Something new is happening which will be even better.

Let me first quickly explain the coal problem.

How much is 750 million tons of coal per year ?

The Robert W. Scherer Coal Power Plant is near Macon, Georgia. The $2.1 billion facility has four, self-contained 880 megawatt units. This is 3.5 Gigawatts of power. It burns 1,288 tons of coal every hour—11 million tons a year.

The US has the equivalent of 70 times this much coal.

Coal in the USA is usually sent to coal plants in 120-car trains. Each train car carries are roughly 120 tons. Thus the capacity of a modern unit coal train is around 15,000 tons per train.

There are at least thirty-six of these two-mile long coal trains en route to Scherer on the ten-day roundtrip from Wyoming (1800 miles away). Between three and five trains offload at Scherer daily. Coal is dumped from doors in the bottoms of the cars as they travel over an unloading trestle. The trains never stop and a 120-car train unloads in half an half-hour.