Coal Prices Rising Exponentially
tradingeconomics.com
tradingeconomics.com
China needs more coal, Europe needs more natural gas. Winter is coming.
Fossil getting expensive long term means all those natural gas sites that covid shattered could now reopen because it is becoming profitable to take them out of ground. This benefits oil companies, but it also creates an opportunity for alternative energy conversion. Why heat houses in winter using expensive/price-unstable natural gas when solar and wind exist, except saying no to nuclear meant it can't even be used as a backup to solar/wind which they need for obvious reasons. Unless of course there is a new revolution in battery tech I don't know about
In addition to all the fossil fuel vehicles that you mentioned, you have also consider all of the industries and livelihoods as well (I'm sure you meant this implicitly). Those who work in oil-fields/sea-platforms, ICE factories, refinement equipment, and so on... If such a transition could happen over night, it would be devastating to so many industries, individuals... even entire economies and countries.
While it's difficult to have any sympathy for the incumbent/legacy/ICE car manufactures being "unable to compete" with Tesla and new wave of Chinese EV manufactures, it can't be easy for any of them to transition without significant pain. Esp with all of the incentives, laws, etc... that have set up over the last century. You have billions of dollars of oil subsidies, franchise laws, worker unions, and so on.
This where the government needs to step in. Fossil fuel subsidies need to be phased out. Training citizens with the knowledge and experience to work in these new industries needs to be provided. New incentives for manufactures to transition to sustainable methods of transportation need to be created. Old one eliminated.
Ties to and influence of lobbies associated to legacy industries and fossil fuels need to be dismantled, even if the only way to go about that is through the creation of new, more powerful and influential lobbies that represent clean and progressive alternatives. I have my doubts that Tesla would be what it is today if they had played by the book, no matter how superior their technology is.
Clean tech can't fill the void left by fossil fuels? Start promoting and evangelizing the advantages of nuclear options.
I guess my point is it's going to be painful no matter how much people fetishize clean tech. Everyone is going to suffer in one way or another, but it has to happen and it needs to start now. I know that there are things being done about it already, but it's not enough.
Fossil fuel subsidies are a social stability measure. There are going to be hard times when people can't afford fuel to heat their homes in winter, and have to endure lectures by the private-jet-to-next-climate-conference-crowd on how morally flawed they are for still affording to light up a candle at night.
What do you do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing?
Storage would fix that except we don't have a storage solution that scales to the levels we need and is widely implementable yet.
What do you do if the sun decides not to shine and the wind decides not to blow for a long time? What do you do when you exhaust your energy stores?
The only thing I can think of is restarting the natural gas and coal plants. Fossil fuel plants will have to be maintained (and staffed) as a backup. Nuclear will work too I guess but same problem, maintenance and staff.
The only scenario I can see where we rely totally on renewables only is when we have a huge excess of renewable energy generation and a lot of extra energy storage such that it will buy us enough time to look for alternatives if the weather decides to go weird and deny us solar and wind power.
None of that is beyond our capability, the issue is getting the will and dollars to build it. The way it's currently going we're organically building small clumps here and there where capital is available with no overall direction. That can work in the long run, but it means the build-up period will be marked with unequal outcomes by region and gluts/shortages.
Also other regions need power too so you would be straining their supply - unless you have, again, huge excess in generation capacity.
My crazy idea is high power lasers and satellites reflecting the sun (magnified beam/laser for minimal night sky disruption??) to the other side of the planet. I wish I had the right education to come up with good ideas, if it was up to me there would be arrays of satellites that convert the sun's light to laser or just a focused beam and literally boil the ocean to generate power! (Good thing there are smarter people working in these problems)
I always see this argument in these kinds of discussion, but does anyone have real statistics as to how often that actually happens? And how widespread these disruptions actually are, keeping in mind that solar and wind power are often distributed over a wide area?
(Keep also in mind that, unless there's a solar eclipse, photovoltaic panels can still produce some power even when it's very cloudy, so that might not lead to a total loss of generation.)
Now if you are only using wind for 10% of your power needs, a 10% drop in wind is not a big deal. But when you are using wind for 30% of your power needs, then the same variability becomes a bigger deal and might start to impact reliability, even though the wind itself is not more variable than before. Same for solar.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-prices-in-europe-hit-rec...
Renewables like solar and wind depend on the weather - which we cannot control at all. Non-renewables have dependencies too like politics and economics but at least it’s something we have some control over.
If solar and wind is to completely replace non-renewables, their intermittency is going to have to be dealt with somehow - and huge excess in generation and storage capacity is only way that comes to mind at the moment.
(The handling of transmission is greatly simplified, but that's ok for what that is.)
One way or the other, this is inevitable. There's only so much fossil fuel that can be burned before the environment becomes too hostile for civilization to survive.
> What do you do if the sun decides not to shine and the wind decides not to blow for a long time? What do you do when you exhaust your energy stores?
Power2Gas gets you to 100% at a reasonable cost. Batteries act as short term storage, with most of the stored energy going through them; the gas provides long term storage and back up generation, with most of the energy storage capacity there (with a much longer average residence time). There may also be room for intermediate storage on the timescale of a week or so (pumped hydro, thermal, for example).
Multiple levels of storage like this is analogous to the cache hierarchy of a computer, in that combining different storage technologies with different properties can provide a solution that is better than any of those just by itself.
A while back MIT had an electric grid cost simulator online, and that was the cheapest fossil-free combination I could find.
Integrating preexisting technologies is the easiest and surest kind of innovation, even if they haven't all been brought together yet.
There are cost estimates at the reference link at https://model.energy/ , along with projections of future costs.
Nuclear energy does that just fine - as a result, France is the lowest-carbon major nation.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
The U.S. generates about as much energy from renewables as it does from nuclear. Combined (nuclear + renewables) only produces around 40% of the energy the U.S. consumes.
In 2008, the combined nuclear + renewable energy accounted for 29% of the energy consumed by the U.S. (green energy production is only up 100% in 10 years). Mostly there was just a swap from Coal power to Natural gas power.
Put another way, it'll be decades with no energy growth to replace the natural gas and coal energy production; baring some massive changes.
At the end of the day, renewables are not going to cut it. We need a massive increase in nuclear, it's the only clear way. If the goal is to switch off coal and natural gas (which IMO, we should just keep using coal + natural gas). Cheaper energy, is the quickest way to reduce poverty.
Clown world....
Biden who has dementia has no plan and basically gave Putin the green light.
I just submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28828492
This seems to me like one of these opportunities where some EU gov'ts are blaming Russia for something in a way that doesn't make too much sense once you look at it for more than five seconds, yet sounds superficially convincing. Things like that are always unfortunate when you could leverage more substantial criticism instead; hardly a tall order with Russia.
See e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russias-gazprom-feel...
https://www.reuters.com/article/rpb-tass-connect-idUSKBN2381...
The facts are: Russia cuts off transit via Ukraine in advance of the winter to force commissioning of Baltic Sea pipeline. It's everything that East Europeans were telling the outcome of NS2 deal is going to be, but what do these jaded people know, right.
It is a pretty good time to be a coal mine. A lot of investment has been scared out of the sector, so not so much competition. But people still keep using coal.
One thing I'd love to see come out of COP26 is an internationally agreed minimum tariff per ton of CO2e, including electricity weighted by its means of production. We want coal to be very expensive to buy (and very cheap to sell).
Not a economist either, but those are not exclusive.
Also, this is not the case here, but ever lowering demands triggers structural prices increase at some point, due do scale cost reduction not working anymore, but you won't see investments in production either.
Meaningful action does not require us freezing in our houses, not yet.
But you have a point, which is exactly why survival of our societies should not be a choice on the consumerist menu. The government, the justice system, the corporate world and finally the citizen should lead in the struggle to decarbonize the world, not the consumer.
That always sounds like an excuse for doing nothing to me.
Just listen to the rhetoric that Shell uses: this is literally what they say.
Blaming the big bad corporations whilst we continue to consume their crap is a cop out. We've been doing that for decades now and nothing much has changed.
The thing is, it isn't. People aren't islands. Our societies, our economies, are structured in a way that make it really hard to keep your impact on the environment low. It's hard to give up on a car in a car-oriented town or country. It's hard to give up on plastic where every single thing you buy has some in it. It's hard to give up on meat when it's the most cost-effective form of nutrition you have available. And then, when you add up all those sacrifices - the result is not living a good life. It's mortification on principle. It's not something you can reasonably expect everyone to follow.
(At a risk of bringing religion into the topic - Jesus has said, "If you want to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."[0], and yet almost no Christian in history ever actually did that. No, these words are used as comfort for those already poor - an explanation, not a plan for life. Environmental self-sacrifice, which doesn't have a mainstream belief system backing it, can hardly be expected to fare better.)
Add to that, most people have no fucking clue what is or isn't destroying the planet. Hell, I consider myself somewhat broadly educated, striving for evidence-based, rational thinking, and I still admit I only have vague idea. There are some obvious things one can do, like "don't fly if you can avoid it", "don't use a car[1] if you can avoid it". Then there are plenty of wrong ideas, like "always unplug your chargers" (negligible gain for significant "I've made an effort" cost) or "use reusable bags instead of single-use plastic ones" (actually plastic bags come way ahead environmentally). Most other changes popular articles list tend to be hard to evaluate - they may or may not help, depending on various second-order effects and proper accounting of impact across product/behavior lifetime, which is often nearly impossible to do.
And all of that - all of that - relies on almost everyone making those same sacrifices simultaneously[2], so the effect is noticeable, all while people not making the sacrifice are visibly better off[3]. Meanwhile, corporations and governments are the ones making the most impact[4], and importantly, they hold the biggest levers. A single law, or a single contract change, can make much more impact than thousands or millions of people abandoning everything and moving to live in the woods as hunter-gatherers.
The way I see it, trying to convince everyone to make personal sacrifices is a fool's errand, and insisting on this as a solution is sabotaging our future. This is a systemic problem, we need systemic solutions.
--
[0] - Matthew 19:21
[1] - I say "use", not "own", because if you're just using taxis to do the same trips that you would with a car, you're hardly achieving anything.
[2] - And continuously, as the market will keep adapting to people's preferences, offering new goods and services ruining the planet.
[3] - I'll just defer to "Meditations on Moloch" on that point. It's an obligatory intro reading for any discussion about any of the world problems - because underneath, they're all just aspect of the same issues with human coordination. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
[4] - As a random example, try stacking up household water or energy use, or greenhouse emissions, against business and industrial ones.
Yet my grandparents led a low impact lifestyle without even thinking about it.
This is more of the same. Excuses.
And, as a consumer, one should also make climate friendly choices, but it's not the most important thing and it should not distract us from where the real difference is made.
We decide what happens, collectively. We vote in governments, and we choose what products to buy. It needs to start with citizens because we're democratic.
The problem is that people's public speech doesn't match their behaviour. Carbon offsets for flights have been available for years. Despite ~75% of people saying "Climate Change is the biggest threat we face" [0] only 1-3% of passengers actually choose the carbon offset [1].
In startups, we know that people lie in surveys, and we need to measure their actual behaviour in order to correctly assess their actual feelings/intentions. From this, we can conclude that most people profess a public belief in climate change, but privately don't care and aren't willing to do anything about it. Companies are taking their cue from this: virtue-signal about changing the world, but don't actually do anything. Governments are likewise taking their cue from it: lots of conferences, lots of talk, no action.
We need citizens to stop driving in petrol-driven cars to marches where they protest about carbon emissions. To stop heating their homes with coal. To stop eating fish completely. To buy the carbon offsets, even if they're crap and not very effective. The mismatch between our public speech and our private behaviour is what's causing everyone else to do the same. It has to start with us, because if it doesn't it'll be ignored.
This attitude of "someone else has to take the first step" is what's causing our inaction. Stop blaming others for your footprint, and do something about it yourself.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/09/1...
[1] https://aviationbenefits.org/media/167226/fact-sheet_11_volu...
Pushing "just personal action" for climate issues is a known delay tactic.
These problems are why we invented governments and central regulation. At the very least we need to internalize the cost of pollution.
What I don't understand, when I assume good faith, is why people disregard calls for political action as lazy or waiting for "someone else to take the first step"; while also have certain actors pouring millions on lobbying and campaigns to downplay the effects of global warming, to understate the viability of green energies and lastly, on pushing the idea of consumer responsibility.
There's a difference between us as a citizen, and as a consumer. The pandemic has shown perfectly that leaving everything up to 'individual freedom' will result in a mess.
> Stop blaming others for your footprint
Did you know the very idea of a footprint is invented by BP as a mechanism to shift responsibility and place blame on the consumer?
Personally I spend a large part of my income on reducing my footprint by the way, but I have no illusions that this is where the required change will come from. In the country where I live, merely being registered as a citizen, paying taxes and everything that is legally required, will have am unsustainable footprint - before I even begin to take a breath I have consumed my share.
What we need to do is hold the actors who are responsible accountable and make a mass collective change that is non-optional.
Renewable energies are cheap (they are basically "free"). Deploying them is expensive. But you only have to subsidize the cost of deployment and after that it's cheaper for everyone.
It's the same thing with insulation : it's expensive, but once it's done correctly, you can basically heat your entire house with only the sun (if it's there) or really low energy consumption.
We're just missing the political will. The transition is possible and would create jobs for the decades to come.
That just sounds like a half-truth, otherwise people wouldn't always be so impassioned about subsidising renewable. They'd jest buy land and build honking great renewable plants.
Now the situation may have changed in the last decade or so, because the growth in renewables is very real. But it takes no political will to deploy cheap energy. There would be queues of bankers trying to invest if they thought they could undercut market producers and make good returns. Every greedy person on the planet (so somewhere in the region of 8 billion of them) would be happy to get in on the deal.
E.g. in Germany one of the chancellor candidates was state MP and personally & illegally forced expansion of coal strip mining while enacting new rules making wind power essentially impossible in his state.
At least in my country, AFAIK regulation explicitly allows for something like that: there's a net metering modality in which a group of consumers (for instance, a condominium) can split the credits from the net metering of a shared solar power plant. It's meant for precisely that scenario (power panels on the roof of an apartment building, each apartment has its own independent meter).
But what's more surprising is that even in per-capita terms, global coal usage has increased since 1990.
However if you change your baseline year from 1990 to 2012, then global coal usage in absolute terms has declined, and will continue to decline over the long term even if there is a bump from the 2020 depressed levels (2020 is a terrible year to benchmark against).
Not true, coal usage[1]: 1990 -> 237Mt, 2016 -> 149Mt
As a tangent, I was shocked that Poland CO2 emission per capita is lower than one of Norway [2]: Norway 9.4t (2018), Poland 8.8t (2018)
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/poland-coal/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The UK's CfDs (Contracts for Difference) pay schemes like wind farms a fixed price for their output, allowing projects to go out to market saying look based on our plans we're going to make so-and-so-many MWh of electricity, the UK promises to pay so-and-so-much £££ for that electricity, therefore lend us (much less) £££ to build it and we'll pay you a nice return. This means investors only need to care about whether your wind farm proposal actually makes electricity, not guess what the price of that electricity will be when it's sold.
Normally these schemes cost the government money. Say electricity is selling for £50 per MWh, and your wind farm's CfD specifies £80 per MWh, the government hands over £30 per MWh extra to make up the difference.
But, when prices sky rocket the government actually gets paid the difference. When electricity sells for £200 per MWh and your wind farm's CfD said £80 per MWh, you only get £80 per MWh as promised, the other £120 per MWh goes into the general fund to buy missiles or feed orphans or whatever.
Most homes in the colder areas of the US heat with gas because the cost per joule of gas is a lot less than for the equivalent electricity. But a lot of homes can supply most their heat with electricity, and would if the economics made sense. And even more would build that capability if gas was 2x the cost per joule as electricity.
A modern home boiler is very efficient, because what you wanted was heat, which is exactly what you get by burning gas. The gas turbine at a power station has to do the same conversion (burn gas to make heat) but then also convert the heat into electricity, and that's before transport loss.
In the ideal world, the choice is between "Burn gas in your home" (bad, accelerates climate change) and "Use renewable electricity" (good, although maybe expensive depending on policy decisions). But for many people today there is no choice, resistive electrical heating would still burn gas in a power station and just cost them a lot more.
Heat pumps tilt the scales, if they're practical for you, it really is possible that a heat pump running on electricity that's actually produced by burning gas works out cheaper and more environmentally friendly than just burning the gas yourself. And of course a heat pump powered by wind is entirely practical and potentially quite cheap.
A gas-driven heat pump could be even more efficient; that is, it could deliver > 100% of the thermal energy content of the fuel to your home (in the form of low grade heat). This is a consequence of avoiding, at least partially, the large second law loss in a typical furnace where very hot flame transfers heat to rather cool air. Any time you see a large entropy generating process like that in a system it's an opportunity for improvement.
> we can expect high electricity prices to coincide more and more with times when renewables are producing very little power and low prices with times when they're producing lots of it.
Yes to some extent that's true, and we should expect demand management to play a big role in reducing the impact on ordinary households. Alec Watson (Technology Connections) did a video about how his home is set (in summer) to cool over night when power is cheap, so he wakes up in a cold but not yet uncomfortably so house, and during the day the cooling is off, so it gets warmer but unless the day is especially miserable it still isn't actually hot inside until the evening, at which point electricity is cheaper again and it begins cooling back down. This way he gets air-conditioning, in a climate where it's not entirely essential but certainly desirable, yet doesn't pay peak prices for it like his neighbours. Imagine if more people did that!
The UK could use a lot more storage. What it has is mostly black start capacity re-purposed as normal storage, but it is a bit short on non-picturesque mountains to modify. It also, of course, decided it didn't want to be part of the EU, where there's an entire continent of renewable energy sources to trade with, several hours difference in dawn time and considerable variation in weather - the UK is still connected to their grid with several Gigawatts of ties but now trades as an outsider.
Not in EU where Germany decided we should all use Russian gas from pipeline bypassing other EU states.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/20/europe/poland-coal-mine-t...
That $600k/day fine is therefore about 4,000 tonnes of coal (ie, nothing). The mine produces ~ 76,000 tonnes a day. That is what the free market thinks of the EU's fine.
The situation isn't that simple since the export price is for black coal and the Polish mine would be producing lignite, but ski jump prices are no joke.
Now we're replacing nuclear with renewables, which is just ass-backwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Total cost to owner (TVO) for this 1600 MW EPR will be little less than 6 billion euros and the rest of the cost (5 billion euros) will be paid by Areva i.e. French citizens as taxes. Building of the plant started 2005 and after the latest delays the reactor is supposed to go critical for the first time during January 2022. It was supposed to be ready during 2010.
As you can see: Cheap and fast to build.
Areva figured that this was an easy way to open the European nuclear power plant markets after the political damage to the industry due to Chernobyl. They did not take into account the fact that a lot of the professionals required were already retired and at the same time the safety regulations were much tighter than before.
Sounds like it has a lot to do with the regulations/regulators.
Interestingly the City of Helsinki is now considering compact nuclear reactors as a replacement for the energy source required for district heating.
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12098463 (in Finnish only)
Currently they are running on coal which is to be replaced by a bio fuel (wood chips) based power plant by year 2024. Many are not happy about the projected increase of traffic from trucks bringing in the bio fuel. The nuclear option will not happen due to too many diehard Green party voters in Helsinki but it is a sign of the times. Even the Green party in Finland is at least partly supportive to nuclear power.
Do you believe the regulations/regulators in Europe are acting reasonably? You could try to argue that extreme risk aversion is the better failure mode, but that’s hard to prove in the long term.
I am pro nuclear power due to the fact that producing the same amount of energy using coal power causes more loss of human lives. This has been true even when comparing just the real radiation exposure from the fly ash of an operating coal powered plant and the maximum allowed radiation exposure from a nuclear power plant. It is still true when comparing the loss of lives per produced energy when both the Chernobyl accident and the Fukushima accident are accounted for.
> As you can see: Cheap and fast to build.
How is 17+ years (with a 12+ year delay) "fast"?
Due to the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents any nuclear power projects today are always an uphill battle with the increasingly difficult to fulfill regulations. At the same time there will be strong political pressures from outside sources like Greenpeace.
If the safety regulations for cars were as stringent with respect to the risks involved there would be no cars at all. Even walking on the streets would be forbidden without using a helmet.
From the rest of your comment I gather you were joking, but please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN. It's really easy for it to turn into nationalistic flamewars, which are particularly tedious and nasty and also relatively avoidable.
That said, if people consumed less we would not need that much energy / impact.
Reducing electricity consumption is not going to happen. The bulk of the green movement today hinges on tons of net new clean electricity generation.
If nuclear made economic sense it would get VC funding.
This isn't the next unicorn startup, we're talking about energy sovereignty and the future of humanity. If the only thing we care about is the economy we'll never get out of this....
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/international/the-co...
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
This is just fantasy. "Can" is a very long way away from "will". And almost all of the reactor projects currently under construction have time and cost overruns.
The best case for the UK in five years is that we manage to finish constructing one (1) reactor that is currently under construction.
Even if renewables stop their current exponential growth and only grow linearly, even assuming a mere 25% capacity factor for renewables and 100% for nuclear (neither of which is true), even assuming all currently planned and under construction reactors are completed and no existing reactors are turned off, renewables still exceed nuclear by about 2028. I’m expecting it to be a lot sooner than that because I expect the two (different) exponential trends in PV and wind to continue for at least another doubling period.
I’m still in favour of expanding nuclear power: it’s much safer than generally believed, it saves on storage requirements and intercontinental HVDC (we might get enough battery factories or extra copper/aluminium mines in time but I don’t want to count chickens before they’re hatched), and while it’s expensive it is (currently) still cheaper than batteries.
But I’m not expecting nuclear to be a big player, I just like diversity of supply for its own sake.
Of course it wouldn't, VCs only care about things that have a potential for rapid growth. A nuclear plant doesn't (and neither do most businesses that provide value in a sustainable way).
I'll add that naval reactors are small and floating - one of the advantages of the "small modular reactor" designs is that the production time and cost are both much less than that of large plants, which makes the risk calculus much more palatable for investors.
>China Orders Top Energy Firms to Secure Supplies at All Costs
Commodity price fluctuations usually are not.
But "rising exponentially" seems to have become a way to say "going up very fast, and you should get excited about it!".
We mock Bitcoin, but China isn’t just shutting down Bitcoin, but also its steel and aluminum foundries, its semiconductor fabs, and adjacent industries to cut power demand. They need to limit blackouts during winter to stave off popular uprisings.
Steel is already high and the chip issues are bad too.
Reuters Sept 2021 Electrical Components https://www.reuters.com/technology/many-apple-tesla-supplier...
Reuters Oct 2021 Consumers to see increased energy prices https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-liberalise-thermal...