The price of shutting down coal power, and what would be gained

WRT China, they can't over produce renewable energy and be the largest global supplier of green energy without coal .. at least not yet.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001

[0] Barring a discovery that coal can be converted into the elixir of youth, etc.

It's a bit misleading because China is mostly _replacing_ old coal power plants now.

China has probably passed the peak coal consumption this year, or it will in 2025.

Source: https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstruction...

Nuclear is around $70/MWhr, one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.

Solar is highly distributeable so it can be placed closer to where the power is used, reducing transmission losses. It doesn't need to be very carefully sited in terms of where it goes on the grid, and nobody needs to worry about the long term geological stability of the area. It doesn't need to be partnered with another plant for cold starts. It has no safety concerns. It doesn't need any labor to operate - mostly occasional repairs to damage and cleaning. It has no capacity to cause any sort of disaster. It does not generate toxic waste in operation.

Nobody has ever said "don't shoot tank rounds near that solar farm or you might cause thousands of square miles of land to be uninhabitable for centuries."

Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"

The administration kowtowing to industry lobbyists to fund nuclear energy when the market was already adding seven times as much renewables as it is decommissioning nuclear capacity...is just corporate welfare, pure and simple.

What yeah, makes them one of the countries mostly investing in coal out there. But there hasn't been an increase, and it ought to fall fast at some point to one of the cheaper alternatives.

Current exploitation of coal in the US maybe be declining, but it is still an important part of a robust portfolio of energy technologies. The US is, in fact, the Saudi Arabia of coal and, to meet robustness requirements for meeting short and long term US energy demand, coal is a common sense component. Maybe eventually only in some mothballed-annual testing-fast restart sense, but it’s a very cheap insurance policy. Keeping the pilot light on for the US coal industry as well, from a National Security standpoint.

Keep improving renewables, but don’t throw away what works. There’s a beauty to a highly diverse portfolio. You sleep better at night.

In any case, the economic case for coal is indeed pretty clear at this point: it's simply too expensive in most markets. Even in markets where coal mining is a big part of the local economy.

And while gas has taken up some of the slack (especially in the US), the vast majority of additions to the grid world wide are renewables.

Peak gas usage world wide is a bit murky. Projections range from right now to 2030 (IEA). But the bottom line is that we're not really replacing coal with gas. There are a lot of gas peaker plants not running all the time that were designed originally to be running 24/7. That massively changes the economics and profitability of these things and makes them a lot less attractive to investors.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

It'd be interesting to see the cost per ton CO2e of paying to shut down gas plants as well.

As China's power consumption grows, is coal occupying a bigger percent of the energy pie or is it proportional growth?

China wants to annex Taiwan. To fight any wau laden with sanctions, it needs energy independence. They don't have natural gas so they're burning coal.

It's not ideal, but at least they have a better reason than Germany shuttering nuclear plants or the US keeping coal alive.

They don't mention cost of replacements, or the costs of climate damage.

It's not really possible to do that in China...

    For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand.

    Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.

    The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector.

    Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth

I've seen an estimate that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may have reached as high as 30,000 ppm (3%).

It was bad luck for the Paleozoic world that this massive mantle plume came up in perhaps the worst possible place.

Some of these pipes became filled with magnetite and as a result are mined for this rich iron ore.

> Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geo-chronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key, short intervals, rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions.

Modern CO2 increase has been going on for 200 years, and is theorized to be comparable to one of the bursts that occurred during the Permian-Triassic extinction. However the PTME witnessed a few such bursts over the course of tens of thousands of years. CO2 levels sextupled from a base that was not much lower than where CO2 levels are today.

It's a warning about the dangers of CO2, but given the corrective actions already taking place I don't think CO2 levels will reach anywhere near those seen during the PTME. Most importantly CO2 level increases are driven by human activity which is a lot easier to modulate than volcanoes.

That’ll still leave concrete as one of the next largest sources, even if the rebar gets a smaller footprint.

Energy for steel production can come from coal, but doesn't need to, coal bound with iron to make steel is a different reaction to burning coal for energy.

"Green steel" (as odd as that sounds) is an active area of research ATM, promising but there's a looong way to go to reduce the emissions from a billion+ tonnes of steel per annum (and concrete production and other resource processing).

Having said that, given the increasing power demands of civilization, why not both in parallel?

The dollar density is also huge.

Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive. And figuring in the cost of nuclear waste disposal kills the project.

All other means of grid power generation are able to externalize expenses. Our society, for better or worse, won't let anything "nuclear" get away with that.