Decline

Pretend like it is not happening. That has always been a good solution.  Here in the heart of North Dakota coal country the ability to burn the crap is slowly coming to an end.  Kadizzle's whole career was involved in burning coal.  The simple minded say that means Kadizzle cannot be critical of anything the coal industry does.  A lot of things make sense at one point in history, but times change. Republicans are not prone to admitting change.  Lignite coal is a filthy low grade coal no matter how you slice it, but it is our coal.  It is like our president.  He is a terrible man, but he our president.  Now there are two lines of thought. We should support him because he is ours, or we should realize what a mess we have.  Now, back to coal.  The coal fired power plants are getting old and inefficient. The plant at Stanton has already closed.  Leland Olds has been limping along for years.  Two big things are giving coal fits.  First is natural gas, and second is wind power.  Natural gas is now cheap and plentiful, so plentiful they are just flaring it in western North Dakota to get rid of it.  The problem with wind power is the wind goes up and down.  To match demand that means the coal fired plants need to go up and down. That is hard on the old coal fired plants.  A coal fired plant takes time to go up or down.  On the other hand a gas fired turbine can quickly respond to high demand.  Gas burns much more cleaner than coal, and is more efficient. 

In coal country everyone keeps repeating the mantra "clean coal".  When you try to clean anything you burn you almost always use energy to clean it.  So when you put more and more pollution control on coal you end up using more and more of the energy just to clean the exhaust.  In the end if the Republicans fail to face the reality of coals demise the coal towns will be ghost towns.  So North Dakota needs to come up with a new game.  Kadizzle thinks the new game will be nuclear power. What?  While people have been sleeping big advances in nuclear technology have been made from an efficiency standpoint, and from a safety point of view.  If North Dakota got ahead of the curve and actively embraced nuclear we might survive, but that is unlikely.