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From the UK... "A decade ago, coal plants generated almost a third of the UK’s electricity, but in the first half of this year they have provided only 3%." ht

From the UK... "A decade ago, coal plants generated almost a third of the UK’s electricity, but in the first half of this year they have provided only 3%." https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon-energy-overtakes-fossil-fuels-as-the-uks-largest-electricity-source https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon... https://electricityproduction.uk/from/coal/?t=8y https://electricityproduction.uk/from/coal/?t=8y

maxk42 7y ago
In the US it's approximately 30%.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  That was true a few years ago. In 2018 it was down to 28%. Now it's about 24%: "Short Term Energy Outlook -- 2019-08-06" EIA forecasts that the share of U.S. generation from coal will average 24% in 2019 and in 2020, down from 28% in 2018. EIA expects electric power sector demand for coal to fall by 2% in 2020, compared with an expected decline of 15% in 2019. However, planned coal plant retirements will continue to put downward pressure on overall electricity demand for the fuel. Almost 13 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity generation capacity has retired this year or is scheduled to retire by the end of 2020, accounting for 5% of the capacity existing at the end of 2018. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php
- scarejunba 7y ago
  In California, it's 3.3% and that's all imported power that's on existing contracts. We will be free of this very soon https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_system_power.html https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...
  - jhayward 7y ago
    California is an outlier, having the advantage of being a low-demand (per capita) state with access to abundant hydro power from the NW area. As well as some of the highest power costs in the US.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Wow really? I would not have guessed anywhere near that high.
  - sp332 7y ago
    Coal has been the majority or near the majority of power generation until very recently. And it's only as low as it is now because natural gas got cheaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Electrical_Generation_1950-2016.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_State...
    - mikepurvis 7y ago
      I have no idea how many facilities this is, but coal plants can also be retooled for gas: https://www.transalta.com/about-us/coal-to-gas/ https://www.transalta.com/about-us/coal-to-gas/
  - Tempest1981 7y ago
    One of my favorite graphics -- although it also includes petroleum: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-States_Energy.pdf https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-...
nathell 7y ago
Meanwhile in Poland it's been 78.2% in 2018, "down" from 78.4% in 2017. And the Polish government has made it clear that coal will remain the basis of energy production here. I'm frustrated as I'm writing this on a train from Berlin to Warsaw. One of the reasons why I chose to travel by train rather than fly was the carbon footprint journey, and I'm cutting it down much less than I should be.
- gambiting 7y ago
  And don't forget that there's still a huge number of private homes which use coal fired boilers. Even if all coal power plants closed tomorrow, Polish towns would still be consuming huge amounts of coal just to stay warm in winter(and there's practically no regulations about emissions from those, it just goes straight up your chimney).
  - c2h5oh 7y ago
    There is a lot of funding available for replacing those - one of the largest chunks of cash provided by eu do far.
    - gambiting 7y ago
      Sure, but there's still a lot of people who don't want to, simply because coal is cheaper than both eco-pellets and gas. My grandparents only changed theirs from coal to gas last year, and only because grandpa was getting too old to go and add coal to the boiler every few hours - but they've been complaining about the fortune that the gas is costing them ever since.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        A carbon tax would fix that.
        gambiting 7y ago
        And one won't be implemented for the same reason why coal boilers haven't been banned yet - "think of the poor people - if they cannot afford their coal for winter how will they stay warm?".
tialaramex 7y ago
It's weird though, if you look back at this week, yesterday for a few hours it was sunny _and_ windy in the middle of the day. That ought to depress the hell out of prices, most of the gas plants were idled. But for some reason a cold plant was fired up. Did they lose money running that plant? Is there some setup where running the plant a certain amount (maybe on windy days when pollution effects in the vicinity are smallest) is just treated as a good thing even though we really ought to be burning less fossil fuels not more? I don't understand the economics of coal versus gas in this space in a market like the UK. It seems as though with gas being cheaper it would just never make economic sense to burn coal when gas plants aren't 100% flat out. But clearly I am wrong somehow.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I wonder if that's related, directly or indirectly to the grid trip: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49302996 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49302996
- ehnto 7y ago
  Gas is quicker to start up and meet demand usually as well. It could well have been a maintenance thing. Maybe it was a test fire of some new equipment or configuration. It could also have been a contractual thing. A minimum supply they agreed upon with the organisation who manages the grid.
- acta_non_verba 7y ago
  This was Cottam Coal Power Station burning its remaining coal at a loss (so you are correct, not profitable when renewables doing well) in time for its impending closure in September. Source: Final paragraph of https://limejump.com/the-week-in-flexibility-mid-week-intrigue-delivers-one-of-the-busiest-weeks-yet/ https://limejump.com/the-week-in-flexibility-mid-week-intrig...
benj111 7y ago
As a Brit I could point out many idiotic brain dead things that the political class of this country does. But the switch from coal is quite frankly astonishing, and then you take a look at the biggest offshore wind farms [1] and you see what's replacing it, and then you look at the size of the planned wind farms [also 1] and you start to believe maybe our carbon reduction targets can be met. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Auctioning off Contracts for Difference seems like a really smart way to make government subsidy stretch further too. The auction allows them to attract low bids by a simple and understandable competition. If you bid higher than other entrants you won't get a contract, but if you bid lower than your operating costs you'll lose money (or more realistically, you won't pay back investors for the capital on the construction fast enough to make sense). The CfD setup means the government's subsidy only manages the uncertainty. If prices collapse, the government picks up a big difference, but if prices sky-rocket the wind farm operator ends up paying the government instead of receiving a subsidy at all. One thing I'm told, and hope to see, is that the taller the wind turbine the more often it runs. At high altitudes it's basically permanently windy, the winds we experience as so variable are a low phenomenon, so in principle as the turbines get taller some of the intermittent production problem goes away by itself. That would be almost bigger than just offshore wind power being cheap enough to justify building it on purely economic grounds with no subsidy and no additional carbon taxes.
- NikkiA 7y ago
  We don't produce enough coal to run coal plants anymore, that's why we've dumped coal power. Almost all of the remaining handful of coal mines in the UK are 100% allotted to our (also near gone now) steel industry.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    I thought the cause was the other way round? That we dumped coal power so that we could stop producing coal, which we wanted to do because the coal miners’ strike demonstrated they/their unions were dangerous to the government?

maxk42 7y ago

In the US it's approximately 30%.

philipkglass 7y ago
That was true a few years ago. In 2018 it was down to 28%. Now it's about 24%: "Short Term Energy Outlook -- 2019-08-06" EIA forecasts that the share of U.S. generation from coal will average 24% in 2019 and in 2020, down from 28% in 2018. EIA expects electric power sector demand for coal to fall by 2% in 2020, compared with an expected decline of 15% in 2019. However, planned coal plant retirements will continue to put downward pressure on overall electricity demand for the fuel. Almost 13 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity generation capacity has retired this year or is scheduled to retire by the end of 2020, accounting for 5% of the capacity existing at the end of 2018. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php
scarejunba 7y ago
In California, it's 3.3% and that's all imported power that's on existing contracts. We will be free of this very soon https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_system_power.html https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...
- jhayward 7y ago
  California is an outlier, having the advantage of being a low-demand (per capita) state with access to abundant hydro power from the NW area. As well as some of the highest power costs in the US.
chrisseaton 7y ago
Wow really? I would not have guessed anywhere near that high.
- sp332 7y ago
  Coal has been the majority or near the majority of power generation until very recently. And it's only as low as it is now because natural gas got cheaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Electrical_Generation_1950-2016.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_State...
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    I have no idea how many facilities this is, but coal plants can also be retooled for gas: https://www.transalta.com/about-us/coal-to-gas/ https://www.transalta.com/about-us/coal-to-gas/
- Tempest1981 7y ago
  One of my favorite graphics -- although it also includes petroleum: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-States_Energy.pdf https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-...

nathell 7y ago

Meanwhile in Poland it's been 78.2% in 2018, "down" from 78.4% in 2017. And the Polish government has made it clear that coal will remain the basis of energy production here. I'm frustrated as I'm writing this on a train from Berlin to Warsaw. One of the reasons why I chose to travel by train rather than fly was the carbon footprint journey, and I'm cutting it down much less than I should be.

gambiting 7y ago
And don't forget that there's still a huge number of private homes which use coal fired boilers. Even if all coal power plants closed tomorrow, Polish towns would still be consuming huge amounts of coal just to stay warm in winter(and there's practically no regulations about emissions from those, it just goes straight up your chimney).
- c2h5oh 7y ago
  There is a lot of funding available for replacing those - one of the largest chunks of cash provided by eu do far.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    Sure, but there's still a lot of people who don't want to, simply because coal is cheaper than both eco-pellets and gas. My grandparents only changed theirs from coal to gas last year, and only because grandpa was getting too old to go and add coal to the boiler every few hours - but they've been complaining about the fortune that the gas is costing them ever since.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      A carbon tax would fix that.
      - gambiting 7y ago
        And one won't be implemented for the same reason why coal boilers haven't been banned yet - "think of the poor people - if they cannot afford their coal for winter how will they stay warm?".

tialaramex 7y ago

It's weird though, if you look back at this week, yesterday for a few hours it was sunny _and_ windy in the middle of the day. That ought to depress the hell out of prices, most of the gas plants were idled. But for some reason a cold plant was fired up. Did they lose money running that plant? Is there some setup where running the plant a certain amount (maybe on windy days when pollution effects in the vicinity are smallest) is just treated as a good thing even though we really ought to be burning less fossil fuels not more? I don't understand the economics of coal versus gas in this space in a market like the UK. It seems as though with gas being cheaper it would just never make economic sense to burn coal when gas plants aren't 100% flat out. But clearly I am wrong somehow.

pjc50 7y ago
I wonder if that's related, directly or indirectly to the grid trip: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49302996 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49302996
ehnto 7y ago
Gas is quicker to start up and meet demand usually as well. It could well have been a maintenance thing. Maybe it was a test fire of some new equipment or configuration. It could also have been a contractual thing. A minimum supply they agreed upon with the organisation who manages the grid.
acta_non_verba 7y ago
This was Cottam Coal Power Station burning its remaining coal at a loss (so you are correct, not profitable when renewables doing well) in time for its impending closure in September. Source: Final paragraph of https://limejump.com/the-week-in-flexibility-mid-week-intrigue-delivers-one-of-the-busiest-weeks-yet/ https://limejump.com/the-week-in-flexibility-mid-week-intrig...

benj111 7y ago

As a Brit I could point out many idiotic brain dead things that the political class of this country does. But the switch from coal is quite frankly astonishing, and then you take a look at the biggest offshore wind farms [1] and you see what's replacing it, and then you look at the size of the planned wind farms [also 1] and you start to believe maybe our carbon reduction targets can be met. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms

tialaramex 7y ago
Auctioning off Contracts for Difference seems like a really smart way to make government subsidy stretch further too. The auction allows them to attract low bids by a simple and understandable competition. If you bid higher than other entrants you won't get a contract, but if you bid lower than your operating costs you'll lose money (or more realistically, you won't pay back investors for the capital on the construction fast enough to make sense). The CfD setup means the government's subsidy only manages the uncertainty. If prices collapse, the government picks up a big difference, but if prices sky-rocket the wind farm operator ends up paying the government instead of receiving a subsidy at all. One thing I'm told, and hope to see, is that the taller the wind turbine the more often it runs. At high altitudes it's basically permanently windy, the winds we experience as so variable are a low phenomenon, so in principle as the turbines get taller some of the intermittent production problem goes away by itself. That would be almost bigger than just offshore wind power being cheap enough to justify building it on purely economic grounds with no subsidy and no additional carbon taxes.
NikkiA 7y ago
We don't produce enough coal to run coal plants anymore, that's why we've dumped coal power. Almost all of the remaining handful of coal mines in the UK are 100% allotted to our (also near gone now) steel industry.
- ben_w 7y ago
  I thought the cause was the other way round? That we dumped coal power so that we could stop producing coal, which we wanted to do because the coal miners’ strike demonstrated they/their unions were dangerous to the government?