All Posts | The Energy Collective

Are Chesapeake's Problems A Red Flag For Shale Gas?

May 17, 2012 by Geoffrey Styles
with 486 views

Chesapeake Energy has been in the news a lot, lately, concerning both the significant challenges it faces in financing its ambitious development program, and its high-profile CEO, who was recently forced to relinquish his role as Chairman. The company's stock is trading for half its value one year ago and less than a fourth of its 2008 peak. [read more]

U.S. Coal Generation Drops 19 Percent In One Year

May 14, 2012 by Joseph Romm
with 383 views

Power generation from coal is falling quickly. According to new figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal made up 36 percent of U.S. electricity in the first quarter of 2012 — down from 44.6 percent in the first quarter of 2011.That stunning drop, which represented almost a 20 percent decline in coal generation over... [read more]

Five short stories from World Energy Outlook

March 28, 2012 by David Hone
with 517 views

The IEA’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) is an annual tradition, the result of much work, data analysis and presentation. A formative volume is produced for all to read and digest, but few of us have the time to do so in the detail required. As such we rely to some extent on IEA presentations and summary documents. One such presentation was given by IEA Chief Economist Dr. Fatih Birol for the British Institute of Energy Economics. Rather than a WEO “tour de force”, the format was closer to storytelling, or more correctly short stories. Here are five pearls that emerge from the most recent WEO. [read more]

The EPA's coal mandate: An opportunity for nuclear, a giveaway for natural gas

March 28, 2012 by Steve Skutnik
with 506 views

Today the EPA issued its first-ever regulation on carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, limiting emissions to 1000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. Given the fact that the average coal plant vastly exceeds this limit (weighing in around 1,768 lbs CO2 per megawatt-hour), the implications of the move seem... [read more]

The Beginning of the End for Coal?

March 28, 2012 by Geoffrey Styles
with 261 views

I saw in Tuesday's Washington Post that the EPA was ready to issue its proposed rules for CO2 emissions from new power plants. When finalized, these rules would apply to facilities larger than 25 MW that begin construction more than a year hence. As the Post notes, the chosen CO2 emissions limit of 1,000 lb. per gross Megawatt-hour (MWh... [read more]

Will Cheap Energy Storage Come to Coal and Nuclear's Rescue?

March 22, 2012 by Jesse Jenkins
with 1,391 views

Everyone knows that the development of low-cost, large-scale electricity storage technologies will be critical to the future of wind and solar energy--or at least everyone who reads The Energy Collective knows that! The ability to cheaply store electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing and use it later when... [read more]

Data, more data and climate change

March 15, 2012 by David Hone
with 216 views

Climate change is one of those subjects that is awash with data, leading to an almost endless capacity for analysis and ultimately conclusion drawing. The same data can be used to create different analytical output and a single analysis can lead to more than one conclusion. This comes about not just from the climate data itself, but from energy use data, energy use projections and the combination of all of these into both simple and highly complex models which seek to map out climate scenarios for the balance of this century and beyond. [read more]

“Perfect storm" has arrived for efforts to reduce carbon emissions

March 15, 2012 by David Thorpe
with 372 views

Efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the UK and across Europe are facing a combination of factors strongly hindering investment in low carbon power generation and energy efficiency and promoting the burning of coal.Now who do you believe? Today, one British tabloid newspaper is reporting that the construction of gas power plants is “... [read more]

Why Coal-Rich Kosovo Can Lead on Clean Energy

March 14, 2012 by Christina Nunez
with 360 views

Over the past decade, plans for 160 new coal fired power plants in the United States have been scrapped, largely due to rising costs and an inability to compete in today’s energy markets. That’s because the cost of once-“expensive” clean energy has fallen dramatically. [read more]

Study: Eliminating Coal-Fired Power is Worth 0.2 Degrees in 100 Years

March 5, 2012 by Robert Rapier
with 641 views

Who could have dreamed solving climate change would be so easy? A new paper in Environmental Research Letters called “Greenhouse gases, climate change and the transition from coal to low-carbon electricity” concludes that replacement of all of the world’s currently operating coal-fired power plants — which produce about 40% of the... [read more]

Combining Domestic Coal with Nuclear Energy to Make Oil?

March 3, 2012 by Rod Adams
with 870 views

As a South Central Virginia resident, I have something in common with the people in the Pacific Northwest who are concerned about the impact of coal exports from the US. Numerous coal laden trains pass through Lynchburg every day, many of them headed to the large coal terminal in Newport News. I can hear the rumbling of those trains at... [read more]

Coal’s changing economics trigger new view of future

February 21, 2012 by Dan Haugen
with 748 views

We’ve long known about the hidden health and environmental costs associated with burning coal, but until very recently, no one questioned that it was a cheap source of electricity for utility customers. [read more]

Universities Become Natural Leaders In Renewable Energy

February 15, 2012 by Nino Marchetti
with 366 views

Beneath the campus of Ball State University in Indiana is a labyrinth of pipes 400 feet deep, filled with water that heats and cools much of the campus and that, when complete, will allow the school to retire four archaic coal-fired boilers.At the University of Minnesota’s twin campuses in Morris, two 1.6-megawatt wind turbines... [read more]

Renewable portfolio standards insufficient to meet 2030 GHG emission targets

February 15, 2012 by Jonathan Smith
with 242 views

The least expensive way for the Western US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to help prevent the worst consequences of global warming is to replace coal with renewable and other sources of energy that may include nuclear power, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, researchers. [read more]

British Columbia Aims to Sell Cleaner LNG

February 8, 2012 by Geoffrey Styles
with 378 views

I just ran across British Columbia's new provincial natural gas strategy, which includes a specific strategy for expanding liquefied natural gas (LNG) production as a way to mitigate global climate change. That might sound odd to those who are worried--unnecessarily--that gas might be even worse than coal, emissions-wise, but the... [read more]