Commentary: Coal-Fired Power is Dependable, Affordable
Across the U.S., common sense appears to be having an impact
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Like former Vice President Al Gore before them, the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders have pursued a potentially gargantuan new revenue source — a tax on the use of carbon-based fuels, particularly coal.
The House of Representatives passed a bill to tax emissions. Senate leaders have so far failed to persuade Republicans and coal-state Democrats that unilaterally making 50 percent of Americans’ electric power supply more expensive would lower temperatures around the globe.
The fight isn’t over, though. The administration’s efforts to choke off investment in the coal industry continues, and the outcome of the war depends on what Americans choose at the ballot box.
In the meantime, though, an interesting thing has happened. As Matthew Brown of The Associated Press reported recently, utilities across the country are building dozens of coal-fired power plants.
The AP reviewed records of the U.S. Department of Energy and information provided by utilities and trade groups. It found that more than 30 traditional coal-fired power plants have been built or gone under construction since 2008.
Utilities have fired up 16 large plants since 2008 and 16 more are under construction. It’s the largest expansion of coal-fired power in two decades.
Those coal-fired power plants will generate about 17,900 megawatts, enough to power as many as 15.6 million homes - say, all the homes in California and Arizona combined.
Brown said these decisions to go with coal reflect in part “a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail.”
Further, Brown wrote: “Utilities say they are clinging to coal because its abundance makes it cheaper than natural gas or nuclear power and more reliable than intermittent power sources such as wind and solar.”
Cost and reliability matter.
Residential and industrial users of electricity need reasonably priced, dependable power. At least on some fronts, that common-sense realization is sinking in.
Thomas Edison built the first coal-fired electric power plant in the United States in 1882 in Manhattan, and what a breakthrough it was. Dependable power changed millions of lives all over this country and made the United States an industrial powerhouse.
It should stay that way.
“It’s the cost,” said Daniel Scott, a coal industry analyst with Dahlman Rose & Co. in New York of the use of coal.
Well, yes. It is.
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