Is Coal on Life Support?

From my friend, great physicist and advocate for sensible energy policy and reliable climate science, Gordon Fulks.

Thanks Gordon
Gordon first introduces an article in the Oregonian
In it a wind advocate claims that coal is going going gone. From supplying half the electricity in America, it will be a non factor?
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/01/will_2013_be_the_year_coal_die.html
Then Gordon comments
To my considerable surprise, the comments are running substantially against him. And some of the commenters have a lot to say. One called Angus out for suggesting that coal production is down in the USA, when it is actually up.
Here is what I submitted:
Angus Duncan is a great salesman, probably able to sell practically anything to anyone. But along with that ability comes the question, ‘How much of what he says is really true?’
He is correct here that America is favoring new generation of electricity with natural gas. And he is correct that Portland General Electric is scrapping its coal-fired power plant in Boardman far before the end of its design life. But he fails to mention that the move toward natural gas has a lot to do with the current low price (oversupply) of this fuel, the advantages of utilizing it, and the enormous amount of money that the natural gas industry has spent demonizing coal.
While modern gas turbine power plants are very thermally efficient, Angus does not tell you that this efficiency is lost when the power plant must be designed to turn on and off rapidly to support the windmills that he sells. And I suspect that he will never admit that the combined wind + natural gas schemes of PGE will burn more carbon than simply a high efficiency gas turbine plant alone. Nor will he admit that the apparent competitiveness of windmills comes from ignoring the huge subsidies that they get. Practically anything can be made to look competitive, if someone else is paying the bill. But taxpayers and ratepayers are the same people!
As to the coal plant at Boardman, PGE customers will lose one of their best and cheapest sources of power when this relatively modern plant is scrapped in favor of much more expensive choices like wind + gas. The inevitable result will be much higher electric bills.
Is Angus saving the world from “carbon pollution?” Of course not, because carbon dioxide is a huge net benefit by, among other things, substantially increasing agricultural crop production. The Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) nonsense is, well, nonsense.
Of course Angus promotes windmills as the futuristic way to generate power. Yet he knows that their cost and poor performance when needed most (cold winter nights and hot summer days) make them a very poor choice from a consumer perspective. Over Christmas, there was a long period where there was no wind generated power produced in this area.
Angus is also correct that the Obama Administration is trying to extend the Clean Air Act, designed to address noxious pollution from automobiles, to benign emissions from power plants. Because this is a gross misuse of a law designed for mobile sources, the US Supreme Court has agreed to decide this year whether or not they will allow such an enormous misuse of a law.
Yes, Angus is very good at part of the story. But we need professionals (real engineers, real scientists, and real attorneys) to tell use what is actually going on. The details are what really matter. Salesmen rarely level with you.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
gordonfulks@hotmail.com