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Russia has recently been rocked the import of necessary technology and unpredictable in a country like Russia, the change is worth celebrating for its health benefits. Coal contributes significantly to air pollution with particulate matter (PM), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen ox ides (NOx), which cause respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Any significant decrease in coal use could prevent thou sands of premature deaths and hospitalizations related to air quality. Moreover, if Russia were to switch all its coal-fired electric production to natural gas, it would result in a net reduction of about 100 million tons of CO2.
One person who would rejoice in such a change is Konstantin Samoilov, a member of Project Save the World who lives now in Uzbekistan. Until he chose to emigrate from Russia rather than participate in Putin’s war against Ukraine, he had been an executive in a Russian energy company. His job had been to create power plants in several post-Soviet countries that remain integrated in the same giant power grid. We asked Konstantin to write the following article about the prospects for a “Russian revolution” to topple King Coal (or would it be Czar Coal)? by major electricity blackouts. In the southern part of the country, more than one gigawatt of electrical capacity has been taken out of the unified electrical grid. Electricity supply was cut to over one million people for days at time and rolling electrical blackouts were introduced in the major cities of the South. Some rolling blackouts are still in effect.
Russia electrical energy system has not seen a disaster like that in the last twenty years and it appears to be just the beginning of the crisis hitting an already troubled industry. And this could be a serious obstacle to the lowering of air-pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in Russia. There are several reasons for these blackouts. The Russian energy infra structure, particularly in regions heavily reliant on fossil fuels, has faced challenges due to aging equipment and a lack of maintenance. This has made the grid more susceptible to failures. Also, as energy consumption rises, especially during peak times, the demand can exceed supply, leading to blackouts. International sanctions have impacted parts for maintenance and upgrades of energy infrastructure, affecting reliability. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the ongoing military activity in Ukraine has led to a reallocation of resources, potentially diverting attention and funding away from essential services like electricity.
Russia’s energy system is an inter connected network for electrical de livery from producers to consumers. An electrical grid consists of electricity-generating power plants, electrical substations to step voltage up or down, electrical power transmitting lines to carry power over long distances, and finally, electric power distribution to customers. In that last step, voltage is stepped down again to the required service voltage. Power plants are typically built close to energy sources and far from densely populated areas. Electrical grids vary in size and can cover whole countries or continents.
The energy system of the Russia consists of seven unified energy subsystems, including the Center, the Middle Volga, the Urals, the Northwest, the South, the East and Siberia and seven geographically isolated energy subsystems, including Chukotka, Kamchatka, Sakhalin, Magadan, Norilsk-Taimyr, Nikolaevsk and Sakha.
Electricity is generated inside power stations – or power plants. There are three different main types of power plants in Russia – nuclear power plants, hydroelectric power plants, and heat power plants.
Hydroelectric power plants con vert the kinetic energy of water into the mechanical energy of turbine rotation, which is then converted into electrical energy. Nuclear power plants use uranium-fueled nuclear fission to release large amounts of heat that creates vapor which, in turn, rotates turbines and pro duces electrical energy. Heat power plants are based on similar principle as nuclear power plants, but instead of using uranium fuel for re leasing large amounts of heat, they use fossil fuels – mainly coal and natural gas.
Thermal power plants produce 63.7% of Russia’s electricity. Hydro electrical power plants in Russia pro duce 18.6%. Nuclear power plants in Russia produce 17.5%. The rest of the electricity is produced with renewable sources of energy: wind and solar power. Historically, coal was the main fuel for producing electricity in the USSR. In the 1960s and 1970s, large natural gas fields in the eastern part of the country were discovered and developed and the nuclear energy industry made a technological leap, allowing it to pro duce electrical energy. That was when many coal-fired power plants in the European part of the country changed to using natural gas and many new nuclear power plants were constructed, greatly decreasing the use of coal for electricity production. Currently in Russia 18% of all heat power plants are fired by coal.
Coal-fired power plants are the least friendly for the environment. Of course, regular coal is not burnt in modern power plants. Instead, coal is crushed into coal dust and supplied with compressed air to boilers and burned there in pulverized coal burners. Particles of crushed coal heat up, flare up, burn, and release energy in other words, create heat Coal consists of one main combustible substance – carbon – and other Components, including the main mineral (nonflammable) component, silicon oxide (sand) and aluminum oxide (silica). All of this mineral part is also heated, but it is rather useless since it does not emit heat. In the burner, the mineral part swells into large pieces Coal-fired power plant even emit radioactivity more than any nuclear power plant, since coal always contains fissile natural substances due to the turbulence and flows down the furnace under the influence of its weight. Part of the mineral component does not have time to consolidate and is carried away by the flow from the boiler into the pipe.
The part that enters the boiler is called slag; the part that is carried away by flue gases is called ash. The slag enters a ditch with running water, which is located under the boiler, and is trans ported to the ash dump. Before the flue gases enter the atmosphere through the pipe, they are cleaned.
There are several cleaning schemes, but the most common is water. Flue gases are fed into scrubbers at a certain speed – a large barrel where water flows down its inner walls. The system is designed for flue gases to fall on this water film, and the ash that is in the gases is captured by this water and flows into the same ditch. The already purified gas enters the pipe. The efficiency of such a system is about 85%, but that varies considerably, depending on how it is managed. Sometimes several stages of purification are carried out to increase the efficiency.
In addition to the mineral component that pollutes the air, there are other substances in coal, such as sulfur. When it burns, it turns into sulfur dioxide, which forms sulfuric acid upon entering the atmosphere. There, combined with water, it forms sulfuric acid, resulting in acid rain. Then there are metals that evaporate in a flare and turn into gases, and then turn back into metals or their compounds in the atmosphere. Coal
fired power plants even emit radioactivity more than any nuclear power plant, since coal always contains fissile natural substances. Also, at high temperatures, nitro gen present in the air that is supplied for combustion turns into nitrogen oxides, which, in turn, can form nitric and nitrous oxide when combined with moisture.
Modern technologies exist that can clean flue gases from ash effectively. Russia’s biggest problem is that absolute majority of coal-fired power plants are older than 40 years. They were con structed in the USSR, where the problem of climate change was never mentioned and decreasing air pollution was not on the Soviet government’s agenda. Now all the air pollution emitted by old Soviet coal-fired power plants is spread all over the territory of Russia. And with all the current problems experienced by Russia’s energy system, it is safe to assume that no major replacement or modernization of the existing coal-fired power-plants is going to take place in the foreseeable future.
But this is what needs to be done to decrease air-pollution: replace coal fired power plants with natural gas power plants or modernize them completely to zero-level emissions – before taking other more costly, more sophisticated and less effective steps. We owe it to the planet – it’s long overdue. Konstantin Samoilov hosts a streaming show, “Inside Russia,” six days a week on YouTube.