Comment by tialaramex
6 hours ago
> The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand.
In thermal electricity plants it takes a lot longer to go from cold & dark to generating electricity with coal than with either Combined-Cycle gas or especially the Open-Cycle "peaker" gas plants. Both types of gas plant also AIUI have a lot better ability to "throttle" their power output.
This means if you have a bunch of CCGT like Britain, you can use those directly to "top-up" the power from your fleet of solar PV and wind turbines, whether that's 1GW of top-up or 20GW of top-up. The change from weather (sun goes down, wind picks up, clouds appear, etc.) is relatively slow compared to what a gas plant can do, whereas it's too fast for coal to keep up as I understand it.
Coal by it’s nature is much less amenable (from a physics/chemistry) perspective to automation and high resolution control. Less pure/refined, granular instead of a gas, harder to start and burns longer once started, etc.
Contaminants in the coal (due to it being a solid mineral) also means it burns with a lot often toxic ash that is hard to deal with.
On the plus side, you can often literally use an excavator to dig it up and put it in the back of a train and then burn it with minimal other capital equipment.
It all makes sense.
>literally use an excavator to
That might be understating the issue. The excavators we use to dig coal have been, and are monstrous. Thousand ton beasts requiring a fleet of support vehicles around them and the ever increasing depth of overburden.
Also the fly ash leftovers tend to get piled up and occasionally break lose in human and ecological disasters at massive scales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288
This is the same kind of scale as those fictional "Spice Harvesters" in Dune. Look around for a photo where there's a person or a familiar object you know the size of in the same frame as the Bagger 288
That is due to the inevitable scaling that occurs with volume, it is not necessary in any sort of physics sense.
You can try it yourself - you can literally harvest/mine coal with a shovel yourself in many areas, and burn it in a fireplace if you don’t mind how dirty it is.