How much longer before coal routinely falls below 20 percent of all generation?
The lowest number of megawatt-hours produced from coal-firing, in memory, was this April. According to Friday's Energy Department data.
Second lowest number of megawatt-hours from coal? This March. Fourth lowest? This February. (Third lowest was last November.)
Indeed, over the last few decades, in only eight months has the number of megawatt-hours from coal fallen below a hundred million.
Three of those eight months were February, March and April of this year. Another three of those months were October, November and December of last year.
And April 2015 and April 2012 are the remaining two months with coal below a hundred million megawatt-hours.
The record low of this April was 72.2 million megawatt-hours. That's real low. As recently as April 2010, six years earlier, coal produced 127 million megawatt-hours, seventy-six percent higher.
At this rate, the number of megawatt-hours produced from coal in 2016 might fall below a trillion. This hasn't happened since the 1970's, when U.S. population was under 225 million.
In 2016 to date, the percentage of all utility-scale power generation that comes from coal-firing was 27.8 percent. That's not even close to the percentage that comes from natural gas-firing, which was 32.6 percent. Nuclear power generation held third place, with 21.1 percent.
For the last two months for which there is data, March and April, coal generation was less than 25 percent of all generation. How much longer before coal routinely falls below 20 percent of all generation?
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Steve Mitnick, Editor-in-Chief, Public Utilities Fortnightly
E-mail me: mitnick@fortnightly.com
