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Solar electricity is poised to overtake coal in—of all places—Texas
(www.motherjones.com)
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Business friendly energy hungry state with enormous plots of undeveloped real estate does the logical thing.
News At Eleven
Incidentally, NGL plants are being built out rapidly in Texas for a tangential reason. Unlike with coal, an NGL plant can turn itself off and on quickly and easily. Consequently, when the sun is shining, NGLs can turn off rather than selling electricity into a cheap market. And when it is night/overcast, they turn on to make up the difference
NGL is yet another TLA (three letter acronym)
tell us what it means at least once!
Sorry. Natural Gas Liquids. Some combination of methane, ethane, isobutane, and propane, which are compressed/chilled to a liquid state for transportation and used to power electric generators.
Natural Gas Liquids. I remember seeing Liquid Natural Gas quite a bit, but I guess we can just shuffle the letters around however we want.
Edit: If you want to know the difference (more details here)
Natural gas can also use efficient modern turbines. Coal plants are a nonstarter in the modern era because they run so dirty with impurities that you have to use shitty turbines that are down for maintenance cleaning all the time.
Natural gas turbines can bypass the need to boil water and drive steam turbines, because the actual combustion of the gas creates the rotational energy directly.
Steam turbines are pretty great, though. Not sure how the rest of a coal plant operates, but the turbines themselves shouldn't be touching any combustion byproduct.
I believe they also recover the heat to boil water to run steam turbines. Double the turbines.