Old King Coal

What is the future of electricity production in Minnesota?

Currently, according to XCEL, 8237MW (51%) of our electricity is produced by burning coal, at least Xcel, which includes my home's source of electricity.
http://www.xcelenergy.com/XLWEB/CDA/0,3080,1-1-1_1875_4797-3472-0_0_0-0,00.html

Wind power is 25MW, or 0.16% 1/600th of our electricity.

Coal burning is the dirtiest source of energy. It can be improved in terms of ending the 30 year-old grandfathering agreements on the worst polluters against required upgrades. There's claimed newer technology that can further reduce emissions than current standards. However none of that offsets the fact that burning coal has the highest release of CO2 of the fossel fuels.

So a good environmentalist is justified in denouncing coal burning. Yet, what are the alternatives? Not fuel oil from petroleum with our import requirements already with oil. Not easily Natural Gas which is in overall decline in North America, and is better used for heating homes.

Nuclear fission - using radioactive decay of Uranium 235 - may or may not be any more sustainable, although at least at power plants themselves don't crease atmospheric pollution - only heated water.

The 4% electricity from Manitoba hydrodam generation is the best we can do - going across the border north into Canada.

Can't Minnesota do any better? The hardest problem I see is even when it LOOKS like things MAY be getting better - air quality in some measures, like from burning low sulfur coal is that these little steps encourage complacency for unsustainable energy. When our (Montana's) low sulfur coal is gone, will we give up coal burning? I can't imagine it - we'll compromise back down to "best we can get" and the path never changes as long as there's "an easy" step that is not so much worse than the last one.

Minnesota has no native natural gas, petroleum or coal. We have no uranium mines. We must import all these energy sources. What we DO have is agricultural land, forests, sunlight, some hydropower and some wind power.

Why can't we do better than we do now?

I'd imagine we must approach this problem from two directions:

1) Electricity must be more costly to allow renewable/local production to compete with nonrenewable imported energy.

That opens market forces to help people make decisions based on "truer costs" rather than just immediate economic costs.

2) We would subsidize research and development of our local energy resoures.

Subsidies are needed on new industries to jump start them to develop a market.

I don't know if these are enough, but they are the direction to go. Of course mercury in our lakes are not going to disappear while other states and regions continue with coal, but when we develop these new technologies, we can tell them to others to help them as well.

I don't know what effect higher electricity rates would have on households and businesses. Myself I participate in the XCEL "WindSource" program - so I pay an extra $0.02/kwh. In theory this is supposed to encourage further development.

AND what of the spoiled children who don't care about the environment, don't care about anything that costs them more money? That is, can this be democratic (voting by dollars), or must it be dictatorially applied by enlightened representatives?

There is a not fully organized but self-righteous movement of people who see the government AS-THE-PROBLEM and don't want a dime more heading to the government then that can avoid short of revolution.

If you neglect diffuse "environmental harm", fish you can't eat, a few dead trees from acid rain, an inperceptively slow rising global average temperature from CO2, there's not much more to argue with you.

Arguing on limited supply of fossil fuels can be helpful in the long term, but it's too long in my mind for coal because of the environmental consequences.

How can I even be sitting at this nice computer typing away by 50% coal plants? It seems difficult for individuals to really make a difference at all. At home I have windsource power, and I'm supposed to feel smug and superior for my "green energy", but I've not convinced a single other person to throw more money at the power company. Not one! Maybe not tried hard enough...

Overall it seems tiring just to imagine starting the evangelical movement for clean energy, unless I want to offer to pay everyone's higher electricity bill myself.

My CEO at work suggested the company make a donation to an environmental group over throwing money at the power company. It's probably true in some sense - at one level higher prices encourage conservation, but slowly rising prices along with 101 other more immediate concerns suggests higher prices won't affect the electricity consumption at my work.

SURE we might mandate employees will turn of computers at night - at least monitors. We already have fluorescent lights. We might get some more LCD monitors over time. But overall electricity costs is a small fraction of our direct expenses.

SO it seems the only way to make a difference is to make prices high enough that we'd get a revolution. Of course there's slow and gradual increases, but people will catch on.

I think it's necessary, but yet invisible, until we hit some sort of black out condition.

AND yet conservation iself is never enough. It just means we have less space to step back when the next crisis hits.

Coal and Nuclear power will surely increase in the future. We will participate because it is the only way we don't need to re-evaluate our needs.