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Saturday, February 22, 2014

The Road To New England

For background to "the road to New England," go to the bottom of the blog, and click on the tag, "Road_To_New_England."

There was an interesting piece over at SeekingAlpha today: twelve reasons why the sky-high price of natural gas won't last. Maybe, maybe not. But this is not reassuring. The government is now projecting, in a story dated February 14, 2014, that more coal-fired power plants will be retired by 2016 than have been scheduled

President Obama, in his war on coal, is putting the nation on track to be a nation more and more dependent on one source of fuel for electricity: natural gas.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on what you rad here or what you think you may have read here, but with extreme weather, as predicted by the warmists, resulting in colder winters (electric heaters) and hot summers (air conditioners), natural gas companies seem to be sitting really pretty. This is going to be very, very interesting, to watch this play out. 

At the linked story look at the rate of the projected cumulative retirements of coal-fired generating  capacity between 2013 and 2016. It is practically straight up.


For Americans this has to be absolutely scary; there is no way that alternative sources of energy can easily pick up the difference. Look at the rate, practically straight up. By the end of next year, it was originally projected that 30 gigawatts of coal-fired generating capacity would have been retired under the war on coal; now that has doubled to 60 gigawatts, the anticipated end state (where the line flattens out) in one two years, and the end state almost one and a half times the original projection. The US won't run short of electricity-generating capacity: it will simply be more expensive.

Again, this is not an investment site, but .... 

Way off topic, but I see three major Obama legacies:
  • a nuclear arms race in the Mideast
  • a US dependent on one fuel for electricity (natural gas)
  • a federally-defined 30-hour work week
China will find US coal relatively inexpensive and relatively accessible.

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