highdesert wrote:Is "clean coal" and clean energy the same in public health terms? Just looking at production costs is a false number, if there are public health costs that someone is paying for it's an expense. Whether it's how the coal is obtained or recycling batteries the health costs need to be computed.
Coal is dying anyway due to market pressure. It's simply less expensive to run thermoelectric plants on natural gas. If the plants are designed from the ground up to run on natural gas, then usually they can take advantage of combined-cycle operation (gas-turbine followed by steam-turbine) and boost their thermal efficiency by about half. Natural gas also doesn't require bag house or ESP maintenance, so the operating costs are less and the fuel can be pipelined directly to the plant - no coal trains and their associated pollution.
Grid storage is coming with or without clean energy. As the price of Li-ion batteries continues to decline, grid storage is being installed onto some grids that don't have significant use of renewables due to the cost savings. It lowers the cost (and pollution) of frequency regulation (the small amounts of short-term power put onto and taken off of the grid to maintain 60 Hz frequency so things don't go boom).
EIA predicts a steady increase in renewables being integrated into the U.S. grid. Most of that is due to economics.