Should coal stay?

Honestly if they made Cedar Point remove the trains from the park and all other parks in the world it would not make any difference to me. If the people on this planet is truly in to "going green" and doing away with global warming, then we got to start some where. It may suck to see the trains go but its something that needs to happen. look at the car companies and what they are already doing. They are making cars that use less gas then ever before. They are creating Hydro-electric cars. So its only fare that everyone dose there part to cut down on energy and pollution.
That's my opinion...

Something that needs to happen?

There is also the human tendency towards overreaction when society is plagued with something that gets labeled as a problem. Then, over time, the pendulum of emotional reaction settles and we reach a new, hopefully healthier, equilibrium.

Removing the coal-burning trains from CP in the name of "going green" would be classified as an overreaction in my opinion. Can the park take measures to help reduce its footprint? Of course. Using 100% recycled materials at the food (which also tastes recycled) stands, recycling all of its own trash, build a windmill to harness the wind power on the coast, capture some solar energy...(who knows how much they already do?).

This is not ignoring the aggregate view, this is acknowledging that there is some tangible quality to keeping a working piece of history at the park, as long as said park also embraces a significant amount of measures to be more energy efficient.

Fine, but there will come a time in the relative near future where there won't be any coal to burn for it. Keep that in mind.

Kevinj said:build a windmill to harness the wind power on the coast, capture some solar energy...

This is such a good idea and I have thought the park should do this for a longtime now. If not for multiple buildings/facilities, then at least for the new corporate building. Instead though, they installed this large awful looking diesel powered generator behind the building for backup power. It has already been running for quite a bit too. Its very loud and about as far from “green” as you can get. Solar power is another great way to harness power and the park has plenty of roof space on buildings to capture this (including the new building). These are steps the park should take but unfortunately I don’t think we will see it anytime soon.

(who knows how much they already do?).

Trust me, it isn’t much.

Boy, if they just recycled pop/water bottles that would go a LONG way.

I do like the feel/sound/look/smell of the coal trains. Would I miss it if they went to something else? I don't know. Stone Mountain has a diesel train, if I'm not mistaken, but I still enjoyed the ride.

No coal to burn in the very near future? Define very near. Several hundred years - I agree.

Solar is not going to be anywhere near cost effective at CP because of the northern latitude and the commonly cloudy days.

Wind might be practical, but do you really want to see a giant windmill at the Point? Now - if it doubled as a ride...

Better idea. How's about Ohio builds some more nuke plants, shuts down some old fossil fuel plants, and the air becomes so clean and the temp so cold that the coal burning trains will be ignored.

99er said:
Instead though, they installed this large awful looking diesel powered generator behind the building for backup power. It has already been running for quite a bit too. Its very loud and about as far from “green” as you can get.

Are you sure it is diesel? Most backup generators now run on natural gas. Not only is pollution very low but the supply is unlimited in that you don't have to fill fuel tanks. If they did install a diesel generator someone was not thinking.

I agree - LPG or Natural Gas is the way to go. I have a Natural Gas unit at my home. During the blackout many years ago, I was the only one on the block with power. Of course I flaunted it a little, cranked the A/C and had a back yard party with all the lights on. :-)

Rapids, I have read many different reports about coal reserves. Many of the older estimates that suggest we have hundreds of years of coal to burn have been discredited. We certainly have decades' worth -- and maybe a century. But the point is that the cost of removing coal is going to continue to climb, just as it is with oil.

At some point in the near future, the cost of alternative energy is going to intersect with the cost of fossil fuel (we may already be there with wind power, or not far from it). As far as solar power goes, guess which country gets the highest percentage of its energy production from the sun? That would be Germany. Cloudy Germany, with a more northerly latitude than Sandusky, Ohio.

I would love to see a giant windmill at the Point. Make it three or four dozen. Get used to seeing wind turbines. In the next few years, we're going to start seeing them everywhere. And we'd better -- because if we don't, it means civilization will be losing the war to exist at the high energy usage we take for granted today.

Bring on the nuke plants. The more, the merrier. We need 'em, too. I'm for any and all energy production that digs us out of the hole we are rapidly approaching. Don't get used to $1.60 gas; it won't be around for long, unless Obama fails and this recession really does turn into a deflationary depression.
Edited for grammatical correctness.

I've always wondered if CP could build it's own windmill to produce its own electricty. Now obviously it would be expensive to build (although I would guess less than a world-record breaking coaster), but would of course pay for itself down the road. I wonder what CP's electricity bill is?

I feel like we discussed this very idea in a thread awhile back, but no luck with a search.

To add on to what Mike is saying, more reliance on coal drastically reduces the supply lifespan, and gets us back to where we are now. Actually it would be worse, because it would be foreign companies that invent all of the stuff we talk about now. Why Americans continue to piss in the face of one of the greatest economic opportunities in our history is beyond me. It's a total head scratcher.

I'm all for more nuclear plants as well (and presidents who can pronounce it). However, we have to lift the ban on recycling the fuel. We bury "spent" fuel and throw away 25% of its potential, and the waste is dangerously radioactive for hundreds of years. By way of reprocessing you can limit that to a hundred years.

Pete said:

Are you sure it is diesel?

Not 100%, but that is what I was told it was from a couple of people working around/with it. I have seen it run and if it is something other than diesel, its been overhauled. The generator is an older one and very used. It's a pretty large one too!

Speaking of the wind turbines, I could have sworn I read an article on here last winter that said they were studying the possibility of putting one in at/near LHP. I remember the article said all of LHP could be powered by one wind turbine with power to spare. I'm sure I'm not just making that up, but I can't find the article anywhere.

As far as using a diesel generator as opposed to a Natural Gas generator, do they even make bigger sized Natural Gas generators? Natural Gas generators make a great deal of sense for those in a house as they are small, quiet, and theoretically will have fuel to run continuously.

When we're talking in megawatts, I believe the Diesel generators make more sense. They are also not exactly cheap to buy at that kind of wattage. If the one CP is using is indeed an older model, that would make a lot of sense. A quick google search also didn't turn up any large Natural Gas generators, but that isn't any indication on whether they actually exist.

I worked for a guy who has natural gas generators as back up power for his data center (mostly to power the floor and box fans he was using to cool it hahaha), and I was excited to think they made big natural gas ones, too - however he also used residential grade AC units to try and cool it, so I doubt anything he did was right.

Haha! Well I bet it's possible, It just depends on if NG was as efficient as Diesel at megawatts.

NG is much cleaner, but has about 75% of the BTU's of diesel fuel. As far as the foot print of two small steam locomotives, it pales in comparison to what rolls into the parking lots of CP every day of the season.

The other thing to consider - How often are you really going to be running a generator and running on emergency power? Is the amount of environment you're going to supposedly magically save worth the extra investment, should there be an extra monetary investment?

We've seriously run our generators maybe 30-40 hours in the last year or two not counting the 15-30 minute tests we run weekly.

So why are we talking about generators then?

Jeff said:
... Few among us were alive when these kinds of locomotives were used commercially, so I'm not entirely sure where the nostalgia comes from.

At this point, there really isn't much "nostalgia" except for the Cedar Point that you knew in your childhood. I think these days the better term is probably "novelty".

As for 'alternative' energy, I'm all for developing anything that makes sense. The development of energy technology will bring the costs down and make that which is now considered 'alternative' actually cost effective. But the trick is, we have to make the new technologies affordable. I'm entirely opposed to any scheme that would artificially push alternatives by making conventional methods more expensive, especially any scheme which makes conventional methods more expensive and then uses that overcharge to subsidize the new alternatives. Because that is an inherently unsustainable model.

I also think the most important thing we need to do in terms of energy is to concentrate on producing more electricity than we know what to do with using the absolute lowest cost methods available. Cheap, plentiful electricity, no matter how it is generated, is ultimately going to be the key to replacing our more difficult energy sources. If the electricity is cheap enough to produce, then batteries, fuel cells, and hydrogen combustion can all start to become reasonably cost effective. But it has to really be cheap. I pay something like $0.10/kWh and that's still too expensive to replace the gasoline and natural gas I now use for my car and my furnace.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.