King coal

Germany can’t just close its coal fired power stations tomorrow, their industry relies on the electricity. They are decommissioning all their nukes and there isn’t enough gas to swap wholesale from coal. This mine will have been planned for decades should they make thousands redundant and create a gap in their generation over a decision long since made. They already have a massive renewable generation capacity but they can’t swap overnight.
 
PlacidCasual said:
They already have a massive renewable generation capacity but they can’t swap overnight.
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This is their problem. They subsidised the uptake of wind/solar so much that the industry exploded and now can provide 100% of their required supply when the conditions are right.

The conditions aren't right all the time so they need to provide base load that only gets paid when it's producing, they don't pay non-renewables fees to remain available, but offline. This has led to a race to the bottom meaning that their base load has to be as cheap as possible resulting in the proliferation of the dirtiest cheapest coal power plants you can build.
 
LabR@t said:
Everyone still uses coal why don't we?
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We do. Masses of it. We just import it because it’s cheaper than mining it ourselves. It comes from Russia. 40% of our electricity is fuelled by coal. Not sure how much we spend on it, but whatever it is the point is it would cost more to mine it here.
 
Evangelion said:
Because a nice lady called Margaret Thatcher came along one day, and said we're not allowed to use coal anymore.

And then she killed the UK's coal industry.
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Scargil and the NUM killed the UK Coal industry by demonstrating to the rest of the population that it was not an energy source that could be relied upon....
 
peterwalkley said:
How old are you ? Do you remember the miners holding the country to ransom and bringing down governments under Arthur Scargill ?

We moved to gas under Thatcher so they could never do it again.
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Remember it well, but the lesson I learned from that is how stupid the unions and socialists are.
 
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