California’s coal collapse

Super smog hits the north China city of Harbin - Los Angeles Times

Bye Bye Coal

• The politicians in the People's Republic do a few things right. With 40 million Californians generating smog we need to use solar and natural gas to avoid turning into ultra-polluted China.

(San Diego Union-Tribune)  -  When it comes to coal production and consumption, California is not exactly West Virginia.

But it is striking to see that California’s use of coal to generate electricity has dropped so dramatically — essentially going from small to almost microscopic.

Two recent reports from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, drive the point home.

First, California’s total megawatt hours attributed to coal has dropped from 1 percent in 2007 to just two-tenths of one percent in 2015.

And second, in an EIA report released last week, California saw a 96 percent decrease in electric power consumption by coal during the same time frame. That’s the steepest fall by percentage of any state.

“As a provider of power into the grid, (coal in California is) dead as a door nail,” said Bill Corcoran, the western regional director for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

Nationally, the consumption of steam coal used for electricity generation fell from more than a billion short tons in 2007 to 739 million short tons in 2015, a 29 percent drop.

California has pushed tax credits for solar panels to reduce smog
and the need to construct new power plants.

Coal’s collapse is largely due to two factors: Utilities switching from coal-fired to natural gas-fired power plants because of low natural gas prices and government regulations aimed at making the air cleaner and hastening the emergence of renewable energy.

For example, at the end of 2005, the 1,636-megawatt Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nev., shut down. Southern California Edison had a 56 percent interest in the plant.

One of the state regulations that put a major crimp on coal was the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Performance Standard Act passed in Sacramento in 2006.

“What the bill basically said is, if you’re going to sell power in California, you have to be as clean as the power that we burn here in California,” said Dan Jacobson, legislative director for Environment California.

But the mining industry is quick to point out that electricity rates in California are among the highest in the country.

When it comes to the average retail price of electricity, California finishes eighth-highest in the country and sixth-highest for states in the continental U.S., at 15.15 cents per kilowatt hour.

“You in California are already paying a lot for electricity at least in part because you use so little coal, which is so cheap,” said Luke Popovich, vice president of external communications at the National Mining Association.

But while California’s rates are higher, the state consumes less electricity per household than most states. That’s partly due to mild weather along the coast but also to greater efficiency from household appliances.

Chinese smog is so thick and chewy that it may qualify as a food group.

As a result, the average monthly bill in 2014 in California was $23 less than the national average.

“Energy efficiency has been an important part of California’s energy policy in not only reducing pollution from dirty fuels like coal but helping consumers use less power to do more work,” Corcoran said.

As coal has dropped, natural gas has risen. It’s the largest single source of power generation in California. In 2005, natural gas made up 48.04 percent of in-state electric generation. In the most recent figures from the California Energy Commission, or CEC, the number has jumped to 61.3 percent.

“It’s great that we’re dropping coal but it’s bad that we’re picking it up with natural gas,” Jacobson said. “What we need to do is move away from fossil fuels and go towards clean, renewable energy.”

The transition highlights a larger debate that extends beyond California.

“Our electricity prices in this country have been historically low by any standards set in other countries,” Popovich said. “There’s no way those prices are going to stay low as long as we stay on this trend. It’s not going to happen.”

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