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The economic forces that caused global coal consumption to be flat is what’s preventing people from building more coal plants. Excluding China global coal cons

• darby_nine 2y ago
  China is not the biggest issue, though they may be today—most of the coal plants coming online are in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Whereas China has a pretty healthy "green industry" sector domestically and similar incentives to the west to decarbonize, most countries currently building do not. Furthermore the coal provider in the region, Australia, makes a lot of money with this export. It's not going to be easy to control all these variables while also forcing countries to not develop a strong energy base (which correlates with, roughly, the size of your economy) and also not providing any subsidies. Meaning, it won't work, though you will certainly piss people off if you try.
  • Retric 2y ago
    Southeast Asia is relatively poor for PV due to all the rain, but that just means it’s a few years behind the curve. That same hockey stick growth has kicked off in all the countries Australia is exporting to. Exported coal meanwhile is fighting heavy transportation costs which only go up as demand starts to fall off. So, while they had very slow growth over the last decade that’s balanced on an economic knife edge. Most industry experts are just trying to decide how quickly things drop off not if they will.