Of course economics is killing coal anyway.

Reader comment on: Thank Larry Tribe

Submitted by lyle (United States), Feb 12, 2016 17:51

With the low prices of natural gas, and the need for plants that can follow load ramps rapidily current coal plants have become uneconomic. In addition having to provide for secure ash storage raises the price of electricity generated from coal. A number of recent reports suggest that the EPA rule may well be irrelvant to the future of coal as Mr. Market has decided it is no longer the economic fuel for electrictiy. Note that coal used to be used widely to heat home, but in the 1940s and 1950s that became uneconomic.

Now of course I also see that because of economic conditions the unmanned underground mining of coal has not arrived, even though most of the tech to do so is here. (the continious coal miner is already controlled from 10 to 15 feet away, add cameras etc, and a fiber cable and you could move the miners back to truly safe areas. just like today the most advanced oil rigs use iron roughnecks to add and subtract pipe joints and automated pipe handling systems to handle the pipe. The driller runs everything with a joy stick, It is not clear why underground coal mining could not do similar things. Further even in surface mining remote/autonomous trucks to haul the coal from the mine face can be done if we can build autonomous cars)

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