Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
reuters.com
reuters.com
Japan has companies which are building new coal plants in order to replace existing plants. Old coal plants have lower efficiency. Old coal plants produce more pollution.
A none trivial reason why so many old coal plants are unprofitable is because other newer fossil fuel plants can out compete them.
Sure renewables play a part, but the single biggest reason those old plants cannot make money at current energy prices is simple competition. New plants are buying the same coal but getting more electricity per ton while using larger and more automated plants. Meaning more revenue per ton with lower overhead.
Coal as a whole will decrease, but along the way new plants need to be built. Yet the media treats all coal plants as a single monolith. "How could a country be building new plants when existing old plants are unprofitable". The media would do well to educate and inform instead.
Renewable (or at least less dirty) solutions would have filled that gap and prevented the need for even replacement coal plants, if that baseline capacity continued to exist, or grown.
Old coal plants will presumably be able to operate on the marginal cost of the coal plus maintenance, where as new plants have a big initial capital spending they need to fund.
Now, it is clear that some plants are so old that they're going beyond their planned lifetime and need investments. But that does not seem to be what you are hinting at?
- "How Things Work: A Coal (and Gas) Power Plant" -- https://youtu.be/TDsmJ3aheCk
- "Cleaning Coal (I.e., Dropping Acid)" -- https://youtu.be/dijpXxU1QB0
- "Burning Coal through the Decades" -- https://youtu.be/vT0cfNGxNeo
I thought this is due to Covid-19 but apparently it's a chronic trend.
> That will rise to 52% by 2030 as renewables and cheaper gas outcompete coal, the think tank said.
A very slow one too.
The market for electricity isn't very "efficient" in that way, a utility or market doesn't buy and sell from an individual power plant so the price/profitability of a single plant doesn't reflect the supply/demand from that plant.
So obviously profitability isn’t the only thing keeping these plants open or not.
Additionally:
but this risks locking in high-cost coal power
Coal is only high-cost when compared against certain metrics that favour non-coal electricity sources.
On the whole electricity is extremely cheap, even from fossil sources, and where the end user may pay enough to care about total usage, the major components of the retail price are not source related, but rather delivery / tax / administrative / bureaucratic.
However, why would I do that when everyone else isn’t.
And how would I do that when there’s no economic framework for me, as an individual retail customer, to do so?
Sure, I can buy 100% renewables, but here in Australia the retailers want to charge me more for that choice. Here in Tasmania the local retailer, Aurora Energy, wants an additional 6.023 cents / kWh for 100% renewable, that’s that’s on top of their peak rate of 32.587 cents / kWh. An additional 18.5%!
Why would I do that if I’m already living near my economic ability?
Edit to add:
And, even if I did choose to pay that premium, it’ll have approximately no effect whatsoever on global climate outcomes. Me paying an additional 18.5% on my bill to feel good won’t suck the carbon out of the air!
This is why we neee regulation in this scenario more than we need individual choice.
I met someone some years back who's job was to keep a coal power plant operational. The boiler was from the 1880s, and the generator installed in the 1920s. They don't use the generator as regular mains power costs 5 times less due to the efficiency of modern technology. However the utility gives them a large enough discount on power to keep it running that he had a job and can repair it as needed. Once every 5 years or so the utility calls him to turn it on and 12 hours later it is providing power to half the town.
I believe anicdotes like that are somewhat common as the utilities want to be sure there is always power when someone wants it.
"Demolition Of Power Plant Rumbles Across Bucks County" https://levittownnow.com/2020/04/04/demolition-of-power-plan...
"Fortum’s Inkoo coal-fired power plant demolished to ground level" https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=257097
"Last Smokestack Demolished At Former Coal-Fired Power Plant" https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2020/02/24/last-smokest...
"Sunbury Generation plant demolished by explosives" https://local21news.com/news/local/watch-sunbury-generation-...
I run a Datasette instance using this data with a map visualization here: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan...
Here's a map of all 2,390 coal plants (click "Load all" to see all of them on the same map) https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan...
It will be almost completely due to the cheap price of natural gas not renewables as the article implies.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
China can make no changes and we can still make the world a better place. Start with your neighborhood first.
At a cursory glance, it seems like it's still ongoing, at a price of 8$/ton: https://www.icf.com/insights/public-policy/china-carbon-pric...
China does have a lot of renewables[1] - enormous solar and wind farms in the interior and west, and the potential for far more. These can produce energy much cheaper than coal plants can. But the challenge is getting that energy to the more populous provinces in the south and east where it’s needed. Transmission infrastructure is expensive, even in China.
[1] Renewables supplied 27% of China’s electricity in 2017, compared to only 4% for natural gas.
China doesn't need a lot of natural gas within its borders. It's neighbors with Russia, which can supply via pipeline all the natural gas that China can take. The issue is it remains cheaper to do coal domestically in China than to buy natural gas from Russia, so they overwhelmingly prefer to do that still. It's also of course expedient for China to use coal, whereas pipelines and energy deals can take a decade.
Their 2014 deal was a $400 billion arrangement involving an 8,000 km pipeline. China has greater access to natural gas thanks to bordering Russia, than nearly all of the world's largest natural gas producers have access to natural gas in their own backyards.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v...
https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_le-coronavirus-pourr...
The population ratio (~10:1) and GDP ratio (~4:1) makes it possible to create this scenario.
The China-Russia dynamic is a little different.
Wind, both on and offshore, is also getting cheaper.
By 2030, new solar will certainly be cheaper in China than it is to operate existing coal plants.
I'm a lot more comfortable betting that mass-manufactured things get cheaper, than I am on the price of natural gas a few years or a decade out. With solar and wind going down another 50% and battery prices under $100/kWh, the economics are pretty powerful.
The politics are just as powerful; China has massive internal pressure to clean up the air (and people have been reminded of how clean it could be), and a chance at replacing the US for world leadership if it can show the way forward on climate.
Sounds like a certain other major country.
I don't think I've seen one where China has ever reduced a target related to economic expansion. I'm kind of surprised they even need that much more power at this point, since the country is fairly developed, where growth tapers off and energy efficiency starts rising.
Switching America's oil subsidies to solar and wind would be much better than pretending that fracking shale is a net plus.
Natural gas from fracking does not cause burning tap water.
https://www.cred.org/is-fracking-connected-to-burning-tap-wa...
Fracking-related earthquakes are either minimal or bebeficial
https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/does...
0/10 "green energy" shill. Fracking gave us dirt cheap natgas, which is damn cleaner than coal AND why your electricity prices havent gone up in the last decade. Educate yourself.
CRED (Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development)
Our Membership
Our members are leaders in the Colorado oil and natural gas community: Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Noble Energy, Bayswater Exploration and Production, DCP Midstream, Liberty Oilfield Services, PDC Energy
Not exactly a trustworthy source you've got there.
Find me a "credible source" that shows natural gas contaminates water. Go ahead. I'll wait.
I'll take a step back from "burning", because that seems hard to prove, but it most certainly does contaminate ground water: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont...
> Fracking-related earthquakes are either minimal or bebeficial
That's the most insane claim I've read on the Internet this week. You should be ashamed for saying that.
Beneficial earthquakes. Now I think I've heard everything.
I know it's against Hacker News rules to assume bad intent in posts, but I cannot believe that you're saying these things in good faith. It's just not possible.
If you can choose between, say, five Richter 3 earthquakes, or one Richter 7, you definitely want the five small ones.
IF fracking induced small earthquakes and IF those small earthquakes relieved pressure such that a big one didn't happen, then those small earthquakes would be beneficial.
This is comparable to deliberately lighting small brushfires to use up fuel and prevent destructive wildfires.
It would be a remarkable coincidence if fracking only caused such beneficent and salubrious earthquakes, and never triggered worse ones. But were it so, it would be good.
Fracking wastes (the sluice of water, sand and a scant amount of chems) does not equal natural gas.
Natural gas does NOT contaminate water. Fuck off.
(yes)
Leaving coal in the ground is both necessary as well as supremely effective to stave off the next global catastrophe.
It also drastically reduces other emissions, some of which have been implicated in the current catastrophe.
As a cherry on top, it upsets coal magnates, a self-selected group uniquely qualified to entertain us with their misery.
To have this discussion, one needs to include information about the entire energy market. If you heavily subsidize low-no carbon footprint sources, you devalue the others.
Additionally you need to separate base load sources from load following sources. Load following coal plants might be more prevalent by number (ie 95%) and in direct competition with natural gas. The smaller the total energy output the more competition you have from solar and wind, which are highly subsidized and reduce margins.
Reuter’s would do better to give this proper context.
It comes down to the [1] Jevons paradox.
>In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.
PV and Wind fell because they were above the market costs of energy. Once they are below, they will stop falling further. Prices will only go further down if energy supply outpaces demand. Why should that ever happen? Have you seen people stop buying SUVs? Once energy gets cheaper, SUVs will become even bigger.
Being well-off essentially means being able to waste energy. To signal status, people will burn all available non-essential energy, however much there is to burn.
As PV and wind fall in cost, they will end up dictating the market price. So, you are technically correct, but otherwise wrong: the current market price is no floor for the cost of PV and wind, any more than (at any point) the cost per unit of computation or storage was the floor on the cost of computers.
I expect PV to drive the levelized cost of power below $0.01/kWh, possibly much below (recent utility scale bids in some places have the power not far above this, and extrapolating the experience curve for PV has costs falling another factor of 4 or so by the time PV becomes a globally dominant energy source.) At these costs, resistive heat from PV is cheaper than any fossil fuel heat source, per unit of thermal energy. And thermal energy is very cheap to store, compared to batteries.
What do you mean? That the energy bill for computers is bigger than the material bill?
What else but the price of the hardware has determined the price of computers?
>I expect PV to drive the levelized cost of power below $0.01/kWh
For some time, this is possible. But if there is a sea of energy, people will find a way to use it. Then, demand rises and prices will rise again.
Sooner or later, material science, genetics and everything else will simulate everything. Progress will depend on the amount of energy that is spent on those calculations. The cloud will take any energy that it can get. Bitcoin was just the start.
Humans take roughly 2kWh worth of food per day. We are willing to pay about $20 for it. It might as well be that energy prices rise to $10/kWh. Not because PV itself is expensive, but because somebody owns the land where the PV modules are standing.
Jevon does not say that prices cannot fall. So if you're trying to use it to say prices will not fall, you're doing it all wrong.
Unfortunately not to me.
Never forget how absolutely huge coal is. Those Joules are not going to be replaced with renewables any time soon. It's literally impossible because renewables need Joules themselves to be built, not just money. Money does not synthesize power generating objects; materials and energy and machinery and the approval to do so (capital) all together do:
That is more than a linear increase in renewable capacity, indicating that renewable capacity will be increasing faster and faster in absolute GW terms.
17% of energy production in the US is now renewables. 26% in China. 46% in Germany.
The economic case for deploying renewables continues to improve, and will soon hit a tipping point where operation of legacy generation systems will be more expensive than deploying and operating newer ones. Even in the US, who will want to be in the coal business then? The companies all know this, and are all pivoting from being coal|gas|x-companies to being energy-companies.
Could you point me to updated world energy usage data then?
Unless the economic cost of switching in the 2000s would have been substantially lower than the extra damage of 20 years of pollution will inflict in the 2050s.
In the past 20 years, we've added 50 PPM of CO2 to the atmosphere. That's one third of all CO2 emissions that humanity has produced in its history.
If you haven't noticed, climate change is already here, and it hurts.
b) The economic cost of waiting 10 years to address an exponential process is going to far outweigh the cost there would've been to give an extra "oomph" to action, I'm sure.
Which ones? I'm only aware of serious efforts in Germany and they basically torpedoed their own electricity use (their per-capita trends aren't good). There aren't that many governments who could stomach doing that to their people.
Both are regulations.
Wait, do people actually say that?
Like an exponential process that starts at 1 atom with a 1 year doubling time would affect all the matter in the universe in less than a century (lets pretend it happens spookily at whatever distance).
And then we can start to think about whether it's going to be a logistic curve or oscillate and what factors might amplify or damp and our model is much more interesting.
Like, the original statement is about systems that people study and model, and how the exponential condition can really only exist for brief periods relative to the lifetime of almost all systems of interest.
What the heck are you talking about? We see the issues globally for last 20 years at least. Droughts, heatwaves in Europe killing tens of thousands, Islands in pacific being flooded due to sea rising and so on and on.
“In 2014, global sea level was 2.6 inches above the 1993 average—the highest annual average in the satellite record (1993-present). Sea level continues to rise at a rate of about one-eighth of an inch per year.”
It's also possible that an even bigger push to get to this tipping point earlier would have saved even more money that will be spent mitigating the extra years of ecological harm, but counterfactuals like that are admittedly hard to prove and we're not at a point in history where that judgment could be assessed.