Sorry Fiah. This is corporate propaganda in its purest form. I kol'd a lot when I read this little gem.
"© 2007-2012 AMERICAN COALITION FOR
CLEAN COAL ELECTRICITY"
Really??Not only is coal the most pollutive energy source. There is hardly any benefit in terms of energy prices compared to wind power in USA where you're advocating it being used.
1
This figure doesn't even include hydroelectricity, which is even more efficient where it is available, although there can obviously be some environmental problems with it. I'll not discuss hydroelectricity for the rest of this post.
If you take into account other factors like health and subsidies,
2 wind may in fact be even more efficient than coal. Then there are all the effects of global warming, which coal power is contributing to as well. Certainly these aren't going to be cheap to fix either.
The very process which makes power from coal, is
combustion. As you can see, this reaction creates CO
2, which is a greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. Longer chains of carbon create more carbondioxide compared to water when they're burned. This is why natural gas (CH
4) is the least pollutive fossil fuel source, oil pollutes more, and coal pollutes the most.
This is even before we take into account the other traces which these billions of tons of coal contain and release into our atmosphere when burned, like heavy metals and radioactive materials.
Going back to the costs, even better, the costs of wind power will decrease as wind power becomes more efficient. Wind power technology is evolving rapidly at this time (and so is solar power). Both capacities have been growing by about 30% pr. year for more than a decade. If this continues (which it probably will not, although it will continue to some extent), wind power alone could cover the amount of electricity used in the entire world before 2030, assuming the world useage of electricity also increases exponentially at its current rate.
3The costs of coal power can decrease if coal power is made more efficient too, but the costs will also rise as coal becomes more scarse (of course, you start by using the most easily available coal deposits which are cheapest to extract from). Coal simply doesn't have any long term future. Let's not waste our time on this and instead spend those resources improving technology which can ensure our energy supply in the long term, like solar and wind power.
So no, stop mining coal. Change to renewable energy sources. Most importantly, continue research in fusion power.
1 Figure 6.8 (from World Energy Outlook 2008), URL:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/53542 URL:
http://cleantechnica.com/world-wind-power/5/3 Based on data from
http://www.eia.gov/
Topic: holyshit (Read 2519 times)
