I certainly hope this will be the end of coal. It would be the biggest single step forward in reducing GHG emissions.
It is only expensive in places where the government has decided to force it out of business via taxes and regulations. That's not true for most of the world, and the future of coal production is certainly up.
You mean "properly include the cost of it's externalities".
Coal is the epitome of "tragedy of the commons". The faster a stake is driven through its heart, the better off the world will be.
Drive coal out of production now and you'll cause a lot more problems than you solve. Lots of activists like to do their ten minutes of hate on coal, but they never stop and think about all the good that it does. It's a case of 'what has coal ever done for us'. Apart from all the lighting, refrigeration, production, water distribution, heating, cooling and computing it enables throughout the world.
The age of coal will eventually end. It is best managed rather then fervently trying to prevent.
When every single village and town has reliable and cheap electricity supply and their productivity has been raised to the point where they can afford cheaper replacements, then coal still has a place.
All those TV adverts for villages with no clean water - what they first need is a power station to power pumps and filtration. When you see kids that have no education, what they first need is electricity so their parents don't have to make the kids work all day, and lighting so they can read at night.
Those places, if they don't have hydro available, need coal fired electricity capable of being delivered at 10c/kWh. They don't need a tesla battery pack and solar panels any more than they need a tesla model s.
I think most of them would trade a bit of coal pollution for the pollution from burning wood and dried out cowshit inside their homes. And it's downright wrong for people in rich countries to out their nose in the air and try and tell them they can't.
> Wind power, on average, sold for 2.5¢ per kilowatt-hour in the US in 2013, when looking at PPA prices (2014 numbers are due to come out this week). That’s the average for all reported PPAs, which means they’re a bit under 4¢ per kilowatt-hour without subsidies. These super-low prices are extremely hard to beat, and demonstrate why so much of the electricity generation capacity added in the past few years has come from wind power plants.
The article also has several examples of utility scale solar already producing power below 6 cents/KwH.
Fridges and lighting and waterpumps need 24/7 power.
Solar with battery raises these costs considerably and are not suitable for the type of power needed.
Solar in-fill is great at low cost. It doesn't scale out like that when you need to make power 24/7.
I have nothing against solar power and battery tech. I just try and keep things in perspective of the bigger picture for the majority of the world.
For the former you need a storage tank after the compressor and for the latter you need a water tower.
For lighting, you are correct, but that needs very little capacity.
Distributed solar with batteries is still cheaper than coal plants and running power distribution all over the third world.
> I think most of them would trade a bit of coal pollution for the pollution from burning wood and dried out cowshit inside their homes. And it's downright wrong for people in rich countries to out their nose in the air and try and tell them they can't.
It would be more effective for us in the first world to subsidize solar technology for the third world, instead of the terribly pathetic idea of continuing to build coal plants.
Many developing nations skipped out on landlines and jumped straight to mobile. Instead of a nation-wide power distribution network with coal-fired generators, perhaps we will see some countries jumping straight to distributed solar.
Look at this chart for a coal company[1]. It's already been almost dead and a major chunk of the coal GHG emissions are already cut way back (albeit at the expense of natural gas emissions).
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=ACI+Interactive#{"range":...
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=73&t=11
That is already a big win.
1949-2011: http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec7_9.pdf
2008-2014Q2: http://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t32p01p1.pd...
Unfortunately, it doesn't back up your claim at all that it's "almost dead"... It looks like we're about 18% off from the peak in 2007.
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=1&pi...
Sorry if it wasn't obvious, but coal companies have to make money. They are at the point now where they are on the verge of being wiped out by natural gas.
It will reach a point where coal makes absolutely no sense to invest in and the game will stop there. It's already at the point where nobody in their right mind is putting money into new large coal prospects.
http://data.cnbc.com/quotes/HNRG
A single company's stock production does not indicate the state of coal any more than Gateway's stock chart represents the state of technology.
It's a bit daft to point to a company that has a pretty be hedge against the decline of coal.
I pointed to ACI because they mostly depend on coal sales in the US so it's a pretty nice reflection of the US domestic coal market.
In the ten year period between 2002 and 2012 (the only figure I have the most recent numbers for) coal consumption went from 5 and a half billion tons to over 8 billion tons, and it's slated to hit 9 billion tons by 2019.