National Electricity Grid Sources

And (posted from Missouri's environmental stats page) for us thick skull-ed folk that need pie charts & graphs - this is how sources are projected to look in terms of the next 8 years or so . . . .

It'd seem wind & PV are going up, at an amount close to what coal is going down.
.

 

Good data.
Interesting that "wind" is catching up to "hydro" in terms of totals.
In the past decades, USA has over-emphasized coal use and under-emphasized nat gas and wind use, so now we are seeing some movement to where we should have been on nat gas and wind, with solar emerging as the new kid on the block. Wind was ignored for many decades in the USA; solar I don't feel is being ignored like wind, but we are not as progressive as say Germany.
I wish they would put 2012 data in the EPA Power Profiler website (currently based on 2010 data).

 

In 2004, natural gas represented 16.5% but after 10 years, it became 26.1%

Majority of electricity added (by far) came from natural gas.

 

The Popping of the Shale Gas Bubble - Forbes

Many articles like the one above predict a quick decline in natural gas production. Presuming this is correct, natural gas price volatility may become the norm. Since a substantial part of electricity is turning to natural gas, this can only reflect in future prices of electricity. Just something to think about.
.

 

http://www.eia.gov/pressroom/presentations/sieminski_06052013.pdf
What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source? - FAQ - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
lots of good historic data here, and eia's predictions of

1993, 2014, 2040
53%, 39%, 35% coal
13%, 27%, 30% natural gas
0%, 4.8%, ? wind and solar
11%, 8.2%, 16-? % big hydro plus other renewable
19%, 19%, 19% nuclear
4%, 1%, 1% other

IMHO coal will decrease more while natural gas and renewables will increase more. EIA didn't seem to take fully into account the new epa rules (even with mercury temporarily thrown out by SCOTUS). Likewise eia only has renewables growing 3% but even if you throw out the rest of the country texas + california should grow it more than that in the 16 years given current plans.

 

and a whole lot of room for removing a lot of astounding inefficiencies everywhere.

 

Cheap natural gas should mean more pipelines, and hopefully switching from electricity to natural gas for heating, hot water, and cooking. Air conditioning and appliances definitely have possible efficiency gains. Many states and localities have subsidies to switch.

Still with more people, more air conditioning, more electronics, and hopefully more manufacturing and plug-in vehicles demand is going to go up even with efficiency gains. As coal declines lets make sure renewables are taking a bigger share.

Solar with all its subsidies still was only 0.4% of power in 2014. Solar in germany was 6.9%. Germany has too many subsidies for america to pass, but they also have some regulatory differences that make solar cheaper.
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/veroeffentlichungen-pdf-dateien-en/studien-und-konzeptpapiere/recent-facts-about-photovoltaics-in-germany.pdf

Still wind is cheaper and 4.4% of the US electricity last year. Choice programs grid improvements could make it grow much bigger. Somehow the politicians love solar but ignore or discount wind, but california finally started building fast in 2014 to join texas and iowa. Lots of great wind in the western US and appalachian states.

 

Sunlight is free, so the question will become one of capital cost and just not consumable cost.

 

For me, there was also the issue of capital cost for running a gas line to my all-electric house. When I asked, it was very expensive. Cheap promotional deals came along later, and may not be available to all localities or at all times.

So I stayed all-electric. Now, the renewable electric path is a sunk cost. The electric baseboard heat is now just a backup to the electric heat pump, electric hot water converted to heat pump, and net-zero PV is installed on the roof. My house is already there.

But my household transportation fleet still has a ways to go . We'll consider a plug-in when the spouse's daily driver (from the 1980s) dies. Roof space and circuit capacity for the additional PV are already in place.

 

Don't be conflicted. I wasn't trying to put out a moral case. A way forward from the dark days of the 1970s (Encouraged coal use, discouraged and made illegal in many cases natural gas use) shifting building heat to natural gas from electricity. New Natural gas heaters are at 78%-97% efficient, this is as opposed to 31% efficient coal after grid drop and 42% efficient ccgt after grid drops. Even new ccgt is 55% much less efficient than a new gas heater.
Gas furnaces, efficiency matters

Heat demand does not correlate well with solar or wind production so this is one of the worst uses of these types of renewables. A problem is getting the natural gas infrastructure finished, as many politicians seem to want to continue to block it based on some 1970s ideas. Economics are removing some of these blocks.

Think 20 years not not the indefinite future. These gas pipelines will have had most of their costs absorbed, and furnaces and hot water heaters full depreciated.

Sure even today geothermal heat pumps make sense for new construction, but for existing buildings these are often too expensive. slowly build these, and with cheaper future renewables, perhaps 30 years from now a swittch from gas to renewable heating. The big push now is should be to detoxify the grid, and more of a shift from electric to gas heat, and from coal to renwables and ccgt gas power plants should be the most cost effective way.

Say we drop coal from 39% to 30% by providing 3% as renewable and 6% as more efficient gas (half as much fossil fuel per unit electricity) that can work better with renewables. Isn't that better than going from 39% coal to 35% using only renewables and spending more?

 

Geothermal heat pumps are very efficient, unfortunately they are expensive to install on existing construction. Where are the dolllars better spent on existing infrastructure in the mid term? New construction is a very small percentage of heating in the US.

I was mainly talking gnereral continental US.

California was exempted from most of the bad anti-natural gas legislation by the clean air act. Over 70% residents use natural gas for heat there compared to 50% for the country. Some bad political decisions in the 1980s and 1990s in california underbuilt the natural gas infrastructure, but this has already been rectified. Most of that remaining 30% are in a old home that they don't want to retrofit, or use very little heat, so not a problem or an opportunity in california. There are lots of opportunities in colder northeast and midwest to move from electricity to natural gas.

Which means yes california because it already saved fossil fuel by switching from electricity to natural gas does not benefit from the switch. The high electricity prices also means the savings from efficiency have already taken place.

Total Electricity System Power
7% of california electricity comes from out of state coal powerplants. That is the low hanging fruit, and I belive there is a plan to eliminate this.

8.55% of california's electricity in 2013 came from wind but almost half was imported out of state. In state wind is the quickest way california can build renewables and have started doing this. Solar was up to 2% in 2013, this can grow too but not nearly as fast or easily as wind. The CSP projects now going live have shown they are not economic, but hopefully that will change the focus back to wind turbines and PV solar.

 

Just to update, from another thread we have new links and newer data

EIA has posted june 2014 - may 2015.
Coal and Coke have dropped further to 36.7%, remember this was 44.8% just in 2009 and 53% in 1993. Petroleum liquids are down to 0.4% of electricity. Natural gas + other gasses 29.7% (not including renewable biogas). Hydro was steady at 6.3% and renewables at 6.9%.

For California we have 2014
Electricity Forecasts
Wind was down to 23,914 GWh because of reduced imports, but solar jumped to 10,365 GWh from 4287GWH in 2013 instate, total with imports was 12,565. That makes wind 8.13% and solar 4.28% in 2014.
Total Electricity System Power

There was a day in Feburary where solar made up 8% of power in California. These figures don't include small home roof solar. We are certainly above the 4.28%.

 

Where coal ever loses to something with better financials, it should be seen as a 'war on stupid' not a 'war on coal'.

Long after the Stone Age, the Black Stone Age came. Both gave big boosts to the human enterprise. Neither deserves to be unnecessarily prolonged. We are going somewhere, and coal ain't it.

Trees, whales and fossil-C have been stepping stones to get MORE energy that MORE people need. They were great, but they were the past. Tell me the future. The Past, 2.0 is BORING.

 

Here is nice article on wind power status.
2014 thru 2016 looking good due to incentives; 2016+ looking good due to Clean Power Plan
I've driven that ridge line from Western PA (Somerset) down thru WVa. Awesome sight.

Chris Mooney Highlights Two New DOE Reports on the "U.S. wind energy boom" - ScalingGreen

 

We have 3 major grids in the US that account for almost all the the electricity used. Grids on islands and alaska provide a lot less power. On the Texas and Western Grid, we are in very good shape. Given financial incentives ccgt natural gas, wind, and solar along with smart grid and efficiency Gaines could quickly drop fossil footprint both per kwh, per capita, and even with population growth. It just takes time or money but its the direction being taken.

The eastern grid is more problematic. It also takes political will. Grid upgrades and natural gas infracture, that allow for more renewables can easily be blocked by coal interests and people claiming environmental reasons (some may even be legitimate). That is where the war on coal rhetoric comes from. In the 70s these interests in the congress and the presidency gave coal a favored status. In the 1990s those laws favoring coal were slowly removed, but coal wasn't fully charged for its negative health impacts. Those talking about it want coal again to be favored by the government in spite of it not being a good solution for most of the population.

Is There Really a War on Coal? - US News

Japan and Germany have joined China and India in building a lot of new coal power plants. Coal will be with us for a long time, but coal doesn't work well with wind and solar, so I expect Germany will only do these things short range (40 years) to replace the nukes, and those other countries will follow suit as renewables and grid storage get cheaper.