand of cognitive dissonance. You'd think things like the recent
Carrier factory shutdown would at least present a speed bump to this sort of
thing.

~~~
TexasEcon23
Individual entitlements are a majority of federal spending. In comparison,
government incentives for coal are almost non-existent. You seem to be off by
at least 10,000%.

~~~
awinder
The funding model is completely different. Entitlement programs are funded by
employers as a cost of doing business and taxpayers, and they’ve been
providing intergovernmental loans for years to keep loan costs down. Meanwhile
shoving billions to cover miner health programs and re-shore busted pension
funds are paid by the taxpayer, who maybe gets lower coal energy costs, but
probably not. That’s before we get into the uncalculated, externalized costs
of coal on the environment.

------
BigChiefSmokem
The coal industry deserves the same respect they show Silicon Valley and my
peers, which is none.

------
cowmix
The Crown made me re-learn about this event.

[https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-12-16/the-crown-
discove...](https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-12-16/the-crown-discover-the-
real-great-smog-that-brought-london-to-a-standstill/)

------
ethbro
No one's really arguing for coal, truly. They're arguing for jobs, respect,
and a livelihood.

I've got a lot of family from southern Appalachia (N GA to WV).

If coal sunsets, America needs to make a promise that we're going to do right
by miners. In a bigger, more sustained way than recent token retraining
efforts. Something on WPA / TVA scale.

If we made that bargain, and stood by it, then we'd be able to start seriously
transitioning away from coal, with broad local political support, today.

And I feel like this is something that we as a country need to get better at
anyway, as it's going to happen to a lot of industries in the next 100 years.

~~~
jbattle
There are only 50k coal miners in the USA. I'm not at all against generous job
retraining programs, but why does the rest of the country/world need to be
held off any progress on this issue for the sake of a relatively small group?
There are individual companies that have more employees.

After 9/11 the airline industry _lost_ something like 40,000 jobs. We didn't
resurrect the WPA then. What makes coal special?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
The airline industry is scattered all over the country. If you lose your
airline job in, say, Chicago, there are a lot of other jobs in Chicago. But
coal is the backbone of a big chunk of Appalachia. If you lose your coal job
in Welch, West Virginia, _there 's nothing else_. And if there are a few other
jobs, the number of laid-off coal-related people absolutely swamps the
openings.

~~~
jbattle
Honestly, I'd love if our society chose to be more generous and invest in
retraining workers across the board. But if someone loses their job in Welch,
West Virginia, and there's nothing else ... they might need to move.

How is it different from steel jobs drying up in Gary IN? Or automobile jobs
in Detroit? Or fishing jobs in Maine? Or tobacco jobs in ... wherever tobacco
was grown

~~~
ethbro
_> tobacco_

The Carolinas and Virginia, I think.

And you're right, it's not that different.

The only thing I'd say is that I believe steel jobs were a bit slower of a
transition. I believe most of the slide took place in the 60s - 80s as lower
cost Japanese steel took off?

Tobacco is also somewhat replaceable. If you were planting it, you can plant
other things. So the glide path is a bit easier.

~~~
philipkglass
Most of the lost coal mining jobs were also lost in decades past:

[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES1021210001](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES1021210001)

Set the "from" date back to 1985 (earliest year available in this UI).

There were 170,500 American coal mining jobs in January 1985. When Obama
entered office in January 2009, there were 86,400.

~~~
ethbro
Point. So I guess the jobs left are the last of the industry.

The irony is that production of coal seems to have increased (see top graph;
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_St...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States)
) since 1970.

Goes to show the power of political narrative vs a reality of automation. But
I suppose even for the companies it's a lot easier to blame Washington than
tell people you bought a $250,000 machine to replace them.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> The irony is that production of coal seems to have increased

I think that's the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. But that's all strip mining
with giant machines. It's more capital and fewer workers.

> But I suppose even for the companies it's a lot easier to blame Washington
> than tell people you bought a $250,000 machine to replace them.

It's more like: somebody else bought a $250,000 machine to replace them five
states away.

------
BLKNSLVR
Status quo at what cost?

It shows how embedded the powers-that-be are into coal that they can convince
the government to waste tax-payer money on propping it up for a little while
longer.

Maybe it'll give them a bit more time to continue their divestment process, so
their paper value doesn't drop off a cliff once this policy is scrapped.

------
Alex3917
> In one study, Mr. Greenstone and his co-authors found that in China, which
> is currently negotiating to buy more U.S. coal, life expectancy is reduced
> by three years in households that use subsidized coal in the winter.

Even though life expectancy has been dropping across the U.S., here in NYC
life expectancy has increased by 3 years over the last fifteen due largely to
new policies around home heating fuel and other laws to reduce fine
particulate emissions. Sad to see Trump trying his best to take us back in the
other direction.

------
tchen
paywall circumvention:
[https://outline.com/fJDRmH](https://outline.com/fJDRmH)

------
FractalLP
For anyone not in the know, Trump is merely following the recommendations of
the Department of Energy regarding providing economic payments to Coal/Nuclear
to value the very very real value they provide in fuel-mix diversity. I
recommend reading up on "Resiliency" and the Polar Vortex event of 2014.
Essentially, the east coast almost ran out of the necessary power to serve
load. This is because they had gas pipeline delivery issues and much gas was
being used for residential heating. Fortunately, ~80% of the Coal slated for
retirement in the region was available. The DOE stated things would have been
"catastrophic" without coal there.

So yes Coal is uneconomic and awful for the environment. However, it is
important to recognize the value that it and Nuclear bring as they often have
a minimum of 3 months of fuel on-site unlike gas, intermittent renewable, and
batteries.

~~~
mikeash
He’s following recommendations from a department where he appointed a leader
who wanted to shut it down, and also didn’t know what it did? That makes it so
much better!

~~~
FractalLP
Rick Perry probably wanted to keep the coal industry from being shutdown
regardless, but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side. The need to
reimburse coal for the value it provides is well understood by all the experts
at the DOE, FERC, and the ISO/RTOs. ISO-NE is deeply concerned with the
upcoming retirement of several large coal units and has run into hot water for
considering subsidizing them. These organizations run reliability studies to
determine the impact from these retirements. They KNOW this is a problem and
are trying to determine possible market solutions.

Just saying we don't need any coal shows a definite lack of understanding of
the industry and the problem. I work in power system transmission, but have
zero connections to either coal or nuclear. My only "skin" in the game is a
deep concern for premature coal retirements based off of all the public
studies which have been run.

Edit: My memory is a little foggy, but I just double-checked myself and the
coal plants in ISO-NE I was thinking about were actually natural gas plants
that wouldn't be impacted by loss of pipeline as they were served by a local
source. If they had enough of those, you wouldn't need to keep nearly as much
coal around. However, I bet they're fairly rare.

~~~
mikeash
“but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side”

Can you explain that parenthetical? I’m at a loss.

