California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month (latimes.com)
- Reference: 0179766822
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/13/032224/california-will-stop-using-coal-as-a-power-source-next-month
- Source link: https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2025-10-08/essential-california-california-dumps-coal-power
> One of the most consequential moments in California's drive to beat back climate change will take place next month. The state will stop receiving electricity from the Intermountain Power Plant in Central Utah, meaning our reliance on coal as a source of power will essentially be over...
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> [T]he U.S. got nearly half its electricity from coal-fired plants [2]as recently as 2007 . By 2023, that figure had dropped to just 16.2%. California drove an even more dramatic shift, getting just 2.2% of its electricity from coal in 2024 — nearly all of it from the Intermountain plant. Operators plan to cut off that final burst of ions next month.
"And with improved technology to store power, the change has been made without the power shortages that dogged the state up until 2020..."5
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2025-10-08/essential-california-california-dumps-coal-power
[2] https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2025-10-02/boiling-point-california-quitting-coal
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Hell, I get a refund check from my municipal power company every year, right here in California. Do you?
I haven't seen a power loss unless it involved a vehicle smashing into something that affects power distribution. I've been here nearly 2 decades.
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I have 4 power walls as 12kw of rooftop solar. Blackouts dont affect me, though they have only been caused by fires where I live, not for rolling reasons. However, the cost of power keeps going up. If I charge my Tesla at home, I go into the red and owe money at the end of the year. If I go out of my way and use free-supercharging for life that Tesla offered when I bought my Model X, I stay in the black, and get a check. The Virtual Power Plant events pay me something like $600 a year, regardless of what th
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Candles were traditionally made from animal fat.
Does that qualify them as renewable? (cue the vegans...)
Sorry, we don't have candles (Score:2)
Consuming this product can expose you to [name of one or more chemicals], which is known to the State of California to cause cancer.
Hydrogen as fuel? but water considered dangerous?? (Score:4, Informative)
From the article: The Golden State is looking to newer, cleaner technologies, including hydrogen, which the new Utah plant will be able to create by splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The technology creates byproducts that concern some environmentalists.
Surely you're going to spend more money cracking water to get the hydrogen molecules than you'll get burning the hydrogen gas later. And what cthulhu-inspired process are they using that "environmentalists" are clutching their pearls about H2 and O2 gasses?
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Good points. I was wondering the same thing. Then again, I wasn't all that impressed with TFA's take on the science. (See my comment above about "Burst of ions.")
Electrolysis with renewable energy should have a very low environmental impact. There is the sunk cost from constructing the plant and the electrolysis equipment. If non-renewable energy sources are used, then the environmental cost goes up.
But I think the "environmentalists" mentioned in TFA might be concerned about other methods that do have an e
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That's easy, they're using methane-based [1]steam reforming [wikipedia.org], which requires large amounts of heat (the reaction is endothermic) and produces huge amounts of both CO2 and CO
If they're only using air for the steam reformation supply: CH4 + H2O => CO + (3)H2 along with potentially CO + H2O => CO2 + H2 if they balance the feed rate perfectly.
If they're using pure Oxygen instead, they also get to add: CH4 + 0.5O2 => CO + (2)H2
This also requires the fuel source they're using be purified to remove sulphur an
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming?useskin=vector
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Solar power is free. Hydrogen makes for fairly decent storage once you solve the 'bleeds through most anything' part.
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> Solar power is free.
Solar power is as free as much as coal power is free.
How can I call coal power free? It's just sitting there waiting to be dug up an burned. How is solar power different from this? Sure, the sun shines down upon us with regularity but we'd still need to build the devices to collect the sunlight and turn it into useful energy. As those devices experience wear they need to be replaced now and then to keep the energy flowing. This costs money.
Then is the matter that the sun doesn't always shine there need
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Agree.
I keep saying this every time someone starts bragging-up 'renewables', and it gets into a big thing about why solar/wind is so much better... I always slip in that in order to keep up with demand, we might as well clear-cut the forests (we don't need those boring trees... we need power for the datacenters) and just wallpaper the country with solar panels and wind turbines... oh, wait... doesn't big oil have a say in there someplace in the government that decides these things?
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The land use requirements for wind and solar power cannot be ignored. Maybe there is an argument that solar power has little cost in real dollars but it does still have a cost in land, land that often can be used for crops, forests, or whatever. Even in Death Valley, a place so many assume is devoid of life, will have periodic blooms of wildflowers. Here's some of the wildflowers of Death Valley: [1]https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn... [nps.gov]
People can argue how much power can be produced per area with solar power b
[1] https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/nature/wildflowers.htm
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It's for short term storage. Consider hydrogen as a big battery. Perfect for flattening out the ups and downs of solar and wind.
One of its risks is volatility. It can go bang really well when mismanaged.
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Storing power as hydrogen? Do you mean Nickel-Hydrogen batteries?
Or, do you mean hydrogen as a potential fuel?
That would only work if that big generator is kept spun up... might take a few minutes to get to 100% from a dead stop.
No single one renewable is going to be the Golden Ticket... not even just two... it'll take a multitude of them to keep the precious datacenter running so the AI-LLM can keep generating slop.
But what about (Score:1)
... all their climate destroying economic growth? Concrete dwarfs many other carbon contributors, and last time I went to California there was a f-ton of concrete. They even built roads out of the stuff. But pay no attention to that, look over here, we just stopped using coal!
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That is a separate part of the problem that also needs tackling, but electricity emissions are 8 to 10x larger than cement (inc concrete) manufacturing in California. The biggerr buckets are transportation, industrial non-electric, commercial and residential fuel, agricultural, recycling, and things like refrigerants. Of those, transportation, industrial non-electric and fuel are the most important to tackle, and a giant chunk of transportation and fuel can and is being addressed through electrification, wh
Concrete's ok - If you dont make more (Score:2)
It's the production of concrete that's "smelly" if Co2 had odour. Estimates concrete is 8% of C02 emissions vs 28% Energy, 29% transport, and blah blah is blah, if we chimps cared about consequences other than availability of bananas.
In other news... (Score:2)
California electricity rates will increase from $.45/kWh to $.65/kWh.
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Correct. Science and technology works completely backwards in the US compared to in the rest of the world. Outside the US, renewables only get cheaper, despite massive fossil subsidies, and is overtaking the electricity production.
I was told this was unpossible (Score:2)
They said the state should be crashing out regularly due to renewables not working at night, in bad weather, or something. You're not saying that conservatives... misled people, are you?
Although I do fully expect some data centers to cause a headache due to extremely high power consumption. Any state receiving a new data centers should note that those are high draw facilities, and as a friend noted, have them pay a floating surcharge until the power utility is able to bring extra capacity online to keep
Power Storage (Score:1)
The article seems to indicate they have solved tis issue but did not elaborate.
"Burst of ions?" (Score:2, Informative)
No, it's the electrons that move in the metal wire of the power-distribution lines. And not very much: in AC distribution, they just wiggle back and forth a fraction of a millimeter.
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My mom is dead and buried in the ground. So you must be the one doing the wiggling, amirite?
Please take a shower when you're done.
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If we're going to play pedantic polly: The combustion of coal produces small amounts of plasma (which is ions). In a few coal power plants, plasma torches are used for ignition and control of the combustion.
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Fair point. However, it's the heat from the combustion that is used to create the electricity, by boiling water to turn a turbine with the resulting steam.
But please, keep looking for ions in the delivery chain. This is kinda fun.
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> But please, keep looking for ions in the delivery chain. This is kinda fun.
Ions are central to delivering electricity. Most High Voltage lines are aluminum conductor steel-reinforced (ACSR) cables where the steel provides most of the strength and the aluminum is the conductor. The electricity flows by inducing the electrons to move back and forth creating valance shells with an electron missing that another electron wants to fill. Each time an electron leaves the valance shell of the aluminum atom, it becomes an aluminum ion. The aluminum ions don't move, but they are tangenti
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They said "Operators plan to cut off that final burst of ions next month" .. that could be the ions created in the coal combustion. Claims about ions in the delivery chain are something you hallucinated.