US, other G7 countries to phase out coal by early 2030s | Hacker News Reader

US, other G7 countries to phase out coal by early 2030s

electrek.co

52 pointsKlaster_146 comments

Fifteen years have passed since the Copenhagen Summit, yet the G7 nations, particularly the United States and Germany, have failed to eliminate coal usage. This is disheartening. This is a significant failure from the Western world to both present and future generations globally, especially to India, Latin, America, Africa and South East Asia and Islanders in the Indian and Pacific ocean who cumulatively had a minimal impact in all this but will bear the brunt of the consequences.

Everytime I hear a local complain about third world emissions, and local small minded politicians mirror that, I start to feel that democracy is a failed experiment.

What really irks me is that, if China succeeds in decarbonization while Canada fails, I would suddenly need to ask oneself if I was on the wrong side of the international divide.

Democracy didn't fail. We are just holding it wrong.

Democracies have the issue of needing majority consent which can be tricky and very time consuming to get, as there will always be a sleezy opposition politicians who will be against something just to get overs on his side and veto it at every step of the way, even if he's against something that's for the common good.

My favorite example is how Austria was the last EU country to ban indoor smoking, all the way in 2019, because of a moron party that kept shooting it down posturing as if they're fighting for the small business owner on the basis of "think of the small business owners who will loose clientele and their business making them homeless, due to the smoking ban, vote for me so I can protect you and yur business".

The solution to "save democracy" would be have more of it. The problem with our model is that everything relies on representatives who don't actually do the representation part.

We should have more direct democracy. For all it's warts, propositions like in CA, FL, etc have really moved forward the actual will of the people.

Direct democracies also have their own issues of easily manipulating people to vote against their own best interest because get this, the Average Joe with voting rights is actually incredibly stupid. See Brexit, Austria's denuclearization, etc.

It only works when gen pop is well educated and highly inteligent and not influenceable with fake news off social media.

Do you really want direct democracy in the era of fake news and low trust society? It seems to be a recipe for disaster.

Say what you want about King Charles, he at least made the effort to try to talk sense to Trump without public posturing and posing for votes.

(I can't believe I am saying something positives about the Windsors, my ancestors on the Indian subcontinent are rolling in their graves)

-edit- to avoid bumping, yes I'm obviously aware the royalty has no real power in Canada or the UK, I was commenting on the lack of popular politics being a boon in attempting to communicate with someone of very different beliefs

I think CA propositions have been a boon. CA is a democratic machine state. So you can't get representation for ideas left or right of the centrist viewpoint of CA pols - except, you can with propositions.

The bad props that passed (prop 65, prop 13) are only exceptions that prove the rule.

I would definitely not want to live under royalty. btw, King Charles doesn't make policy. He's a figurehead, not a head of state.

> My favorite example is how Austria was the last EU country to ban indoor smoking

Regardless of their reasons, they were right to oppose it, because banning smoking in private establishments is tyranny. Petty tyranny, not the headline-news type of stuff, but tyranny nonetheless. Smoking bans are wrong. It is perfectly fine for private establishments to ban smoking, or permit it, as they wish, but it is categorically wrong for the State to force them to.

Why? Just because something is private does not give you the right to do whatever the fuck you wann do with it, since you're operating a business establishment.

An bar/club/establishment is not the same kind of private property as your own house where you can do what you want and let in whoever you want, it's a business that needs to comply with state laws. And state laws say non smokers shouldn't be forced to inhale tobacco smoke in establishments.

The US is no longer a democracy. It's effectively an oligarchy now.

It's been that way for decades, it's just a lot more obvious now.

Regarding China: China accounted for 95% of the world's new coal power construction activity in 2023, according to the latest annual report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Construction began on 70 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in China, up four-fold since 2019, says GEM's annual report on the global coal power industry China started construction on 70.2 GW of new coal-power capacity last year, almost 20 times the rest of the world's 3.7 GW.

Yup, but they are also basically powering solar power everywhere. Hence the "if"; my hope is that their elite is not married to fossil fuels like the economic elites in the US and Canada.

We'll have to wait and see

I’m not sure how you hope for China to reduce their carbon emissions while simultaneously building 20 times more coal power than the rest of the world combined?

Are we the bad guys? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpZ8EkK3eWY

The thing no one mentions about developed countries past emissions is that it also led to much of the world's scientific discovery and innovation that percolated down into the developing countries too. You can't really separate modern knowledge everywhere from past emissions somewhere.

Bet.

When we look at the increased demand due to population growth, electric vehicles, crypto and AI, I am going to disbelieve this goal until I see it. I would go as far as to bet we see a higher amount in MW produced from coal, but perhaps a smaller percentage. It takes like 20 years to build a nuclear power plant in the US. Maybe if we somehow fix our endemic construction issues and are able to put up a couple nuke plants a year for the next decade we will reach it. Or at best we just replace coal with natural gas, and in which case who cares, our CO2 production is still going up?

Electric vehicles are a net reduction in energy use — you could burn the oil to make electricity and still come out ahead.

> Or at best we just replace coal with natural gas, and in which case who cares, our CO2 production is still going up?

The rate of change matters: every bit of carbon emitter now makes it worse, so any form of power less polluting than coal buys a little time to deal with the hard problems like heavy industrial processes which take more time to convert.

The big thing you’re leaving out is the growth curve on renewables, especially solar. We’re already seeing major economies (Germany, California) hitting periods of completely running their power grids on renewables, and as the cost goes down it’s going to be even less economically viable to burn coal. One of the big questions is who will figure out how to use peak overproduction effectively since that has the potential to make things like EVs even cheaper than the fossil fuel alternatives.

This is also why we need some kind of tax or an outright ban on proof of waste cryptocurrencies. Everything else will improve as cheap renewables become widespread but the whole point of something like bitcoin is to show that you’re wasting the most power, and that scales with production in a way nothing else does. Given the minimal economic impact, a ban would be most beneficial but a general carbon tax would be effective on a slower scale.

There is enough wind, solar, and batteries in our interconnection queues right now to make a net zero electric grid: https://emp.lbl.gov/queues.

Many of those specific projects will not be built, but others will as some of those drop and others are added.

Check out CAISO.com right now to see the massive decline in natural gas use on a daily basis in April of 2024 vs. April of 2023 -- batteries are already crushing natural gas use in the afternoon peak, in just one year.

As others point out, switching to EVs will result in an overall decline in energy use, and those EVs can also be set to charge when renewable resources are abundant and might otherwise be curtailed.

I would prefer all green energy, but there is a lot of natural gas in the US. Likely, closing down a coal plant and replacing it with a gas plant will happen in more than a few places.

I don't doubt that will likely occur in more than a few places. I just doubt the need for it to happen. As natural gas use diminishes and those interconnection queues start cranking through the massive traffic jam of renewables and batteries trying to get on the grid, that means less and less volumes of natural gas paying for all of the fixed-cost infrastructure. Gas rates will consequently go up and up in a spiral, making short-run decisions to build more gas infrastructure very short-sighted and likely to cause a significant amount of stranded assets in the future.

> electric vehicles

Most people who are able charge at night when demand is lower anyway. Not sure about your other points, but here are some points about EVs in the UK:

> The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.

> Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002, and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...

> Or at best we just replace coal with natural gas, and in which case who cares, our CO2 production is still going up?

One should care about coal versus natural/methane gas because:

> Coal produces more CO2 per unit of energy than natural gas does when burned. Coal consumption for electricity generation produces 209 pounds of CO2 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), compared with 117 pounds of CO2/MMBtu for natural gas.

* https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296

> Coal contains more carbon than oil or gas. When we burn these fuels, the higher amount of carbon in coal reacts to form CO2, while a higher proportion of hydrogen in oil and gas causes them to form H2O along with CO2.

* https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-does-burning-coal-genera...

(Happy to switch to nuclear and/or renewable instead though.)

cool visualisation of electricity generation source per country https://app.electricitymaps.com

This deserves its own post on HN because this is really neat.

This data seems wrong. I'm looking at Nevada and they state that the majority of the power being generated is by gas. Doesn't the Nevada area get power from a wide array of nuclear + the Hoover Dam? To be fair it does say that at the time of access the data is an estimate but still...

Nevada has no nuclear power plants, and gas accounts for 56% of its power. The Hoover Dam only provides about 4% of the state's energy. Partly because the power from the Hoover Dam is split up between the surrounding states, and Las Vegas only gets about a quarter of it.

The province of Ontario (in Canada) did so in 2017:

* https://www.ontario.ca/page/end-coal

The current (live) grid mix can be found at:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply

Natural gas is replacing coal for various reasons. If you are anti-coal, you are likely pro-natural gas whether you know it or not.

The economics of coal just don't make as much sense anymore. It's labor intensive, it requires much more future remediation at the generation site, it's burdensome to store, etc.

Yes, natural gas is the obvious intermediate step that can bridge renewables implementation to a completely renewable generation.

The one other viable option is oil, but it's way worse on all aspects.

Anybody that is anti-natural gas is working to perpetuate fossil fuels (either knowingly or not).

Necessary, but I'll believe it when I see it. As recently as 2016, the leading Republican presidental candidate was promising to bring back the coal industry.

Didn't Germany open up more coal mines to cope with the shortage in natural gas from the Russian boycott and lack of electricity from shutting down their nuclear plants?

They did, though according to the yearly trends on https://app.electricitymaps.com/ the carbon intensity is back down to 2020 levels — and very similar to America.

Britain and Spain are impressive for the recent reductions in carbon emissions, and France for their long-term nuclear power use.

I'll just leave this here.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/26/german-windfar...

No, mining is proceeding according to the plan to end in 2035. You might confuse it with the protests surrounding Lützerat, where the existing mining activities encroached (as planned) the village.

Germany kept 4 coal plants online in 2022 and 2023 that should have been shut down.

But was he able to actually achieve anything? Turns out the POTUS doesn't have the power to revitalize an industry bound for extinction due to much more powerful economical forces. Decarbonization is a big wheel already turning and cannot be stopped, never mind its direction reversed. All he could do was get himself elected, and honestly that's probably all he wanted.

Now he wants revenge.

He's likely even less concerned with actual political issues or doing anything to improve his voters' lifes, and much more concerned with single-mindedly trying to retaliate against anyone who he feels has slighted him personally.

Yes, but he counts environmentalists and the mythical “deep state” as reasons why he accomplished so little and I expect his revenge dreams include plenty of reversals, the harder to recover from the better. Last time, he ran it like one of his businesses but from the sounds of Project 2025 he’s more receptive to letting competent people do their thing while he’s going after his top enemies.

Joe "Mansion" has entered the chat.

Oh yeah, if the G7 agree on climate change, that's definitely happening. Just don't look at the Kyoto Protocol, Copenhagen Accord or the Paris Agreement.

Renewables are helping to kill coal, but ironically what's really strangling it is cheap natural gas. Amusingly, if Coal Country really wants to revive the coal industry, they should start voting for Democrats and hope for a fracking ban.

Gas took over coal not only because it is cheaper due to fracking, but because it is a less damaging fossil fuel. There is no scenario in my mind where coal displaces natural gas, except in the event of an unavoidable supply issue with NG such as supply chain disaster.

Cheap natural gas has been strangling coal generation for over 15 years now. There's a reason there are no new coal plants being built in the US, and it's not for environmental reasons. It's all about economics. Now that the power companies have reduced their coal generation by 50% they are taking the opportunity to market themselves as being "green." Hogwash. They're not green - they're going after cheaper power sources. Power sources such as natural gas, wind, and solar.

Notice what isn't in that list - nuclear. Nuclear in the US is simply too expensive and requires too long of an investment commitment for it to be attractive. So, it's not being done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com