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.
This is sadly the state for a good number of PUCs across the nation. That's one reason that electricity costs are rising even as generation is getting cheaper thanks to renewables and storage.
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.
People aren’t brigading you with downvotes (I highly doubt that whoever owns Slashdot now is hiring people to astroturf discussions about it on HN). Your comment is getting downvoted because it doesn’t really make sense.
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.
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.
I had read the coal plants are also political safety nets for the local governments. Some populace is worried the switch to renewables will go wrong and they will freeze over winter, so the coal plants are built as a perceived backup option.
As another comment pointed out, China isn’t afraid to let infrastructure sit idle. That if these coal plants sit unused or demolished in the end - it would be better than the political risk mentioned above.
[1] shows that they their coal plants have not been sitting idle i 2025 and are producing close to what they did in 2024. [2] shows that coal based electricity produced is still increasing, but their overall CO2 emissions / kWh is lowering [3]
I think you're relating coal as a percentage of all energy rather than relative to itself year on year.
The data here shows that coal consumption is simply increasing in China. Therefore, I believe it is inaccurate to say "they are building more plants but starting to burn less coal." It is more accurate to say "they are building more plants and burning more coal, but they are not increasing their coal use at the same rate they increase their use of other energy sources."
Our World In Data gets that information from https://globalcarbonbudget.org/. I believe that the next update will include 2024 data, and should be available next month.
My reason for challenging the phrasing is just to be precise. This is a complex topic, and the distinction between a falling percentage of energy mix versus a rising absolute amount of consumption is a key detail that's often missed.
China gets most of its thermal coal locally, it imports specialty coking coal from Australia (to make metal), as well as some thermal coal. It also gets thermal coal from indonesia. It mines 10X what it imports, but really needs to import coking coal to keep making metals (it could probably survive on its own thermal coal reserves).
> 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?
My knowledge is a few years out of date, but at the time china’s power generation was mostly coal, despite the heavy investment in solar. New power generation at the time was not replacing old but just keeping up with rising demand, so china was building new coal plants as well. I don’t think most _new_ generation was coal even 5 years ago, but most existing _generation_ was coal , and I expect that is still true
As of 2023, China ~50% coal and the almost all of the rest is renewable (they use very little oil/gas since it all has to be imported). Since then, chinese solar capacity added has been absolutely ridiculous. In 2024, they added 125 GW, and in 2025 they have so far added >250 GW of solar. If my math is right, this means that China is as of this year, adding ~5% of 2023 electricity consumption per year, which would mean that within 5 years of similar production (which seems overly pesimistic given how much solar has increased every year up till now) they will be down to ~25% coal
> 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 has lots of coal (to mine from the ground), and most of their solar/wind is out west, and most of their huge hydro is south, but is not enough anyways. They are able to reduce the amount of coal they depend on for their rising energy needs, but not eliminate them. It isn't just to keep the jobs/skills around, actually that would be easily transferred, they just can't pragmatically stop using coal yet.
Right they're gonna continue using as much coal they were already using. Because they have coal. People like the commenter I responded to repeat the talking point about "more coal plants". Because that automatically makes others think China is burning more and more and more coal and we're the only suckers who try to "go green". When in reality China's manufacturing prowess is responsible for solar power becoming so cheap in the first place and they're the biggest users of it by far.
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?
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.
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)
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.
> 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)
Comparing idealized costs of one form of energy replacing another doesn't make it a non-economical form of energy.
> 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.
That sort of wishy-washy language is classic political sales pitch stuff. And I say that in favour of transitioning to solar/wind where it makes sense.
Coal generators are reaching the end of their life, and to be frank, the US doesn't have the ability to build more if they tried (labor and skill shortages, primarily, but capital is also going to be hard to come by considering stranded asset risk). There is a 5-10 year backlog of gas turbines by the three companies in the world that build them. Coal retirements will continue, and hopefully, low carbon energy sources (being the least expensive option) will backfill them. Could the US face power shortages due to refusing to build new power generation out of ideology? Certainly. But are 50-60 year old coal plants going to run forever? Unlikely, based on mechanical limitations, supply chain constraints, etc.
Solar, wind, and batteries will continue to decline in cost; whether the US chooses to adopt them is a choice. Make good choices, as I tell my children.
Nowhere to go but down for U.S. coal capacity, generation - https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity... - October 24th, 2024 ("More than 8,100 MW of currently operating coal capacity will be at least 60 years old by 2030, but plant owners have not yet announced retirement dates. It is highly unlikely any of those units will still be operational by 2040, given the increase in maintenance costs and the decline in performance that go hand in hand with aging coal plants. Another 20,000MW of coal-fired capacity will be at least 50 years old by 2030, putting them at or near their expected operational lifespans.")
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.
On a related note, I'm skeptical of the feasibility of their 2035 EV-only mandate. They haven't made any meaningful progress toward building up a grid that can support as much electrical power consumption as they will need. I know gasoline-powered cars are not going to disappear overnight, but the average American replaces their car about every 12-14 years according to Professor Google. Either that number is going to become 25-30 in California, or people will be heating their homes with peat and dry, fire-prone CA lumber.
I'll admit I have selfish interest in seeing nuclear power take over our electrical grids, but I don't want to see the lives of 40M people upended just because it will give the companies in my portfolio more pricing power.
> 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.
Also that trivial issue of actually building a nuke plant for under $15 billion and in under 10 years, which hasn’t been done in “the west” for decades.
There's also a good case for geothermal plants at these sites, if the geology permits it. There has been a good deal of development, and more sites are usable.
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).
Natural gas is not as bad as coal but that’s an extremely low bar.
I can’t find any support for your claim that natural gas is “a few percent” of the “pollution” of natural gas.
In GHG terms natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits CO2. Web searches suggest the number is somewhere between 50% less GHG emissions to a few percent more GHG emissions for natural gas vs coal. This is because natural gas has the additional issue of widespread fugitive emissions across the supply chain which emit methane, an even more potent GHG which itself breaks down to CO2.
As with everything it’s complicated but it’s simply unbelievable that a natural gas plant is anywhere near a 90% improvement over a coal plant which is my arbitrarily generous standard for “a few percent”.
Ultimately there’s just no good way to burn fossil fuels.
I’m not sure what California Air Emission Regulatory is. Do you mean CARB?
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.
Four of the worst five wildfires in the US (in terms of damage) took place in the last decade in California. The fire in LA this year is estimated to have cost more than the other four combined.
That is only one factor. Others include: overallocation of fixed costs to consumers, CA's climate and energy policies, CA's high regulatory burden, and CA's unique geographic challenges. Some of these are self imposed.
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.
This is a perfect example where simulations would be really great to demonstrate the cost of replacing the nuclear power station with an alternative. Take last 5 years worth of weather data and energy consumption, run a combination of solar and lithium storage solution for a similar cost as what is being suggested (say $8B), and see if they would fill in the role of the nuclear power plant. If they can't, add one or several natural gas peak plants to the mix and use less storage, and find how much would be needed. Some cost would be added to build new transmission, but it can be added on top of the simulation.
Replacing base load with solar and batteries, especially for days when weather makes supply the lowest and demand the highest, is in general a non-trivial problem, but it is location dependent. Maybe California is one where it make sense.
> Replacing base load with solar and batteries, especially for days when weather makes supply the lowest and demand the highest, is in general a non-trivial problem, but it is location dependent. Maybe California is one where it make sense.
Storage and gas capacity make this a fairly trivial problem, but it is somewhat location dependent.
The difficulties in deploying it are mostly political and regulatory, and not technical.
Places like Texas, with a fairly open market that allow new entrants to add assets on their own initiative, storage paired with wind and solar is dominating the market. In fact in most of the us, storage/solar/wind is mostly what's getting deployed no the grid, see the map at the bottom:
However, you only see batteries getting added after there's already a fairly large chunk of renewables on the grid. Before then, there's not much need for the expense. Last stat I heard was that 60% of solar deployments in the US included storage, and that's only going to go up.
And you can see on EIA's map that the Intermountain gas plant under discussion is the largest gas addition this year. The only reason it's gas and not solar and storage is that in 2019 the union was anti-renewables for political reasons:
It would have been better to have solar plus storage. There's far more gas on the grid than is necessary to provide backup to California's current solar+storage capacity.
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.
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.
Could be worse. If you lived in California you'd pay triple the "above-market electricity rates" you currently pay.
Not if you have a municipal energy provider.
When you let industry run your government ...
This is sadly the state for a good number of PUCs across the nation. That's one reason that electricity costs are rising even as generation is getting cheaper thanks to renewables and storage.
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.
People aren’t brigading you with downvotes (I highly doubt that whoever owns Slashdot now is hiring people to astroturf discussions about it on HN). Your comment is getting downvoted because it doesn’t really make sense.
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...
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.
I had read the coal plants are also political safety nets for the local governments. Some populace is worried the switch to renewables will go wrong and they will freeze over winter, so the coal plants are built as a perceived backup option.
As another comment pointed out, China isn’t afraid to let infrastructure sit idle. That if these coal plants sit unused or demolished in the end - it would be better than the political risk mentioned above.
[1] shows that they their coal plants have not been sitting idle i 2025 and are producing close to what they did in 2024. [2] shows that coal based electricity produced is still increasing, but their overall CO2 emissions / kWh is lowering [3]
[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?dat...
[3] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?dat...
I think you're relating coal as a percentage of all energy rather than relative to itself year on year.
The data here shows that coal consumption is simply increasing in China. Therefore, I believe it is inaccurate to say "they are building more plants but starting to burn less coal." It is more accurate to say "they are building more plants and burning more coal, but they are not increasing their coal use at the same rate they increase their use of other energy sources."
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-coal?tab=line&...
Our World In Data gets that information from https://globalcarbonbudget.org/. I believe that the next update will include 2024 data, and should be available next month.
My reason for challenging the phrasing is just to be precise. This is a complex topic, and the distinction between a falling percentage of energy mix versus a rising absolute amount of consumption is a key detail that's often missed.
This is 2025 data. Absolute coal usage is declining since the beginning of 2025.
China gets most of its thermal coal locally, it imports specialty coking coal from Australia (to make metal), as well as some thermal coal. It also gets thermal coal from indonesia. It mines 10X what it imports, but really needs to import coking coal to keep making metals (it could probably survive on its own thermal coal reserves).
> 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?
87% of power added in china in 2024 was renewable.
https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/...
My knowledge is a few years out of date, but at the time china’s power generation was mostly coal, despite the heavy investment in solar. New power generation at the time was not replacing old but just keeping up with rising demand, so china was building new coal plants as well. I don’t think most _new_ generation was coal even 5 years ago, but most existing _generation_ was coal , and I expect that is still true
As of 2023, China ~50% coal and the almost all of the rest is renewable (they use very little oil/gas since it all has to be imported). Since then, chinese solar capacity added has been absolutely ridiculous. In 2024, they added 125 GW, and in 2025 they have so far added >250 GW of solar. If my math is right, this means that China is as of this year, adding ~5% of 2023 electricity consumption per year, which would mean that within 5 years of similar production (which seems overly pesimistic given how much solar has increased every year up till now) they will be down to ~25% coal
> 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 has lots of coal (to mine from the ground), and most of their solar/wind is out west, and most of their huge hydro is south, but is not enough anyways. They are able to reduce the amount of coal they depend on for their rising energy needs, but not eliminate them. It isn't just to keep the jobs/skills around, actually that would be easily transferred, they just can't pragmatically stop using coal yet.
Right they're gonna continue using as much coal they were already using. Because they have coal. People like the commenter I responded to repeat the talking point about "more coal plants". Because that automatically makes others think China is burning more and more and more coal and we're the only suckers who try to "go green". When in reality China's manufacturing prowess is responsible for solar power becoming so cheap in the first place and they're the biggest users of it by far.
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?
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.
87% of all capacity added in 2024 was renewable.
https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/...
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
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)
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.
> 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-...
Comparing idealized costs of one form of energy replacing another doesn't make it a non-economical form of energy.
> 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.
That sort of wishy-washy language is classic political sales pitch stuff. And I say that in favour of transitioning to solar/wind where it makes sense.
Coal generators are reaching the end of their life, and to be frank, the US doesn't have the ability to build more if they tried (labor and skill shortages, primarily, but capital is also going to be hard to come by considering stranded asset risk). There is a 5-10 year backlog of gas turbines by the three companies in the world that build them. Coal retirements will continue, and hopefully, low carbon energy sources (being the least expensive option) will backfill them. Could the US face power shortages due to refusing to build new power generation out of ideology? Certainly. But are 50-60 year old coal plants going to run forever? Unlikely, based on mechanical limitations, supply chain constraints, etc.
Solar, wind, and batteries will continue to decline in cost; whether the US chooses to adopt them is a choice. Make good choices, as I tell my children.
Trump’s major coal sales flop in Wyoming and Montana - https://wyofile.com/trumps-major-coal-sales-flop-in-wyoming-... - October 8th, 2025
Gas-Turbine Crunch Threatens Demand Bonanza in Asia - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-07/gas-tu... | https://archive.today/z4Ixw - October 7th, 2025
AI-Driven Demand for Gas Turbines Risks a New Energy Crunch - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-gas-turb... | https://archive.today/b8bhn - October 1st, 2025
Most of the planned coal capacity retirements are in the Midwest or Mid-Atlantic regions - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65744 - July 14th, 2025
Nowhere to go but down for U.S. coal capacity, generation - https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity... - October 24th, 2024 ("More than 8,100 MW of currently operating coal capacity will be at least 60 years old by 2030, but plant owners have not yet announced retirement dates. It is highly unlikely any of those units will still be operational by 2040, given the increase in maintenance costs and the decline in performance that go hand in hand with aging coal plants. Another 20,000MW of coal-fired capacity will be at least 50 years old by 2030, putting them at or near their expected operational lifespans.")
US Coal Plant Map Retirement Tracker - https://www.sierraclub.org/coal/coal-plant-map
(think in systems)
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.
On a related note, I'm skeptical of the feasibility of their 2035 EV-only mandate. They haven't made any meaningful progress toward building up a grid that can support as much electrical power consumption as they will need. I know gasoline-powered cars are not going to disappear overnight, but the average American replaces their car about every 12-14 years according to Professor Google. Either that number is going to become 25-30 in California, or people will be heating their homes with peat and dry, fire-prone CA lumber.
I'll admit I have selfish interest in seeing nuclear power take over our electrical grids, but I don't want to see the lives of 40M people upended just because it will give the companies in my portfolio more pricing power.
(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.
Also that trivial issue of actually building a nuke plant for under $15 billion and in under 10 years, which hasn’t been done in “the west” for decades.
15b over 10 years is small money these days in terms of public infrastructure.
This is currently being attempted in Wyoming, but required both state and federal reg changes. Currently timeline is for it to be online by 2030. https://wyofile.com/natrium-advanced-nuclear-power-plant-win...
There's also a good case for geothermal plants at these sites, if the geology permits it. There has been a good deal of development, and more sites are usable.
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.
Some background on LADWP’s history in Utah: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hydrogen-transforming-utah-...
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.
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).
Natural gas is not as bad as coal but that’s an extremely low bar.
I can’t find any support for your claim that natural gas is “a few percent” of the “pollution” of natural gas.
In GHG terms natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits CO2. Web searches suggest the number is somewhere between 50% less GHG emissions to a few percent more GHG emissions for natural gas vs coal. This is because natural gas has the additional issue of widespread fugitive emissions across the supply chain which emit methane, an even more potent GHG which itself breaks down to CO2.
As with everything it’s complicated but it’s simply unbelievable that a natural gas plant is anywhere near a 90% improvement over a coal plant which is my arbitrarily generous standard for “a few percent”.
Ultimately there’s just no good way to burn fossil fuels.
I’m not sure what California Air Emission Regulatory is. Do you mean CARB?
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/
Now look at what you’d pay under a municipal provider like LADWP.
That's because of the wildfires. California will have high rates no matter what just because of that.
Can you elaborate on why that is or provide a source? Other states also have high wildfire risk and don’t have the expensive power like California.
Four of the worst five wildfires in the US (in terms of damage) took place in the last decade in California. The fire in LA this year is estimated to have cost more than the other four combined.
https://www.energysage.com/news/ca-electricity-rates-increas...
That is only one factor. Others include: overallocation of fixed costs to consumers, CA's climate and energy policies, CA's high regulatory burden, and CA's unique geographic challenges. Some of these are self imposed.
[1] https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/03/california-...
[2] https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4950
[3] https://www.ppic.org/blog/a-closer-look-at-californias-surgi...
[4] https://www.ivy-energy.com/post/californias-ever-increasing-...
That is because of transmission costs and upgrades required because of climate change, not generation costs.
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.
By my math that's about 10 cents per kilowatt hour. That's pretty good for California.
This is a perfect example where simulations would be really great to demonstrate the cost of replacing the nuclear power station with an alternative. Take last 5 years worth of weather data and energy consumption, run a combination of solar and lithium storage solution for a similar cost as what is being suggested (say $8B), and see if they would fill in the role of the nuclear power plant. If they can't, add one or several natural gas peak plants to the mix and use less storage, and find how much would be needed. Some cost would be added to build new transmission, but it can be added on top of the simulation.
Replacing base load with solar and batteries, especially for days when weather makes supply the lowest and demand the highest, is in general a non-trivial problem, but it is location dependent. Maybe California is one where it make sense.
> Replacing base load with solar and batteries, especially for days when weather makes supply the lowest and demand the highest, is in general a non-trivial problem, but it is location dependent. Maybe California is one where it make sense.
Storage and gas capacity make this a fairly trivial problem, but it is somewhat location dependent.
The difficulties in deploying it are mostly political and regulatory, and not technical.
Places like Texas, with a fairly open market that allow new entrants to add assets on their own initiative, storage paired with wind and solar is dominating the market. In fact in most of the us, storage/solar/wind is mostly what's getting deployed no the grid, see the map at the bottom:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586#
However, you only see batteries getting added after there's already a fairly large chunk of renewables on the grid. Before then, there's not much need for the expense. Last stat I heard was that 60% of solar deployments in the US included storage, and that's only going to go up.
And you can see on EIA's map that the Intermountain gas plant under discussion is the largest gas addition this year. The only reason it's gas and not solar and storage is that in 2019 the union was anti-renewables for political reasons:
https://archive.is/dpoM1
It would have been better to have solar plus storage. There's far more gas on the grid than is necessary to provide backup to California's current solar+storage capacity.
California hit a new low of 22% fossil generation for the first half of 25. It makes sense and is already happening
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.
I'm not sure why anybody is annoyed by this, but if it does: just multiply the MW by 4 hours. That's the standard deployment for storage right now.
naw
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.
/.? 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.