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Comment by xxgreg | Hacker News Reader

What I find even more absurd is the United States, despite producing a huge amount of natural gas, consumes more coal per-capita than Germany.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/604946/per-capita-coal-c...

Edit: sorry that link got pay walled. Try this one.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...

This is 2015 data - and the US has narrowed the gap since.

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Coal [electricity] in the US is down to 60% of what it was ten years ago. Since the second half of 2015, the US has been generating more electricity with natural gas than with coal. The current difference between them is larger than the entirety of US solar production.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Coal isn't just used for electricity generation.

If you look at the 2017 BP energy report numbers the US is still about 20% above Germany in coal consumption per capita. (Not sure when 2018 numbers come out.)

I'm glad to see the US is reducing emissions. However ideally it wouldn't be due to swapping one fossil fuel for another. Makes you wonder what will happen if the prices of coal/gas flip again.

The US is adding a lot of solar generation - in just the last two years our solar electricity generation increased by more than the total solar output of Germany.

And what's up with Japan's steadily rising use of coal energy?

They are still a top 5 world economy.

The usual answer is "because Fukushima shut down the nuclear industry, duh". But this is obviously wrong as when looking at the data. Much of the increase was between 2000-2010.

I wonder if it's due to the monopoly structures of the energy business shielding them from the changes that the rest of the world has been seeing. I wonder how much of the coal is used for electricity vs steel making etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...

The good news is that coal is now more expensive than gas, and even more the solar and wind in high insolation/windy areas. Unfortunately, since coal is no longer competitive, the Trump administration has been talking about subsidizing it.

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