Meanwhile over here in WV, we are saddled with above-market electricity rates thanks to our state (non-)regulatory commission and a desire to keep old coal-fired generators operating. It drives us nuts.
It doesn't, not really. It was gutted after its original sale years ago.
All the Daves and other journalists are actually AI (HAL9000s).
The comments and related moderation are similarly as bad. "HAL Open the pod bay doors."
"I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that." - HAL
No serious reader bothers anymore with that outfit, and this evaporative cooling of social networks comes to any platform that fails to moderate appropriately.
Edit: Seems the brigade from sentiment manipulation bots is in full swing (-3). Sad state of affairs this. The site used to be quite good until they sold out, and I don't know a techie that doesn't like a good Hal Dave euphemism. Squelching makes volunteers not want to contribute anything in goodwill, and hollows out the whole like a cancer. When no one of intelligence raises the bar, everything fails to the lowest common denominator stagnating. Facts are facts, and downvote manipulation doesn't change that.
Last time I heard about this Intermountain plant a few years ago, it was about the LADPW union being absolute assholes to do anything to keep it running.
Good riddance, be gone, coal is expensive and unreliable and it's mostly political manipulation to pick winners and losers that keeps it around. TVA is begging to be able to get rid of this coal plant which causes massive reliability problems:
Please elaborate. China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal, with last year hitting a new high of coal deployment[1]. Why would they do that if it's expensive and unreliable? The letter you linked is advocating for a new gas plant.
And no, I am not advocating for building more coal plants.
I think TVA's elaboration, which I linked to, is not only far more authoritative and trustworthy than me, a random internet poster, but here goes:
1) Our coal plants are old and trip off all the time, putting the grid at high risk. 2) The cost to upgrade a coal plant or build a new one is far higher than the gas alternative, so no financially competent entity is going to go with coal unless they are forced to by political manipulation/strong arming/bad incentives that hurt ratepayers.
Prices in China have literally nothing to do with the US, for either construction or gas or coal, so I'm not sure why you're linking to that in favor of our actual utilities' opinions here in the US. Is China's experience with coal really the reason you think that coal is either reliable or cheap?
They are building more plants but starting to burn less coal. Both can be true at the same time. They are expected to hit peak coal as early as this year. So, far coal generation is slightly down relative to last year.
What's happening is part just bureaucratic inertia. They raised funding and are building the plants even though strictly they aren't needed anymore. And part of it is them replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones. They close plants regularly as well. Instead of operating plants 24x7, they keep a few around for when wind/solar fall short. It seems even the Chinese have a hard time predicting how fast the energy transition is going. They've hit their own targets years ahead of time repeatedly in the recent past.
Apparently China coal imports could drop by about 18-19% this year. That seems to be part of a bigger five year plan. They might be hitting the targets for that early as well.
> China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal
Are you sure about that 'most' part? Hasn't China been building something like a coal plant's worth of solar power generation every eight hours for the past year or so?
> China is building an absurd amount of new [coal] plants
Fossil fuel advocates in the West love repeating this "fact" and omit another, rather more inconvenient fact. 80+% of all new electricity generation in China is solar or other renewable. China builds coal plants but they don't really use them much.
These coal plants either replace older ones shutting down or are mostly left idle. Why? My guess: to keep the jobs and skills around, to juice GDP, and as a backup.
China is build coal plants, solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas. They do less natural gas because they don't really have much of that, they do more coal because they can mine that locally, solar/wind are really only abundant out west while most people live in the east, and nuclear is a new thing that they are still getting into (and has lots of expenses that they haven't made cheap yet).
China is building less coal plants than they would need to if they just focused on coal, so they are improving over time.
My understanding is that china has a lot of coal, but has to import natural gas and petroleum products. I believe this changes the cost calculus in favor of coal specifically in china. That said, Chinese coal power plants are also much newer than US plants, which might mean they require less maintenance.
In terms of absolute usage the coal use in China is declining since the start of 2025. Deployment of renewables and storage are enough to supply both the grid expansion and displace existing coal demand.
If they build gas plants then they'd be so much more entangled in conflicts in the middle East (and Russia) . I'm not sure that that would be fantastic for anyone, the Chinese included
I wouldn't be surprised is the anti coal movement has been pushed by the petrostates
Coal sucks but it does ensure energy independence (as does solar and wind)
> Last time I heard about this Intermountain plant a few years ago, it was about the LADPW union being absolute assholes to do anything to keep it running.
Please be more specific about how you think they were being "absolute assholes."
Coal has rising costs that occur on the facilities side and the aging facilities are becoming more unreliable on a modern grid that often needs to fluctuate power demands relatively quickly. It's also more expensive than alternatives like solar and wind, even if their subsidies are disregarded.
The only coal plant economical to run in the US is Dry Forks, WY compared to new renewables and storage.
> The cost of running existing coal power plants in the United States continues rising while new wind and solar costs keep falling. Our first Coal Cost Crossover report (2019) found 62 percent of U.S. coal capacity was more expensive to run than to replace with renewables, while our second (2021) found 72 percent of capacity more expensive than renewables. Our latest Coal Cost Crossover research finds incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act accelerate this trend – 99 percent of all U.S. coal plants (209 out of 210) are now more expensive to run than replacement by new local solar, wind, or energy storage.
> This report finds 99 percent of the existing U.S. coal fleet is more expensive to run compared to replacement by new solar or wind. Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity, and generate $589 billion in new investment across the U.S. Our report provides policy recommendations to facilitate a just transition through the Coal Cost Crossover.
(report is from 2023, the economics of renewables and solar have only improved since then)
I know it's not what OP meant, but dirty equals expensive, in the medium term. We are going to be paying the costs of climate change much sooner than we would like to admit.
> Key to making that shift has been the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has ordered less electricity from the Utah plant while simultaneously building a natural gas and hydrogen burning power station just across the street from Intermountain.
Does that mean that LA is building a plant in Utah?
Why not build the plant in LA? Is it more efficient to ship electricity instead of gas; or is it just more politically convenient to pollute Utah instead of LA?
> Why not build the plant in LA? Is it more efficient to ship electricity instead of gas; or is it just more politically convenient to pollute Utah instead of LA?
Great question. It is easier to rely on existing transmission at Intermountain than it is to build a gas turbine in LA (along with whatever infra is needed to provide a reliable supply of fossil gas to the generator site). You can even add batteries, solar, wind etc in the future at that site; coal sites are being remediated and turned into battery storage colo in many situations to rely on that existing transmission infra.
I read somewhere that old coal plants would in theory be trivial to drop-in upgrade to nuclear: you just need to replace the heat source with a nuclear one, but the rest of the infrastructure can continue to be used.
The problem is that coal plants are sprinkled with a whole bunch of radioactive fly ash, and normal radiation level for a coal plant would violate the hell out of regulations for a nuclear plant.
The Intermountain Power Plant provides energy to many different places. Replacing generation there keeps transmission lines balanced as they were.
Wikipedia says LADWP operates 4 natural gas power plants within city limits, so they do both. It might be hard to find a site for a new generator, and the Intermountain site had additional coal generators planned but not built; building a natural gas generator there makes a lot of sense.
> Is it more efficient to ship electricity instead of gas
Yes, in general, and especially if (as is the case here) the electrical transmission infrastructure is already in place and you are just switching powerplants at the generating end (its a whole lot cheaper to build nothing than gas supply infrastructure.) But also:
> or is it just more politically convenient to pollute Utah instead of LA?
Its both more politically convenient and less of an adverse impact on human life to pollute farther from dense population centers, yes.
They have a grid investment of ultra-high capacity power lines coming down from Utah into Southern California, so might as well continue to use it. Utah also has more space for such things, maybe its less expensive, maybe its easier to get natural gas/hydrogen to Utah vs. Southern California, etc...
Electricity transfer is orders of magnitude more cheaply transmitted than any physical quantity of gas as the power is up-converted to around 750kV which only wastes a few hundred watts in the actual transmission (across thousands of miles).
California Air Emission Regulatory which is already on the books cannot comply with the plants so it makes sense that they are being built outside the state.
Natural Gas has the benefit of being simple to start up and shut down the needed turbines, compressor, exchanger, 1st and secondary loops based on demand. There's still some pollution, but compared to coal the pollution is a few percent in comparison (afaik). It burns more cleanly. Newer plants usually use the most efficient equipment at that time (within the tradeoffs chosen) so costs are often less (though poor material choices may offset this when corruption/fraud is found).
Please no! Our electricity rates are already too high. The massive cost for short-term extensions to Diablo Canyon will drive them even higher.
Think of how much an extension to the lifespan might cost in your head. Now go and look: $8.4B to $11B to keep it running only until 2030.
There is massive political support for nuclear right now, which is the only reason it's being considered. The whole reason it was initially decided not to extend the license was that the cost would be too high. Now people that know nothing about electricity costs, but really love nuclear, have pre-determined that Diablo Canyon should be kept running without regard to better ways to spend that money on our electricity grid.
It annoys me immensely that all provided grid storage statistics are in MW, not MWh.
The only statistics that speak about capacity brag that California- one of the leaders in grid storage deployment- can store nearly a third of solar generation in February (which represents only a third of the energy production) on a sub-day time scale.
The more impressive thing in my mind is that California has also reduced the use of natural gas by 37% since 2023 through the combination of solar + batteries.
Meanwhile over here in WV, we are saddled with above-market electricity rates thanks to our state (non-)regulatory commission and a desire to keep old coal-fired generators operating. It drives us nuts.
When you let industry run your government ...
I recommend updating the link to the primary source: https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2025-10-08/ess...
Ok, changed from https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/13/032224/californ... above. Thanks!
I was just surprised Slashdot still existed.
It doesn't, not really. It was gutted after its original sale years ago.
All the Daves and other journalists are actually AI (HAL9000s).
The comments and related moderation are similarly as bad. "HAL Open the pod bay doors."
"I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that." - HAL
No serious reader bothers anymore with that outfit, and this evaporative cooling of social networks comes to any platform that fails to moderate appropriately.
Edit: Seems the brigade from sentiment manipulation bots is in full swing (-3). Sad state of affairs this. The site used to be quite good until they sold out, and I don't know a techie that doesn't like a good Hal Dave euphemism. Squelching makes volunteers not want to contribute anything in goodwill, and hollows out the whole like a cancer. When no one of intelligence raises the bar, everything fails to the lowest common denominator stagnating. Facts are facts, and downvote manipulation doesn't change that.
1 reply →
Last time I heard about this Intermountain plant a few years ago, it was about the LADPW union being absolute assholes to do anything to keep it running.
Good riddance, be gone, coal is expensive and unreliable and it's mostly political manipulation to pick winners and losers that keeps it around. TVA is begging to be able to get rid of this coal plant which causes massive reliability problems:
https://elibrary.ferc.gov/eLibrary/filelist?accession_number...
> coal is expensive and unreliable
Please elaborate. China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal, with last year hitting a new high of coal deployment[1]. Why would they do that if it's expensive and unreliable? The letter you linked is advocating for a new gas plant.
And no, I am not advocating for building more coal plants.
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/4658e336-930f-49db-abc9-0036ee0ea...
I think TVA's elaboration, which I linked to, is not only far more authoritative and trustworthy than me, a random internet poster, but here goes:
1) Our coal plants are old and trip off all the time, putting the grid at high risk. 2) The cost to upgrade a coal plant or build a new one is far higher than the gas alternative, so no financially competent entity is going to go with coal unless they are forced to by political manipulation/strong arming/bad incentives that hurt ratepayers.
Prices in China have literally nothing to do with the US, for either construction or gas or coal, so I'm not sure why you're linking to that in favor of our actual utilities' opinions here in the US. Is China's experience with coal really the reason you think that coal is either reliable or cheap?
They are building more plants but starting to burn less coal. Both can be true at the same time. They are expected to hit peak coal as early as this year. So, far coal generation is slightly down relative to last year.
What's happening is part just bureaucratic inertia. They raised funding and are building the plants even though strictly they aren't needed anymore. And part of it is them replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones. They close plants regularly as well. Instead of operating plants 24x7, they keep a few around for when wind/solar fall short. It seems even the Chinese have a hard time predicting how fast the energy transition is going. They've hit their own targets years ahead of time repeatedly in the recent past.
Apparently China coal imports could drop by about 18-19% this year. That seems to be part of a bigger five year plan. They might be hitting the targets for that early as well.
4 replies →
> China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal
Are you sure about that 'most' part? Hasn't China been building something like a coal plant's worth of solar power generation every eight hours for the past year or so?
2 replies →
> China is building an absurd amount of new [coal] plants
Fossil fuel advocates in the West love repeating this "fact" and omit another, rather more inconvenient fact. 80+% of all new electricity generation in China is solar or other renewable. China builds coal plants but they don't really use them much.
These coal plants either replace older ones shutting down or are mostly left idle. Why? My guess: to keep the jobs and skills around, to juice GDP, and as a backup.
1 reply →
China is build coal plants, solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas. They do less natural gas because they don't really have much of that, they do more coal because they can mine that locally, solar/wind are really only abundant out west while most people live in the east, and nuclear is a new thing that they are still getting into (and has lots of expenses that they haven't made cheap yet).
China is building less coal plants than they would need to if they just focused on coal, so they are improving over time.
My understanding is that china has a lot of coal, but has to import natural gas and petroleum products. I believe this changes the cost calculus in favor of coal specifically in china. That said, Chinese coal power plants are also much newer than US plants, which might mean they require less maintenance.
they build them but they’re mostly not running them, utilization numbers keep falling. It’s either a central-planning failure or some kind of hedge
In terms of absolute usage the coal use in China is declining since the start of 2025. Deployment of renewables and storage are enough to supply both the grid expansion and displace existing coal demand.
If they build gas plants then they'd be so much more entangled in conflicts in the middle East (and Russia) . I'm not sure that that would be fantastic for anyone, the Chinese included
I wouldn't be surprised is the anti coal movement has been pushed by the petrostates
Coal sucks but it does ensure energy independence (as does solar and wind)
> Last time I heard about this Intermountain plant a few years ago, it was about the LADPW union being absolute assholes to do anything to keep it running.
Please be more specific about how you think they were being "absolute assholes."
Coal is dirty for sure but "expensive and unreliable"?
Coal has rising costs that occur on the facilities side and the aging facilities are becoming more unreliable on a modern grid that often needs to fluctuate power demands relatively quickly. It's also more expensive than alternatives like solar and wind, even if their subsidies are disregarded.
The only coal plant economical to run in the US is Dry Forks, WY compared to new renewables and storage.
> The cost of running existing coal power plants in the United States continues rising while new wind and solar costs keep falling. Our first Coal Cost Crossover report (2019) found 62 percent of U.S. coal capacity was more expensive to run than to replace with renewables, while our second (2021) found 72 percent of capacity more expensive than renewables. Our latest Coal Cost Crossover research finds incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act accelerate this trend – 99 percent of all U.S. coal plants (209 out of 210) are now more expensive to run than replacement by new local solar, wind, or energy storage.
> This report finds 99 percent of the existing U.S. coal fleet is more expensive to run compared to replacement by new solar or wind. Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity, and generate $589 billion in new investment across the U.S. Our report provides policy recommendations to facilitate a just transition through the Coal Cost Crossover.
(report is from 2023, the economics of renewables and solar have only improved since then)
https://energyinnovation.org/report/the-coal-cost-crossover-...
2 replies →
I know it's not what OP meant, but dirty equals expensive, in the medium term. We are going to be paying the costs of climate change much sooner than we would like to admit.
(From the article that Slashdot links to)
> Key to making that shift has been the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has ordered less electricity from the Utah plant while simultaneously building a natural gas and hydrogen burning power station just across the street from Intermountain.
Does that mean that LA is building a plant in Utah?
Why not build the plant in LA? Is it more efficient to ship electricity instead of gas; or is it just more politically convenient to pollute Utah instead of LA?
> Why not build the plant in LA? Is it more efficient to ship electricity instead of gas; or is it just more politically convenient to pollute Utah instead of LA?
Great question. It is easier to rely on existing transmission at Intermountain than it is to build a gas turbine in LA (along with whatever infra is needed to provide a reliable supply of fossil gas to the generator site). You can even add batteries, solar, wind etc in the future at that site; coal sites are being remediated and turned into battery storage colo in many situations to rely on that existing transmission infra.
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_27 (first two paragraphs are relevant to total transmission capacity to LA from Intermountain, ~2.4GW at ±500kV)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Department_of_Wate...
https://openinframap.org/
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64604
(consider the fungibility of electricity vs other energy mediums)
I read somewhere that old coal plants would in theory be trivial to drop-in upgrade to nuclear: you just need to replace the heat source with a nuclear one, but the rest of the infrastructure can continue to be used.
The problem is that coal plants are sprinkled with a whole bunch of radioactive fly ash, and normal radiation level for a coal plant would violate the hell out of regulations for a nuclear plant.
3 replies →
Building anything in California is very difficult and time consuming. Think in decades rather than years.
I'd guess that a new coal powered power plant is close to the most impossible thing imaginable to try to build in California.
The Intermountain Power Plant provides energy to many different places. Replacing generation there keeps transmission lines balanced as they were.
Wikipedia says LADWP operates 4 natural gas power plants within city limits, so they do both. It might be hard to find a site for a new generator, and the Intermountain site had additional coal generators planned but not built; building a natural gas generator there makes a lot of sense.
> Is it more efficient to ship electricity instead of gas
Yes, in general, and especially if (as is the case here) the electrical transmission infrastructure is already in place and you are just switching powerplants at the generating end (its a whole lot cheaper to build nothing than gas supply infrastructure.) But also:
> or is it just more politically convenient to pollute Utah instead of LA?
Its both more politically convenient and less of an adverse impact on human life to pollute farther from dense population centers, yes.
They have a grid investment of ultra-high capacity power lines coming down from Utah into Southern California, so might as well continue to use it. Utah also has more space for such things, maybe its less expensive, maybe its easier to get natural gas/hydrogen to Utah vs. Southern California, etc...
Some background on LADWP’s history in Utah: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hydrogen-transforming-utah-...
Electricity transfer is orders of magnitude more cheaply transmitted than any physical quantity of gas as the power is up-converted to around 750kV which only wastes a few hundred watts in the actual transmission (across thousands of miles).
California Air Emission Regulatory which is already on the books cannot comply with the plants so it makes sense that they are being built outside the state.
Natural Gas has the benefit of being simple to start up and shut down the needed turbines, compressor, exchanger, 1st and secondary loops based on demand. There's still some pollution, but compared to coal the pollution is a few percent in comparison (afaik). It burns more cleanly. Newer plants usually use the most efficient equipment at that time (within the tradeoffs chosen) so costs are often less (though poor material choices may offset this when corruption/fraud is found).
On the other hand, the state courts finally concluded, a few weeks ago, that Oakland can't stop a developer from building a coal export terminal.
Keep Diablo Canyon running!
Please no! Our electricity rates are already too high. The massive cost for short-term extensions to Diablo Canyon will drive them even higher.
Think of how much an extension to the lifespan might cost in your head. Now go and look: $8.4B to $11B to keep it running only until 2030.
There is massive political support for nuclear right now, which is the only reason it's being considered. The whole reason it was initially decided not to extend the license was that the cost would be too high. Now people that know nothing about electricity costs, but really love nuclear, have pre-determined that Diablo Canyon should be kept running without regard to better ways to spend that money on our electricity grid.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/us-electricity-2025...
https://seia.org/state-solar-policy/california-solar/
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/
It annoys me immensely that all provided grid storage statistics are in MW, not MWh.
The only statistics that speak about capacity brag that California- one of the leaders in grid storage deployment- can store nearly a third of solar generation in February (which represents only a third of the energy production) on a sub-day time scale.
1 reply →
naw
The more impressive thing in my mind is that California has also reduced the use of natural gas by 37% since 2023 through the combination of solar + batteries.
* https://www.threads.com/@1mzjacobson/post/DPjmVLcDqFo/impres...
California also has the most expensive rates in the country. Much less impressive when taking cost into account.
https://www.newsweek.com/electricity-prices-surge-us-map-sho...
https://www.energybot.com/electricity-rates/
That's because of the wildfires. California will have high rates no matter what just because of that.
4 replies →
/.? There's a name I've not heard in ages ...
California will stop using coal throughout the entire supply chain, or will stop burning coal within their geographical boundaries?
(Power is frequently generated and transported across state lines)
You could learn the answer to this question in the second sentence of the article.
I could tell from the wording of the headline
The article is about cutting off a plant in Utah
Considering that the article is all about the closing of a specific power plant in Utah, I think they're aware of this.