3 ms·

burn less coal than who?

• plorg 3y ago
  Than themselves, over time. Or at least that seems like the implication. But this article includes very few numbers, and none are about tons of coal burnt or GWh electricity produced from coal annually. The figure they cite most consistently is capacity factor, suggesting that figure may be decreasing as coal is used for peaking. Beyond the likelihood that this kind of usage pattern is actually worse for emissions, capacity factor itself is a misleading figure to use. If you build a single new coal plant that has lower capacity factor usage than the rest of your fleet the fleet average would go down despite you burning a larger quantity of coal. I hope that's not what they are trying to claim, because it would ridiculous. But it's the closest thing this article cites to an actual trend. The rest is just people (or the authors) saying, "yeah, [despite all of the evidence] we expect coal usage to decline".