A new power plant that will use coal and produce 585 megawatts is being built in VA at a cost of 1.8 billion.?

Question

What viable alternatives are available today that will work in VA, that can be built for the same price and that will produce the same amount of Elec.

Wind will not work, wrong zone. In the places where it might, the NIMBY people have said NO to wind farms.

Solar is an out right joke. So what alternative power sources would you people like to see that would produce this much power for over 1.3 million homes, at such an affordable rate? Now this needs to be doable today, not ten years from now, not some pie in the sky dream, but what will generate this much power today,

Answer 1

That is a good solution to your problem... The CO2 that is produced by the plant will give the plants plenty of CO2 to live...

Answer 2

Since Virginia has the coal, use it;-} but insist on scrubbers.

There are useful byproducts to be recovered from coal.

Coal can also be liquified or gasified for better efficiency.

Answer 3

I'm not sure why, but futurist Ray Kurzweil was talking about the capacity of solar cells to produce energy, and he thinks that it will increase geometrically just like Moore's law and processor speed in computers, and the increase in available memory.  Something to do with nanotechnology transforming solar cells into an information technology.  Like I said, I didn't quite grasp his arguments.  The point is, solar power may not be a joke for that much longer.

As for the coal plant, if the objection is the greenhouse gas produced, we are desperate need of demonstration projects that will show if CO2 sequestration techniques will actually work.  If VA's plant uses these techniques, then it's a step in the right direction.  Not sure what happens if it doesn't work as well as planned, though.

Answer 4

Lunar power......

It's an untapped market.

If enables the true thinkers to do things like "Go to the Sun".

The sun?   That's right, the sun.

Ok, environmental naysayers........Isn't that Globally impossible?   Besides, just way tooooooo hot?

Not if you go at night.

Answer 5

Solar thermal plants approach that size, with projects planned up to 200 MW at this point.

"Within a year, Ausra will match the price of natural gas plants, which generate electricity at about 9.2 cent per kilowatt hour, O’Donnell said. Within three years, it will match the cost of coal-fired plants, which is about 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour (without clean coal processes such as carbon sequestering or gassification)."