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Coal usage peaked ~2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_coal Just in the past two weeks: Germany closing even new

Coal usage peaked ~2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_coal Just in the past two weeks: Germany closing even new coal plants - https://reneweconomy.com.au/german-coal-plant-closes-after-just-six-years-to-produce-green-hydrogen-from-wind/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/german-coal-plant-closes-after-j... Philipines will not build new coal plants due to economics. They will instead invest in grid scale storage and renewables - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-10/biggest-philippine-power-generator-will-drop-new-coal-projects https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-10/biggest-p... It's mostly economics. When other generation and storage systems drop by orders of magnitude in price in just 2 decades it throws the old equations out. There's no economic reason to build a coal plant today. https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/12/03/plunging-prices-mean-building-new-renewable-energy-is-cheaper-than-running-existing-coal/?sh=5ad07e8831f3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/12/03/plu...

melling 5y ago
38% of the electricity globally is coal. We’ve got quite a long way to go.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Because of sunk costs (not in the fallacy sense). Doesn't mean it makes sense to build a new one. Agreed we have a long way to go :)
  - melling 5y ago
    We are building lots of coal plants globally. https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissions-china-goes-on-a-coal-spree https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...
    - jes5199 5y ago
      I don’t understand why China is building so many coal plants - for several years it’s been reported that they run them way, way under capacity.
      - jdhn 5y ago
        Jobs program, perhaps?
        philipkglass 5y ago
        I think that's one big reason. It's easier to build unneeded power plants than to figure out how to retrain people and move them into new jobs. It's something that other countries struggle with too. Fortunately (?) in the US there's less pressure to keep people employed with makework so unneeded coal plants shut down and former employees sink or swim on their own.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        I'd guess for baseload?
      - azernik 5y ago
        It's because the optimistic narrative about the reasons for coal's decline are misleading. Some of the competition is renewables. A lot of it is natural gas. Countries are usually building a mix of fossil fuel and renewable generation. If you're a great power, have little natural gas or oil accessible by land (either in your own territory or through friendly neighbors), and have peer rivals with enormous navies, coal becomes very attractive as the fossil part of your energy mix for security reasons.
      - foota 5y ago
        Energy Guarantees? Maybe they want to protect their baseload from a lack of natural gas.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Don’t we use coal for two main things? Energy and steel? Do we have a replacement for coal in the steel industry?
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    I don’t know if he is right, but Bill Gates has been saying that we should basically accept that certain kinds of steel will never be made with a net zero process. We need steel though, so we will have to offset those carbon costs.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    Cement production is another big one.
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      It's relatively easy to capture the carbon dioxide produced by cement production, though. Relatively few, relatively large, point sources where the CO2 is in pipes already. Low-carbon alternatives to Portland cement are being researched and piloted, too. Just a matter of money and the learning curve, the same as with electric power production.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      I wish we could engineer a way to use all the heat from nuclear reactors for this purpose.
      - jjk166 5y ago
        Unfortunately about 60% of CO2 emissions from cement production is simply the CO2 released from the conversion of Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) to lime (CaO). You need carbon capture no matter what, so capturing emissions from the heat production as well is likely far more economical than modifying a plant to use a totally different process heat source. Further, nuclear is simply not a good option for this application. Cement kilns need to reach 1,450 C, while reactor temperatures are limited to about 950 C.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  You are correct, there's just a lot of plants and backwards thinking and political inertia, but fundamentally all that coal is being used at an economic loss. It is cheaper to replace an existing coal plant with new construction alternative energy even including the new procurement costs. That's without subsidies by the way. Oil will begin to be subject to this. When BEVs eat into oil demand sufficiently, financing and banking will evaporate for new projects, and the industry will undergo a reverse economies of scale in extraction, refining and shipping. Oil is already more vulnerable than coal to this, since the cost of extraction for oil is high compared to the old days of "stick pipe a couple feet in the ground and light sweet crude gushes out". The oil is coming out of deep water, fracking, tar sands, etc which all has a price floor which, if oil goes under that long enough (since banks won't float loans on this sector much longer), the entire extraction operation shutters, often permanently. Although we should absolutely be accelerating the rate of fossil fuel -> alternatives conversion with government subsidies.
bradleyjg 5y ago
The linked article says: The Department of Energy in late 2020 declared a moratorium on endorsing new coal-fired power plants as the Southeast Asian nation seeks to shift to a more flexible power supply and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2030. You don’t need a moratorium on something that makes no economic sense. This is a decision that takes into account externalities (and that’s great!)
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  > You don’t need a moratorium on something that makes no economic sense. Yes, you do. Some will make decisions that are uneconomic because captive rate payers have no choice (this is prevalent with coal in the US MISO and PJM ISO grids) but to pay, and those making them are doing so to support coal even while in its death throes. About 160 cities are locked into the prairie state coal plant in southern Illinois (one of the largest coal plants east of the Mississippi) because of bonds they issued and debt they’ve taken on they can’t afford to accelerate payback on to close the plant early. https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2021/6/4/22517456/prairie-state-coal-plant-energy-bill-illinois-legislature-green-energy-air-pollution-fossil-fuels https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2021/6/4/22517456/prai... TLDR You have to kill coal with extreme prejudice, not just hope economic sanity is enough, because the evidence has demonstrated it isn’t.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    > Some will make decisions that are uneconomic because captive rate payers have no choice If that’s the case then you have bigger problems. Rather than applying bandages on top of a broken system you should figure out how to align incentives.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      People who profit today and won’t be here tomorrow cannot have their prioritizes aligned with mitigating climate change. If I were to want to go with some hyperbole, I’d call them apathetic antagonists. The system is broken because you can’t align the incentives.
tpmx 5y ago
> Germany closing even new coal plants Please don't greenwash Germany's horrible energy strategy after they prematurely closed nuclear plants because of Fukushima-based populism. One example: They brought a new 1.1 GW coal power plant online last year that they expect to run until at least 2038. (Datteln 4: https://www.reuters.com/article/deutschland-klima-uniper-idDEKBN2CU0G2 https://www.reuters.com/article/deutschland-klima-uniper-idD...)
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > Please don't greenwash Germany's horrible energy strategy Quite. One good thing (the only one?) that came out of Thatcherism was the end of the British coal industry, though at the cost of enormous suffering for many people. Although BoJo and his crew of sub-100 IQ morons seem to be intent on opening a new one. These stickers in the 70s, mostly on polluting Citroen 2CVs used to really piss me off: https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F2b1ccb4a-1cea-43de-be5d-3ea4bd48c903.png?fit=scale-down&source=next&width=600 https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt... And actually now, which I had completely forgotten, I remember meeting a gorgeous blond girl in Bennets Bar in Edinburgh, about 1978, and her taking me back to my flat in her car with the "Nien Danke" sticker on it. And I said it would have to go. Well, you can probably imagine what the result was.
  - Tepix 5y ago
    She was right though. Nuclear power was unsafe and you can argue that it is still unsafe as last seen during Fukushima.
  - ggm 5y ago
    See, if you'd met her at Sandy Bell's or Mathers, that would never have happened
    - zabzonk 5y ago
      You are right about Sandy Bell's. Never been in Mathers, I don't think (at least not consciously). Actually, more memories are now flooding back. One of my flat-mates (not the greatest-looking man) met up with a really hideous woman in Sandy Bells and tried to inflict her on us - we fairly resolutely said "NO" - it all worked out for the best in the end - he ended up with a nice nurse.
azernik 5y ago
To be a bit more pessimistic - the competition that's driving out coal isn't just renewables. It's more efficient and cheaper fossil fuels, most notably natural gas. These are way better than coal in carbon emissions, but won't get us nearly low enough unless they are in turn replaced by renewables fairly quickly

melling 5y ago

38% of the electricity globally is coal. We’ve got quite a long way to go.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Because of sunk costs (not in the fallacy sense). Doesn't mean it makes sense to build a new one. Agreed we have a long way to go :)
- melling 5y ago
  We are building lots of coal plants globally. https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissions-china-goes-on-a-coal-spree https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...
  - jes5199 5y ago
    I don’t understand why China is building so many coal plants - for several years it’s been reported that they run them way, way under capacity.
    - jdhn 5y ago
      Jobs program, perhaps?
      - philipkglass 5y ago
        I think that's one big reason. It's easier to build unneeded power plants than to figure out how to retrain people and move them into new jobs. It's something that other countries struggle with too. Fortunately (?) in the US there's less pressure to keep people employed with makework so unneeded coal plants shut down and former employees sink or swim on their own.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      I'd guess for baseload?
    - azernik 5y ago
      It's because the optimistic narrative about the reasons for coal's decline are misleading. Some of the competition is renewables. A lot of it is natural gas. Countries are usually building a mix of fossil fuel and renewable generation. If you're a great power, have little natural gas or oil accessible by land (either in your own territory or through friendly neighbors), and have peer rivals with enormous navies, coal becomes very attractive as the fossil part of your energy mix for security reasons.
    - foota 5y ago
      Energy Guarantees? Maybe they want to protect their baseload from a lack of natural gas.
newsclues 5y ago
Don’t we use coal for two main things? Energy and steel? Do we have a replacement for coal in the steel industry?
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I don’t know if he is right, but Bill Gates has been saying that we should basically accept that certain kinds of steel will never be made with a net zero process. We need steel though, so we will have to offset those carbon costs.
- pengaru 5y ago
  Cement production is another big one.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    It's relatively easy to capture the carbon dioxide produced by cement production, though. Relatively few, relatively large, point sources where the CO2 is in pipes already. Low-carbon alternatives to Portland cement are being researched and piloted, too. Just a matter of money and the learning curve, the same as with electric power production.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    I wish we could engineer a way to use all the heat from nuclear reactors for this purpose.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      Unfortunately about 60% of CO2 emissions from cement production is simply the CO2 released from the conversion of Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) to lime (CaO). You need carbon capture no matter what, so capturing emissions from the heat production as well is likely far more economical than modifying a plant to use a totally different process heat source. Further, nuclear is simply not a good option for this application. Cement kilns need to reach 1,450 C, while reactor temperatures are limited to about 950 C.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
You are correct, there's just a lot of plants and backwards thinking and political inertia, but fundamentally all that coal is being used at an economic loss. It is cheaper to replace an existing coal plant with new construction alternative energy even including the new procurement costs. That's without subsidies by the way. Oil will begin to be subject to this. When BEVs eat into oil demand sufficiently, financing and banking will evaporate for new projects, and the industry will undergo a reverse economies of scale in extraction, refining and shipping. Oil is already more vulnerable than coal to this, since the cost of extraction for oil is high compared to the old days of "stick pipe a couple feet in the ground and light sweet crude gushes out". The oil is coming out of deep water, fracking, tar sands, etc which all has a price floor which, if oil goes under that long enough (since banks won't float loans on this sector much longer), the entire extraction operation shutters, often permanently. Although we should absolutely be accelerating the rate of fossil fuel -> alternatives conversion with government subsidies.

bradleyjg 5y ago

The linked article says: The Department of Energy in late 2020 declared a moratorium on endorsing new coal-fired power plants as the Southeast Asian nation seeks to shift to a more flexible power supply and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2030. You don’t need a moratorium on something that makes no economic sense. This is a decision that takes into account externalities (and that’s great!)

toomuchtodo 5y ago
> You don’t need a moratorium on something that makes no economic sense. Yes, you do. Some will make decisions that are uneconomic because captive rate payers have no choice (this is prevalent with coal in the US MISO and PJM ISO grids) but to pay, and those making them are doing so to support coal even while in its death throes. About 160 cities are locked into the prairie state coal plant in southern Illinois (one of the largest coal plants east of the Mississippi) because of bonds they issued and debt they’ve taken on they can’t afford to accelerate payback on to close the plant early. https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2021/6/4/22517456/prairie-state-coal-plant-energy-bill-illinois-legislature-green-energy-air-pollution-fossil-fuels https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2021/6/4/22517456/prai... TLDR You have to kill coal with extreme prejudice, not just hope economic sanity is enough, because the evidence has demonstrated it isn’t.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  > Some will make decisions that are uneconomic because captive rate payers have no choice If that’s the case then you have bigger problems. Rather than applying bandages on top of a broken system you should figure out how to align incentives.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    People who profit today and won’t be here tomorrow cannot have their prioritizes aligned with mitigating climate change. If I were to want to go with some hyperbole, I’d call them apathetic antagonists. The system is broken because you can’t align the incentives.

tpmx 5y ago

> Germany closing even new coal plants Please don't greenwash Germany's horrible energy strategy after they prematurely closed nuclear plants because of Fukushima-based populism. One example: They brought a new 1.1 GW coal power plant online last year that they expect to run until at least 2038. (Datteln 4: https://www.reuters.com/article/deutschland-klima-uniper-idDEKBN2CU0G2 https://www.reuters.com/article/deutschland-klima-uniper-idD...)

zabzonk 5y ago
> Please don't greenwash Germany's horrible energy strategy Quite. One good thing (the only one?) that came out of Thatcherism was the end of the British coal industry, though at the cost of enormous suffering for many people. Although BoJo and his crew of sub-100 IQ morons seem to be intent on opening a new one. These stickers in the 70s, mostly on polluting Citroen 2CVs used to really piss me off: https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F2b1ccb4a-1cea-43de-be5d-3ea4bd48c903.png?fit=scale-down&source=next&width=600 https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt... And actually now, which I had completely forgotten, I remember meeting a gorgeous blond girl in Bennets Bar in Edinburgh, about 1978, and her taking me back to my flat in her car with the "Nien Danke" sticker on it. And I said it would have to go. Well, you can probably imagine what the result was.
- Tepix 5y ago
  She was right though. Nuclear power was unsafe and you can argue that it is still unsafe as last seen during Fukushima.
- ggm 5y ago
  See, if you'd met her at Sandy Bell's or Mathers, that would never have happened
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    You are right about Sandy Bell's. Never been in Mathers, I don't think (at least not consciously). Actually, more memories are now flooding back. One of my flat-mates (not the greatest-looking man) met up with a really hideous woman in Sandy Bells and tried to inflict her on us - we fairly resolutely said "NO" - it all worked out for the best in the end - he ended up with a nice nurse.

azernik 5y ago

To be a bit more pessimistic - the competition that's driving out coal isn't just renewables. It's more efficient and cheaper fossil fuels, most notably natural gas. These are way better than coal in carbon emissions, but won't get us nearly low enough unless they are in turn replaced by renewables fairly quickly