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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Personal Finance / Macroeconomic Trends & Risks
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Author: tjscott0   😊 😞
Number: of 4460 
Subject: Re: Dept of War-Risks of alien power mongers
Date: 12/23/25 9:16 AM
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Coal power electric power plants--I''m BACK!

nakedcapitalism.com - These coal plants would have retired then came AI and trump

Since the second Trump administration took power in January, at least 15 coal plants have had planned retirements pushed back or delayed indefinitely, a DeSmog analysis found.

That’s mostly due to an expected rise in electricity demand, a surge largely driven by the rise of high-powered data centers needed to train and run artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Nearly 75 percent of the coal plants were on track to shutter in the next two years.
I suppose that temporarily that is no longer the case.

Not long ago, coal really did keep the lights on. In 2005, it provided roughly half of America’s electricity, making it by far the dominant power source nationwide. But in the past two decades, coal’s market share has rapidly waned. No new coal plants have come online since 2013. These days, its footprint has dwindled, with just 16 percent of the overall energy mix.

environmental regulations didn’t kill coal. Instead, its demise became inevitable mostly thanks to the rise of a competing fossil fuel: natural gas.

Gas has both economic and technological advantages over coal, said David Lindequist, an economist at Miami University who co-authored a recent paper on the environmental impacts of the shale gas boom.

As new fracking technologies helped to flood the U.S. market with cheap gas in the mid-2000s, utilities began a broad coal-to-gas pivot that’s still underway today.

the Trump administration said in September that it plans to feed the AI boom — with an estimated 100 gigawatts of capacity in the next five years — by keeping more old coal plants open. “I would say the majority of that coal capacity will stay online,” Wright said.

Gas turbine bottleneck:
May 30th, 2025
spglobal.com - US gas fired turbine wait times as much as seven years costs up sharply
US gas-fired turbine wait times as much as seven years; costs up sharply
February 20, 2025
power-eng.com - Long lead times are dooming some proposed gas plant projects
Long lead times are dooming some proposed gas plant projects

~10 years to build a nuclear power plant.
researchgate.net - Typical timeline of a nuclear plant construction and start up project Source IAEA
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