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Coal power in the United States accounted for 39% of the country's electricity production in 2014.〔http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_01〕 Coal supplied 16.5 quadrillion BTUs of energy to electric power plants in 2013, which made up nearly 92% of coal's contribution to energy supply.〔https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/index.html https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2013/2013USEnergy.pdf〕 Utilities buy more than 90 percent of the coal mined in the United States.〔http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_586978.html〕 Coal has been used to generate electricity in the United States since an Edison plant was built to serve New York City in 1882. The first alternating current power station was opened by General Electric in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania in 1902, servicing the Webster Coal and Coke Company.〔 By the mid-twentieth century, coal had become the leading fuel for generating electricity in the US. The long, steady rise of coal-fired generation of electricity shifted to a decline after 2007. The decline has been linked to the increased availability of natural gas and renewable power, and more stringent environmental regulations. The Environmental Protection Administration has advanced restrictions on coal plants to counteract mercury pollution, smog, and global warming only in 2012; ==Recent trends, comparisons, and forecasts== The average share of electricity generated from coal in the US has dropped from 52.8% in 1997 to 45.0% in 2009.〔(Electric Power Monthly - Energy Information Administration )〕 In 2009, there were 1436 coal-powered units at the electrical utilities across the US, with a total nominal capacity of 338.732 GW (compared to 1024 units at nominal 278 GW in 2000). The actual average generated power from coal in 2006 was 227.1 GW (1.991 trillion kilowatt-hours per year), the highest in the world and still slightly ahead of China (1.95 trillion kilowatt-hours per year) at that time.〔See Wikipedia article on Chinese economy〕 In 2000, the US average production of electricity from coal was 224.3 GW (1.966 trillion kilowatt-hours for the year).〔 In 2006, US electrical generation consumed or 92.3% of the coal mined in the US. In the first quarter of 2012, the use of coal for electricity generation declined substantially more, 21% from 2011 levels. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 27 gigawatts of capacity from coal-fired generators is to be retired from 175 coal-fired power plants between 2012 and 2016. Natural gas showed a corresponding increase, increasing by a third over 2011.〔Electric Power Monthly, March 2011 (released May 2012), U.S. Energy Information Administration〕 Coal's share of electricity generation dropped to just over 36%.〔 The coal plants are mostly base-load plants and account for about 32% of the peak electricity production in the summer, when the electricity demand is the highest and the auxiliary (mostly non-coal) plants are added to the grid.〔(EIA - Electricity Data, Analysis, Surveys )〕 As of 7/7/11, utility companies will shut down and retire aging coal-fired power plants following the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) announcement of the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAP).〔(EPA finalizes rules for cross-state air pollution - The Hill's E2-Wire )〕 The extent of shutdowns and reduction in utilization will depend on factors such as future price of natural gas and cost of installation of pollution control equipment; however, as of 2013, the future of coal-fired power plants in the United States did not appear promising. Recent estimates gauge that an additional 40 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired capacity will retire by 2020 (in addition to the nearly 20GW that have retired as of 2014). This is driven most strongly by inexpensive natural gas competing with coal, and EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which require significant reductions in emissions of mercury, acid gases, and toxic metals, scheduled to take effect in April 2015. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Coal power in the United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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