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Comment by jasoncartwright | Hacker News Reader

From the UK... "A decade ago, coal plants generated almost a third of the UK’s electricity, but in the first half of this year they have provided only 3%."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon...

https://electricityproduction.uk/from/coal/?t=8y

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Meanwhile in Poland it's been 78.2% in 2018, "down" from 78.4% in 2017. And the Polish government has made it clear that coal will remain the basis of energy production here.

I'm frustrated as I'm writing this on a train from Berlin to Warsaw. One of the reasons why I chose to travel by train rather than fly was the carbon footprint journey, and I'm cutting it down much less than I should be.

And don't forget that there's still a huge number of private homes which use coal fired boilers. Even if all coal power plants closed tomorrow, Polish towns would still be consuming huge amounts of coal just to stay warm in winter(and there's practically no regulations about emissions from those, it just goes straight up your chimney).

There is a lot of funding available for replacing those - one of the largest chunks of cash provided by eu do far.

Sure, but there's still a lot of people who don't want to, simply because coal is cheaper than both eco-pellets and gas. My grandparents only changed theirs from coal to gas last year, and only because grandpa was getting too old to go and add coal to the boiler every few hours - but they've been complaining about the fortune that the gas is costing them ever since.

A carbon tax would fix that.

And one won't be implemented for the same reason why coal boilers haven't been banned yet - "think of the poor people - if they cannot afford their coal for winter how will they stay warm?".

Any serious carbon tax scheme proposed is income neutral; a tax-and-dividend system.

Can you explain how it would work in this case please?

You tax carbon at say, $40 a ton. You then distribute any revenue from the tax as a dividend to every adult in the country.

It results in a net increase in purchasing power for your most vulnerable citizens.

Different places change at different rates. One thing that will happen, however, is that as some of the big coal customers switch, the economies of scale for coal production change, and it becomes even more expensive. So, coal will eventually become too pricey even for places like Poland, even though "Poland" does not bring to mind "summer skies where solar would be competitive" (I may be biased as I've only ever visited Poland around Christmastime).

Poland's only local energy source is coal, which is why they're so set on using it. Natural gas comes mainly from Russia, and they don't have the capital for nuclear. Solar isn't a good option in Poland due to the long winter nights, and it's not a particularly windy country for wind generation.

>they don't have the capital for nuclear

I find that kind of hard to believe.

You find it hard to believe that one of Europe's poorer countries has trouble finding the €20bn over 10 years it will cost? The UK is having trouble affording that for Hinckley C.

Poland isn't "one of Europe's poorer countries" and many countries that operate nuclear power plants are poorer than Poland (such as: Argentina, Armenia, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, Turkey, Ukraine)

I wouldn't throw Brazil in there, Brazil has barely 2 functioning reactors (Angra I and Angra II) with the third one being stalled since 1984, restarted in 2007 and so far has no hope of being finished in time (announced for 2020 but now waiting investments to continue development).

We don't have trouble affording it in the UK, we have trouble with the morons in charge wanting to do it arse about face.

The smart way would be to commission half a dozen state of the art designs (the 2nd is cheaper easier than the first and so on) over a decade, the French did 15 reactors in about a decade and economies of scale and expertise make each successor simpler.

We desperately need more baseload supply to supplement on the ongoing renewables switch, the grid is is operating on the slimmest safety factor I can recall.

I grew up in rural Poland, and still visit frequently. Trust me, it's really poor. It does a great job of presenting itself as richer than it is, but leave one of the metro areas like Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, whatever, and you see people living in what would be considered abject poverty in the US. It can barely keep its existing infrastructure working well.

Long winter nights are usually offset by long summer days.

...and your peak demand for energy is heating in the winter. Not convenient if you have to somehow store all that energy from summer for use in winter.

Though I guess Poland is still heated by NG, even if it’s coming from Russia. Heating with electricity is pretty inefficient.

Heating with electricity is plenty efficient if using heat pumps. In fact, a very high efficiency natural gas advanced combined cycle plant providing electricity to heat pump heaters with a COP of 2.5 or better (often 3 or more) is actually more energy efficient than burning the natural gas for heat directly, as crazy as that seems.

But yeah, finding clean sources of electricity in winter is a challenge for a place like Poland. Poor hydroelectric resource. Only modest geothermal potential. Modest solar (not good for winter load). But wind potential isn't too bad in the north of the country and in the Baltic Sea. Nuclear power should be considered, however, as it is in Finland.

I’ve never heard of heat pumps being used in say an apartment building that tend to dominate these sorts of locales, but perhaps that’s just because the technology is new and the buildings are old?

Nuclear has super high capital costs that usually must be subsidized by the state (and insurance definitely needs to be subsidized). Not to mention corruption has to be low enough that a disaster doesn’t occur. I can see less developed countries not being able to take this route.

They have wind and sun just like Germany.

They definitely have enough capital for nuclear. Their neighbours, Slovakia and Czechia, both have quite significant nuclear installations. Czechia generates 34% [1] of electricity from nuclear and Slovakia 52% [2]. Slovakia is finishing expansion of one of their nuclear power plants (Mochovce), which will add 2 more reactors - each with ability to deliver 13% of total country consumption [3].

Both Slovakia and Czechia are bit more "richer" than Poland (if you look at GDP (PPP) per capita), however Poland is much bigger economy - 5x size of Slovakia.

My guess is that because so far they had so much coal (largest reserves in Europe [4]), it was no brainer for them. However they are now in the process of commissioning nuclear power plant and plan to generate power from nuclear by 2033 [4]

[1] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetika_v_Česku#Výroba_elek... (second row - Jadro - is nuclear)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_energy_in_Slovakia

[3] https://www.seas.sk/mochovce-3-4-npp

[4] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

Nuclear may have some of the same issues as coal, in that if its use declines worldwide it becomes more expensive for you to keep using it. Not to mention the historical baggage associated with it.

Wind would be more likely I'd think?

You're assuming Polish government approaches this as an economic problem.

While this is correct, it doesn't factor in that most of Poland/eastern Europe's coal electricity generation is sourced from often nearby lignite mines separate from the global commodity system (lignite = brown coal, the dirtiest least, efficient coal type). So the real economic force that will likely have an effect here is the decreasing costs of solar and wind, rather than global commodity price changes as certain markets migrate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mines_in_Poland

I think this economic argument is what is going to kill Australia's economy in about 6 - 10 years time.

We are so dead set on maintaining our resource sector, in particular coal, that there seems to be no acknowledge that a crash is coming.

Yes, the price is high right now, which is great as a producer. But at some point there will be an inflection: the high price of coal, vs decreasing renewables and improvements to grids will mean coal plants become less and less untenable.

The price will crash, we'll be left with a massive oversupply of both the resource and the infrastructure. The communities that pushed for coal mines because they provide employment are going to be left with nothing.

In the end, mines like the Adani's Carmichael mine will fail with only a small amount of the resources extracted.

This is a great result for the climate, more coal left in the ground, it's just an ass about way of doing it that's going to wreak havoc with our economy.

From the outside this seems obvious and perplexing why it is being done anyway.

This crash hit hard small Estonia right now, the market is open and every technology has become cheaper. The only argument right now keeping it alive is security aspect and not having either good climate nor gas around there. Or money to build my nuclear

To be fair Poland started with that number being over 98% when communism fell.

It's estimated Poland would have to spend >5% of GDP for 20+ years to replace it with nuclear or renewables and it's not a popular idea when you have a populist, global-warming skeptic government and close to 100k people working in coal mining (not that far from 1% of all employed in Poland)

tl;dr; unless there is external pressure & funding it's not changing.

I wonder how many other countries are in Poland's boat? That's some tremendous political resistance to overcome.

In American politics, the fate of coal miners is ridiculously overrated. The coal industry employs fewer people than a mid-sized national fast food chain.

Go further east and it's the same. There's also no sun and the gas is expensive or from Russia. Pro west countries don't want to depend on Russian gas. The whole world is complex and energy sector just mirrors it. Hence the change is difficult to overcome and many people don't see or understand why. Everyone would love to be green and carbon free, that's not the question.

Any yet average person in Poland has a similar carbon footprint.

Here in Australia, our current Prime Minister proudly brought in a lump of coal into the Parliament to show how not scary it is.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-m...

And this week blew off the representatives of the Pacific islands that will first to go due to sea level rise, yesterday your deputy PM said that that wasn't a problem because "they come here to pick our fruit" (forgetting that as Oz goes crispy around the edges there wont be any fruit).

Frankly you Aussies are a bit embarrassing at the moment, time to get your act together

At the moment? We have had seven Prime Ministers in the last ten years. I'm starting to believe we may be well beyond all hope politically speaking. Feels like we are beached as, bro.

There was a mini "scandal" in Germany not long ago during a meeting between the Australian PM and Angela Merkel, when a handout for Merkel had some info about said PM, including his name. Some German newspapers saw that as an embarrassing slight to the Australians but some Aussies on the net said sth along the lines of "well, I think it's understandable with so much turnover during the past few years..."

It's also quite stupid considering how vulnerable climate change his country is. Think how badly major heat waves already effect Australian cities and how close to sea level most of Australia is, especially northern parts of Australia.

From what I read the PM seems to think he is some how immune to the effects and only smaller island nations will be effected, while simultaneously forgetting that he also lives on something which resembles an island, even if it is a big one.

It seems the Australian PM is certainly not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Coal is cheap and available in Poland why not use it? It is a bit hypocritical for Western European countries to move their industrial base to Poland first and then push for green energy as a mean to decrease competitiveness of Polish economy.

On the good side Poland is big time afforesting for the last 70 years from 20,8% in 1946 to 30% in 2020. Show me another country in Europe who did so much to sequester CO2 over last 70 years.

Also Poland and Czech Republic had decreased its CO2 production by 50% since 1990s - most in the world. Sure, EU money helped a lot but it was Polish jobs and life choices that paid for closing factories and reforming its post-communist dirty heavy industry, sewage treatment plants, agriculture etc.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

So not all bad.

PS. Plans for Polish nuclear power plant in Żarnowiec had been abolished post Chernobyl. You never know..

And I wish Poland got rid of coal and better yet cars. But be realistic.

As a Brit I could point out many idiotic brain dead things that the political class of this country does. But the switch from coal is quite frankly astonishing, and then you take a look at the biggest offshore wind farms [1] and you see what's replacing it, and then you look at the size of the planned wind farms [also 1] and you start to believe maybe our carbon reduction targets can be met.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms

Auctioning off Contracts for Difference seems like a really smart way to make government subsidy stretch further too.

The auction allows them to attract low bids by a simple and understandable competition. If you bid higher than other entrants you won't get a contract, but if you bid lower than your operating costs you'll lose money (or more realistically, you won't pay back investors for the capital on the construction fast enough to make sense).

The CfD setup means the government's subsidy only manages the uncertainty. If prices collapse, the government picks up a big difference, but if prices sky-rocket the wind farm operator ends up paying the government instead of receiving a subsidy at all.

One thing I'm told, and hope to see, is that the taller the wind turbine the more often it runs. At high altitudes it's basically permanently windy, the winds we experience as so variable are a low phenomenon, so in principle as the turbines get taller some of the intermittent production problem goes away by itself. That would be almost bigger than just offshore wind power being cheap enough to justify building it on purely economic grounds with no subsidy and no additional carbon taxes.

We don't produce enough coal to run coal plants anymore, that's why we've dumped coal power. Almost all of the remaining handful of coal mines in the UK are 100% allotted to our (also near gone now) steel industry.

I thought the cause was the other way round? That we dumped coal power so that we could stop producing coal, which we wanted to do because the coal miners’ strike demonstrated they/their unions were dangerous to the government?

Timing is wrong. The big wave of mine closures was the 80s. The plants ran on imported coal from e.g. Poland. In the 90s the "dash for gas" switched fuel. Then finally the renewable buildout got going and the EU directive killed the remaining coal plants. Drax has mostly switched to imported wood pellets.

It's weird though, if you look back at this week, yesterday for a few hours it was sunny _and_ windy in the middle of the day. That ought to depress the hell out of prices, most of the gas plants were idled. But for some reason a cold plant was fired up.

Did they lose money running that plant? Is there some setup where running the plant a certain amount (maybe on windy days when pollution effects in the vicinity are smallest) is just treated as a good thing even though we really ought to be burning less fossil fuels not more?

I don't understand the economics of coal versus gas in this space in a market like the UK. It seems as though with gas being cheaper it would just never make economic sense to burn coal when gas plants aren't 100% flat out. But clearly I am wrong somehow.

I wonder if that's related, directly or indirectly to the grid trip: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49302996

Gas is quicker to start up and meet demand usually as well.

It could well have been a maintenance thing. Maybe it was a test fire of some new equipment or configuration. It could also have been a contractual thing. A minimum supply they agreed upon with the organisation who manages the grid.

This was Cottam Coal Power Station burning its remaining coal at a loss (so you are correct, not profitable when renewables doing well) in time for its impending closure in September.

Source: Final paragraph of https://limejump.com/the-week-in-flexibility-mid-week-intrig...

In the US it's approximately 30%.

That was true a few years ago. In 2018 it was down to 28%. Now it's about 24%:

"Short Term Energy Outlook -- 2019-08-06"

EIA forecasts that the share of U.S. generation from coal will average 24% in 2019 and in 2020, down from 28% in 2018.

EIA expects electric power sector demand for coal to fall by 2% in 2020, compared with an expected decline of 15% in 2019. However, planned coal plant retirements will continue to put downward pressure on overall electricity demand for the fuel. Almost 13 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity generation capacity has retired this year or is scheduled to retire by the end of 2020, accounting for 5% of the capacity existing at the end of 2018.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php

In California, it's 3.3% and that's all imported power that's on existing contracts. We will be free of this very soon https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...

California is an outlier, having the advantage of being a low-demand (per capita) state with access to abundant hydro power from the NW area. As well as some of the highest power costs in the US.

Wow really? I would not have guessed anywhere near that high.

Coal has been the majority or near the majority of power generation until very recently. And it's only as low as it is now because natural gas got cheaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_State...

I have no idea how many facilities this is, but coal plants can also be retooled for gas: https://www.transalta.com/about-us/coal-to-gas/

One of my favorite graphics -- although it also includes petroleum: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-...

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