In the US, coal consumption is down 60% since the peak year of 2008.[1] The trend looks linear. Hits zero sometime in the 2030s. Coal is over in the US. Even the coal industry thinks coal is over.[2] Conversion of coal plants to natural gas is proceeding rapidly.
I flew across Northern China 5 years ago, you could see open cast mines next to power plants to the horizon .... but they were rapidly filling in the space with wind generation 1000s of turbines using the coal plant's transmission lines - they knew that the pollution drifting east to Beijing wasn't sustainable
The impetus is more to ensure people don't get pollution in the big cities (which indirectly helps with climate change, but that was never the real goal).
We've been conditioned to think democracy is the perfect form of government but why did people vote for Trump? Why in my country does less than 50% of the voters show up for elections?
The US is rated as an "flawed democracy" and not a "full democracy" for the last decade by the Economist Intelligence Unit (an offshoot of the Magazine that published this article).
Switzerland has usually a less than 50% turnout, for a comparison - and still gets brownie points for democracy. Yes, I'm sad myself, but I'll still take it over any other systems.
First past the post systems generally have lower turnout than proportional systems. Even record turnout for the US isn't very high in international terms.
And if that record turnout is to support and/or oppose a candidate that seeks to burn the whole system down and gets votes due to the system not reflecting voters priorities for a while then it further supports my theory.
While I personally think of democracy as "the worst except for everything else we've tried", there's plenty who speak as if it's tautologically the best.
In the historical context I would see "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" as intentionally juxtaposed against the "Divine Right of Kings" (the leading political philosophy in Europe for the last few thousand years).
I think there is a TON of interesting discussion to be had on the best ways to _implement_ democracy, but locating the source of political power directly in the people who are governed seems like a pretty solid idea to me... I have not been able to come up with anything better.
Indeed. Democracy is "least bad" because it at least allows people to choose, but don't be surprised if they make the wrong choice. Evidently one problem outweighs the other, and for advocates for democracy it's that the latter issue is outweighed (the former is that the people have no choice, this is people making the wrong choice). If men were angels, a nominally totalitarian government could be absolutely ideal.
Either you live in a very different bubble, or you are building a strawman to demolish.
I never even heard anybody claiming that democracy is perfect form of government. People in democratic countries usually accept that democracy is messy.
The real killer app of democracy is the ability to change leaders without death or bloodshed. Of course it results in fewer big projects being built (though the US was very good in building things like Apollo or the Interstate System, once - it is mostly environmental regulations that get in the way now, and not pure democracy).
But the stereotypical danger of autocracy is that its big projects will be a useless money sink (like this [0]), or even destructive.
sure, but half of the country believes that's achieved with some measures and the other half believe those measures are the cause of the problems. A dictatorship doesn't change that, you'll only have half of the country incapable of voting for a change.
A few decades ago, a French minister was being interviewed on US TV about the French nuclear power program. He was asked how France had managed to get all their nuclear plants approved and built. He said, "We had a vote in the Chamber of Deputies. I understand you do things differently in America."
Pollution in China was terrible. Pretty much everybody hated it, and it was not possible to hide or whitewash it.
The US was in the same position during 60-s and 70-s, and it fixed the worst of the pollution rapidly. The EPA was established during the freaking Nixon administration.
I think there were a lot of factors at play behind the will of the leader or form of government, including resources and technologies available to the respective nations.
Well, they'll at least report that they're doing it. I've heard that autocracies tend to have data quality issues that derive from messengers not wanting to be shot.
China’s commitment to nuclear power increased significantly with the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025), released in March 2021, which called for a buildout of some 150 new nuclear reactors over the ensuing 15 years to reach a production goal of 200 GW of nuclear energy by 2035 (enough to power more than a dozen cities the size of Beijing).
By 2050, China wants nuclear to provide at least 15 percent of its electricity generation (which China envisions as its third overall source of energy by that year, behind wind and solar).
The Chinese publish their plans on a 5 year schedule. They abandoned all plans for inland nuclear plants, in total they cancelled twice as much nuclear as the US has currently running.
China is right now just reaching the goal it set for 2020 capacity in 2016 and things appear to be slowing down.
I just don’t get this. Why is it so damn hard to do nuclear anywhere when France does it so well? You’d think regulations in china would not be the reason
> In December 2007, construction of the unit itself began. This was expected to last 54 months, with commissioning planned for 2012
However it is still under construction. Olkiluoto was also a major disaster for France, though it was eventually completed.
South Korea is probably the best example for nuclear construction success, but they have had to jail a few people for forging inspection results.
All in all, I think China has done fairly well with nuclear. Nuclear is a massive project that is insanely complex. It is not helped by trivializing the complexity, nor is it helped when people focus more on public opposition than the construction challenges, IMHO.
Mostly similar but with a lot of breadth, eg: they have three generations of molten salt reactors on the go ATM (one pilot complete, one 10x large half complete, one even bigger on the drawing board being modified on basis of results from first two).
Coal has peaked globally, there's no global expansion, 190+ countries are winding back coal save for both India and China which are still expanding at a declining rate and expected to peak and decline in the mid term.
WRT China, they can't over produce renewable energy and be the largest global supplier of green energy without coal .. at least not yet.
China’s growing coal capacity could be seen as a mix of welfare and bureaucratic waste. Each prefecture is incentivized to build its own redundancy, and in a flagging economy, government spending is up to keep the economy going. The resulting overcapacity could be used for ‘peaking’ to offset intermittency in renewable power, something that’s being experimented with currently. And in the shorter term, coal can have less warming effect than gas, but I’m not sure this would be true of China’s coal plants in particular
China’s growing coal consumption is part of Cina's growing energy demands, their middle class is growing and exceeds the entire popultion of the USA in size.
While that middle class has a per capita energy and consumption figure that is lower than the USA per capita figures it is the case that the US has set an aspiration life style expectation that sees demand grow.
China's coal use has become increasingly more efficient; much is made of additional new modern coal power houses, little mention is made of the larger numbers of older inefficient far dirtier coal plants have been closed down and are still being closed down.
Nuclear and renewables are part of overall energy production in China to a far greater proportion and absolute number than in the US.
The scale of China's energy production is substantial and not easily characterised.
It's 29.1% renewables in China (2,756 TWh) vs. 21.4% (894 TWh) in the United States.
Grouping nuclear and renewables together as low-emissions sources, the US gets 47.65% of its electricity from low-emissions sources and China gets 33.96% from low-emissions sources.
China is building nuclear and renewable sources faster than the US, so will narrow the gap over the rest of the decade, but it's also growing its total electricity consumption faster.
Fair correction, I was focused more on China's renewable sector than it's nuclear (which China plans to increase to 15% of their projected 2050 electricity production) and on absolute size.
I mostly check my figures before comments, this is what I deserve for going off the cuff :-) ( thanks )
I made a mistake too when I was adding and copy-pasting numbers. US is at 39.55% low-emissions electricity. So I got the ranking right but originally overstated the size of the gap.
China in 2024 is on track to install more solar and wind capacity than it's consumption growth add the fact that of lcoe of solar + battery storage is now cheaper than what retail electricity is selling for in China. So move off coal electricity for China might be a lot faster than people are predicting.
Most coal plants in China will probably be used a peaker plants in the future. They don't make the best peaker plants, but China doesn't have much natural gas.
The linked article by Hannah Ritchie states the case for this. There's also this article about an Australian experiment to shut off and turn back on a coal plant within 5 hours:
Coal has already taken over peak generation in China. They've only started to build battery plants, so coal will be covering peaks for anther decade at least.
You could be right, if there’s innovation in storage tech. I currently have my eyes on sodium ion, which doesn’t have the resource issues of lithium ion, and is already dirt cheap. Hasn’t got great gravimetric density, but perfect for grid storage
Although sodium is good, LFP batteries are already below $65-68/Kwh and do not have the same risk of thermal runaway that lithium-ion batteries do. These batteries are being rated for 6000+ cycles without more than 80-90% degradation (i.e. daily charge discharge for 20 years). So LCOE of battery storage systems like Tesla Megapack are now around $0.06c/Kwh, which is cheaper than the average electricity price in most of the world.
The biggest problem the world faces to decarbonize now is finance rather than technology, as few can afford to pay 10-20 years of electricity usage upfront, apart from rich countries. I hope the battery storage prices keep the cost trajectory as smaller the payback period, the faster and larger the adoption will be.
Well aware of LFP. The device I’m using now was charged by it. The problem is that grid storage needs tremendous scale, and for that lithium battery chemistries are constrained by lithium extraction. Sodium is already abundantly available
I was bullish on sodium ion batteries last year but now I don't see them taking off at least for the next few years unless sodium ion tech is 40-50% cheaper today.
The reason being no matter how much oil and gas companies keep harping about lithium shortage reality is lithium production is likely to stay ahead of demand for the next few years. And the incremental improvement in lithium battery tech and production each year keeps sodium ion tech from keeping any cost advantage.
Last I checked they were always on par for household energy storage units, leave aside grid scale. If this is their starting price before economies of scale really kick in, then I can’t see what the next couple of years bring. Esp. as new grid scale batteries are coming online. There’s still more innovation to do in terms of improving cycle life though
This is wishful thinking. Large parts of Africa is yet to become a developing economy. Once that happens, coal consumption is going to increase. Unfortunately, it's the easiest and cheapest way to generate electric power.
Africa is also one of the sunniest places around. With both solar and battery capacity still rapidly falling in price, and infrastructure generally being problematic in many African nations, it seems likely enough that they'll skip past to off-grid / micro-grid power.
Why would Africa install coal? It's way more expensive than solar, and coal makes them dependent on imports. Once installed, solar is independent energy.
The same reason African nations build railways and ports they strictly don't need - China and various world banks are continuing what European countries used to do, cheap "upfront" capital loans for expensive infrastructure projects that benefit resource extractors and other that prey on small nations.
Your rational long term argument has little sway when key decision makers are bribed and offered a chance to retire to a mansion elsewhere on the planet.
As of today the majority of China's coal activity in Africa is directly related to China's mining activity in Africa to provide power for ectraction, processing and townships.
That mining activity is 'small' in the sense that Chinese mining companies represent ~ 8 percent of Africa’s total output in the sector and are concentrated in just five countries: Guinea, Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Resource extraction from those regions back to China is currently approx. $13 billion US (for resources that would likely cost 5x that cost if sourced from Canada or Australia)
China is not alone and by no means the greatest extractor; Anglo-American alone accounts for more than double that 8% share.
The future maybe different, but right now coal use has peaked and is starting to fall. See (for example) actual data [1].
> Once that happens ..
you speculate, you engage in wishful thinking, you ignore actual resource consumption projections gathered globally over decades by major resource companies.
Such external costs should only be included if the uncertainties on estimates of external costs of CO2 emissions are somehow represented. And I’m referring to factoring in all structural and parametric uncertainties inherent in climate models. Cutting to the chase, you can never factor in, or even meaningfully bound, those structural uncertainties. Not a big deal for million dollar investments, a big deal for trillion dollar investments.
Modelers of all ilks generally avoid reporting the underlying uncertainties in their results. And when they do report them, they are woefully underestimated. Fine in the abstract, but not acceptable when trillions of dollars are at stake. Dollars that can be spent instead on direct low risk, high impact improvements in third world child health (clean air, clean water, infectious diseases, etc.). Maybe choose those that also mitigate climate impacts (as we currently understand them), but directly save the living children/people first.
Keep on improving the models with scientific research, but don’t fool ourselves about the accuracy and completeness of such models for policy analysis. I’m old enough to remember the Club of Rome/Limits to Growth controversies.
The geophysics behind, say, the Santos Barrossa gas project appears pretty tight; the C02 emmissions estimates are directly tied to the economic feasibility estimate process .. if one is wrong then so is the other, if so it must be a bad investment and a foolish project?
When the project’s offshore and gas processing emissions are factored in, the LNG produced from the Barossa field would have a total emissions intensity of 1.4 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of LNG produced.
This makes the Barossa development the most emissions intensive LNG projects in Australia and the world
At this point in time there's a clear understanding of the consequences of the current 11 billion tonne of CO2 equivilant emmissions released annually .. an increase in trapped solar heat energy that directly leads to increased storm intensity, climbing global mean tempretures, and edging closer to positive feedback thresholds which are significantly hard to reverse when crossed.
It's worth contextualizing that the decline of coal in the US has been fuelled (sorry) more than anything by the rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas extraction. The US is now the world's largest natural gas producer with 60% of that gas being produced by hydraulic fracturing. This isn't going to be easily accessible — or acceptable — everywhere around the world.
Solar and batteries are getting so cheap so fast it won’t matter for the rest of the world. China installed a 3GW solar facility in 14 months, just turned up, second largest in the world [1] [2]. 14 months. And they are not slowing down.
Is there any data on the lifecycle of large-scale solar batteries? Are they any better than the small-scale ones? If they aren't, it would seem impractical to rely on them, because of the costs to replace/recycle them every few years.
Just to be clear, I'm referring to the use of electrical batteries for the temporary storage of solar power, so that the power can be available when the sun is not.
Non-electrical storage techniques (gravity, hydro) would seem better suited for long-term reliability.
Lithium batteries typically have a 10-15 year service life, depending on who you buy from (I am most familiar with Tesla's Megapack and Autobidder product in this regard; Tesla will warranty for up to 20 years [1]). CATL has a battery they warranty for 1M miles in EV applications [2], extrapolate to daily stationary storage cycles. Sodium ion is moving very fast, and is likely superior for this use case (both in regards to cost and service life) [3].
Scale up manufacturing, scale up deployment, scale up recycling, and you've got a circular supply chain system. At end of life, new (very likely better) batteries are installed and the old ones (in decades) are shipped back for recycling. In the US, this is Redwood Materials [4], founded by JB Straubel (former Tesla CTO). They have agreements to both recycle batteries with major automakers as well as supply feedstock for new battery components [5]. I'm unsure if this circular supply chain system exists in China yet, but I presume it is straightforward with their nation state resources to encourage along.
Pumped hydro is great where you can build it and it is cost superior to batteries, but batteries can be shipped and installed anywhere a concrete pad is waiting for them, very rapidly.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/megapack ("Each Megapack unit ships fully assembled and ready to operate, allowing for quick installation timelines and reduced complexity. Systems require minimal maintenance and include up to a 20-year warranty.")
I cannot speak authoritatively as to whether the LFP cell cost decline curve has enabled stationary storage to be cost superior in all cases compared to both short and long duration pumped hydro, hence the caveat. I have no doubt we'll get there, just not sure we're there yet.
Probably something for Lazard's next LCOE report, to act as a canonical reference for such discussions.
The cost difference depends on number of cycles. If you fill and empty your storage daily, batteries are way cheaper. If you fill and empty annually, pumped storage is way cheaper.
Hydrogen is a very poor long term storage. It either uses very expensive tanks or it leaks away. It's also a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive.
No, hydrogen is excellent for long term storage. It is stored underground.
"Couple of orders of magnitude more expensive" is not correct. For long term storage, the capex per energy storage capacity dominates, and the cost of underground storage caverns (especially solution mined in salt) is very cheap, an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of stored energy than reservoirs for water.
It absolutely does matter. If one is cycling the storage system annually, $3/kg for hydrogen becomes a minor part of the cost. The cost of this input is proportional to the number of charge/discharge cycles over the timescale indicated by the discount rate, and for annual storage that's not very many.
It's a common mistake to think that the importance of round trip efficiency for diurnal storage carries over to annual storage.
As I understand it, the Tesla warranty was factored into the purchase price as a way to stabilize the TCO, and has little to do with the physical lifecycle of the lithium cells.
Sodium looks very promising, but it's "not there yet."
> As I understand it, the Tesla warranty was factored into the purchase price as a way to stabilize the TCO, and has little to do with the physical lifecycle of the lithium cells.
Where does that understanding come from? Because Tesla's warranty is consistent with every other manufacturers warranty that I have seen, basically 4000-5000 cycles is standard for grid storage lithium ion.
The warranty doesn't guarantee that the batteries will not fail, it just compensates the owner when they do. Buyers may be hesitant to purchase an expensive system such as a Powerwall or a Cybertruck unless the system comes with a warranty. So Tesla can raise the sales price to cover the inevitable warranty claim, and the purchaser will be none the wiser.
It's clear how warranties work, what's not clear to me is why Tesla would be using them in a way different from any other use of them over the years, and why every single other manufacturer is also using them in some sort of different way.
Employment in coal extraction is also an interesting graph. Although a lot of it has dropped due to mechanization over the generations (like, from ~1910 on downwards) it's still pretty clear that the old heights of job-creation people might remember with nostalgia are never[0] coming back.
I didn’t read where the US is mining out all their coal deposits and dumping them in the ocean.
Current exploitation of coal in the US maybe be declining, but it is still an important part of a robust portfolio of energy technologies. The US is, in fact, the Saudi Arabia of coal and, to meet robustness requirements for meeting short and long term US energy demand, coal is a common sense component. Maybe eventually only in some mothballed-annual testing-fast restart sense, but it’s a very cheap insurance policy. Keeping the pilot light on for the US coal industry as well, from a National Security standpoint.
Keep improving renewables, but don’t throw away what works. There’s a beauty to a highly diverse portfolio. You sleep better at night.
No, that's Australia. We do a lot of stupid shit to earn that title. We're the #1 coal exporter in the world (note: exporter, the US beats us on production), despite having a tiny population and economy compared to the USA. We're also mostly desert and have a pop of ~20 million, just like Saudi Arabia, and we also pour our fossil fuel profits into a sovereign wealth fund, just like Saudi Arabia - oh wait no we don't, we're less financially prudent than Saudi "let's build a ski resort here" Arabia.
The reason it's over is because wind and solar have become cheaper than anything else. Solar is currently around $23/MWhr.
Nuclear is around $70/MWhr, one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.
Solar is highly distributeable so it can be placed closer to where the power is used, reducing transmission losses. It doesn't need to be very carefully sited in terms of where it goes on the grid, and nobody needs to worry about the long term geological stability of the area. It doesn't need to be partnered with another plant for cold starts. It has no safety concerns. It doesn't need any labor to operate - mostly occasional repairs to damage and cleaning. It has no capacity to cause any sort of disaster. It does not generate toxic waste in operation.
Nobody has ever said "don't shoot tank rounds near that solar farm or you might cause thousands of square miles of land to be uninhabitable for centuries."
Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"
The administration kowtowing to industry lobbyists to fund nuclear energy when the market was already adding seven times as much renewables as it is decommissioning nuclear capacity...is just corporate welfare, pure and simple.
Solar and wind definitely make the most sense wherever feasible, but it's important to keep in mind you can't just build solar and wind farms anywhere. China has moderately good solar capacity in the north, but generation there will be seasonal due to how far north it is. The north of China is also not close to the majority of the population, so transmission will be an issue.
China's high to moderate quality solar capacity will be built out very quickly, and it won't provide enough to close the gap from fossil-based generation. From there, the cost of solar generation will rise as low quality capacity is developed.
China will need a way to import some of their energy generation, possibly through by importing goods like iron and steel that have a high energy production cost, from countries like Australia that can produce them using renewable energy (green iron / green steel) using Australia's almost limitless solar resources.
Since much of Australia's coal is also used in places like China to smelt their local and imported iron and steel, this could further drive down production of coal.
China is building a nation spanning UHV ("ultra high voltage") power transmission system.
> According to China Energy News, the combined length of the UHV transmission lines operating in China had reached 48,000km (30,000 miles) by the end of 2020, more than enough to wrap around the Earth by the equator.
> Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"
Well, if hydrogen from electrolysis really takes off, it would be possible to piggyback an exchange tower on the system to also get heavy water production.
Or some other form of energy storage. If there's a nearby higher-altitude lake, you can pump water uphill. Or you can even just lift blocks of cement or whatever up a tower. Or split water into hydrogen and oxygen and store the hydrogen. Or melt sodium. Etc.
Solar + battery storage is cheaper than nuclear, and also far more flexible.
Nuclear, as a baseload generator, is not capable of meeting demand peaks, so if we are going to require batteries for solar, we should require batteries for nuclear as well. Which does not help its case very much.
> Nuclear, as a baseload generator, is not capable of meeting demand peaks, so if we are going to require batteries for solar, we should require batteries for nuclear as well.
Being a baseload generator is what nuclear is used for. It doesn't require batteries because you're not trying to use it for demand peaks.
Suppose you have 10GW of demand at night (minimum daily demand), 16GW at midday during peak solar generation and 20GW for two hours right after sunset (maximum daily demand). Do you want 20GW of nuclear? No, you want 10, to handle the first 10GW of demand at all times. That's baseload. Then you want another 10GW of solar, most of which is used directly during midday and the rest of which is used with storage to handle the demand peak just after sunset.
Doing it this way means you only need storage for the amount the demand peak after sunset exceeds baseload, which might be 20GWh of storage, instead of needing enough storage to satisfy the entire demand all night, which could be 140GWh.
It also improves resistance to low renewable generation because if renewable output is at 50% of normal for a week or more but the grid is half nuclear then the overall grid would have a 25% deficit instead of a 50% deficit. And then you need less in long-term storage, or peaker plants, to pick up that load.
Using nuclear for base load is silly. Why would you use the 12c/kWh nuclear energy while the sun is shining when you could be using the 0.5c/kWh solar instead?
Because you already built the nuclear plant to provide power at night and during periods of low renewable output, and once you're already paying to build and operate it, the incremental cost of also using it during the day is effectively zero and zero is less than any non-zero cost for needing more solar farms.
Also, the real numbers aren't actually that far apart because you're using the high end of the estimate range for nuclear and the low end of the range for solar.
To replace nuclear with solar for baseload you need the solar farms and batteries for at night and peaker plants for extended periods of low generation during the day and to maintain fueling infrastructure for those peaker plants. You add all of those up and it costs more than using nuclear for baseload.
I think that commenter is asking: since the nuclear+solar solution requires batteries, why do we account for them as the cost of solar but not as the cost of nuclear? shouldn't it be equal parts both?
The solution that uses both nuclear and solar requires fewer batteries than the one that uses only solar, ergo the extra batteries are a cost of using only solar.
The solution that uses both nuclear and solar might also require fewer batteries than the one that uses only nuclear, but that's exactly why the optimal solution is to use a combination of nuclear and solar instead of exclusively one or the other.
My understanding on China's coal plants is that it's not the number of them, it's whether they're running that counts. Coal-fired generation is currently cheaper than storage for backing up wind and solar generation and their plants are typically running about 50% of the time right now, expected to run less often as storage and more renewables come online. So China’s coal use could fall despite it adding more capacity.
There's a lot of speculation about when peak coal and fossil usage is going to be in China. There is some suggestion that that might actually be right now. China's aggressive rollout of solar, wind, and battery is shifting a lot of their plans by years or decades. The official line is still that they want to be carbon neutral by 2060. But they might actually get there a lot sooner if the current trends continue.
In any case, the economic case for coal is indeed pretty clear at this point: it's simply too expensive in most markets. Even in markets where coal mining is a big part of the local economy.
And while gas has taken up some of the slack (especially in the US), the vast majority of additions to the grid world wide are renewables.
Peak gas usage world wide is a bit murky. Projections range from right now to 2030 (IEA). But the bottom line is that we're not really replacing coal with gas. There are a lot of gas peaker plants not running all the time that were designed originally to be running 24/7. That massively changes the economics and profitability of these things and makes them a lot less attractive to investors.
Gas peaker plants aren't intended to be run 24/7. That's why they're called "peaker plants". Most of the cost is fuel, so they can be profitable if run only during peak periods.
Nuclear plants are all fixed cost. So reducing power produced during off-hours increases cost per KWh.
On the last few years, China's coal consumption has been almost unchanging.
What yeah, makes them one of the countries mostly investing in coal out there. But there hasn't been an increase, and it ought to fall fast at some point to one of the cheaper alternatives.
One small plus for coal is that it doesn't leak. With better satellite observation now, we're finding out how underreported the emissions of methane from natural gas extraction were.
Due to thermal insulation and the avoidance of rain/snow extinguishment by the crust, underground coal-seam fires are the most persistent fires on Earth and can burn for thousands of years, like Burning Mountain in Australia.
Coal and Asbestos are natural too, the point is that "natural" there is a greenwashing term as it's quite polluting and not the best energy source out there considering global warming.
If I'm reading this right, they just added up the remaining amortized capital cost of the plants, doubled that to give the investors a return, and divided by the amount of CO2 emissions that would be avoided.
They don't mention cost of replacements, or the costs of climate damage.
The fallacy of the cost argument here is that it fails to take into account the cost and economics of operating a coal plant. Coal energy is simply too expensive. Any time wind/solar pushes energy prices down, coal plants are operating at a loss. Shutting down and starting up coal plants is expensive too.
A lot of the reduction in coal plant capacity is not driven by environmental concerns but by economics. This is investors cutting their losses. The cost of continuing to operate these plants is higher than the cost of just getting rid of them. Keeping these plants going requires ongoing investments with very dubious returns. Financing that is getting hard; it's a bad investment.
Which is why a lot of countries are pretty far done decommissioning their coal capacity.
Yeah if we did something like this for real, we should make a more realistic estimate of how much of a return the plant owners are really likely to get, instead of just arbitrarily multiplying their investment by two.
But while coal is declining, it's still spewing large amounts of CO2 and probably will for some time yet. It's doing better in areas outside the US, where it doesn't have to compete with such cheap natural gas.
We could also apply this plan to natural gas, which is doing better economically, accounts for a lot of CO2, and has a warming impact as bad as coal if you take methane leaks into account. I wonder what the cost per ton CO2e would be for that.
Why should the investors be getting that much of a return? The whole premise of why investments gain value is that there is a risk associated with it. The risk didn’t pay off, try not getting in the planet killing business
The problem is that the risk is still paying off. The coal plants continue to run, and it's not that easy getting the political support to shut them down before the economics make it happen anyway.
The installed capacity of solar has been doubling every 3 years for the past 15 years. And if it keeps going on this pace for another 15 years, solar will exceed the energy production of all other energy sources (coal, oil and gas’s).
It is my opinion that this should be a global roadmap. Double solar installed capacity every three years. It’s doable. We should do it.
Wrongly framed. The price of not shutting down coal is an planet that would uninhabitable. That would cost more than all of the value humans ever created, create, or ever would create had we chosen more wisely to stop killing ourselves for the temporary "crack high" of profits today. Now, the challenge is in decarbonizing energy and all other industries one-by-one to limit the damage and destruction that has already been set in motion by energy already imparted and will be retained using the sky as an open sewer.
Presumably countries with a higher proportion of electricity from hydropower, like Canada and Brazil, could get even more out of this than Japan does in terms of stabilizing renewables.
You can also float solar PV on the reservoirs, re-using the grid connections with extreme complementarity (since you want to hold the hydro power back when the solar is producing).
One of the ways China is killing coal is of course with coal, aaaand the worlds largest ultra high voltage transmission power lines~30000 km's, which is so extensive that moving power from supply to demand works over several time zones. Enabling maximisation of solar and wind production by sending noon solar in one place to power the end of day surge somewhere else and coal is
playing a role by bieng run at full efficiency, with no need for load dumping.
Currently more than half of the load on the ultra high voltage transmissiin network is bieng provided for by renewables, and a mad mix of anything and
everything to fill in the gaps.
kind of like finding anything to put in empty shipping cans going back to china
driving American production of Hay, watered from aquifiers,ending up in China
or possibly mountains of wierd suspect corn,bieng shipped and then burned as fuel
in a coal plant.Thermal plant here in Nova Scotia, burns wood to make electricity.
And then back to hay, which is pelletised and used as fuel.World wide the use of bio fuels is going to be in the millions of tons, so it is too soon to close the book on carbon.
We have a long way to go to shut down coal power. Here's a graph of current global fossil fuel consumption in exajoules. China uses about 84 exajoules of coal power, and is approaching 4 exajoules of nuclear, so that's a big job to replace with nuclear. China plans to triple their nuclear from their current ~50 plants, but that's still a smallish fraction of total demand.
> "Global coal consumption also hit a new high, exceeding 164 EJ for the first time. This represented a 1.6% increase from 2022, a growth rate seven times higher than the average over the previous decade. China remained the largest consumer, responsible for 56% of global coal use. China’s coal consumption increased by 4.7% in 2023, more than four times the country’s 1.1% average coal consumption growth rate of the past decade. For the first time, India’s coal consumption in 2023 surpassed the combined consumption of Europe and North America. Meanwhile, coal consumption in both Europe and North America dropped below 10 EJ each, marking their lowest levels since 1965."
The planet thus continues to head full tilt towards Pliocene conditions last seen 2-5 mya. A rational civilization would at this point be investing in a massive infrastructure project on a global scale to adapt to these new conditions, while simultaneously stepping up wind/solar/storage deployment at scale.
Global high, sure, and yet at the same time a very probable peak with a future of steady fall:
For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand.
Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.
The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector.
Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth
Strange little thinkpiece. The classic "No Country for Coal Gen" report in 2017 suggested that most coal generation in the states at that time was being propped up despite being uneconomic due to warped incentives and that the US would save billions just in energy costs by closing them (health and carbon benefits were on top of that energy cost saving and were further billions).
Ironically I have more faith in Communist China actually following the economic incentives in phasing out coal, despite sporadic reports of regional governments alledgedly following their local preogatives to build coal.
Someone in China drew an interesting picture of a slow rotating skyscraper shaped like a vertical axle wind turbine. Tall but the proportions of a bucket. Say such a thing has half a million ton in mass and 500 m diameter. The fun part is that losses are less than zero if there is some wind.
India is an outlier, they are addicted to coal so much so that an entire family tycoon (probably in cohoots with the government) owns coal supply lines.
Off topic but I saw in a YouTube video how they suspect one of the earths greatest extinction events was partly driven by volcanic material igniting massive coal beds, the combination of the vulcanism and the coal burning killed like 90% of life on earth.
The Permian-Triassic extinction. A massive intrusion of basaltic magma into the The Tunguska Basin that also created the Siberian Traps. The intrusion heated organic-rich sediments and evaporites (salt, anhydrite) and caused eruption of gases. Siberia is littered with enormous pipes as much as 1 km in diameter that erupted massive amounts of gas during the event. In addition to CO2 and methane, the gas was loaded with chlorinated hydrocarbons from the salt, which could have devastated the ozone layer.
I've seen an estimate that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may have reached as high as 30,000 ppm (3%).
It was bad luck for the Paleozoic world that this massive mantle plume came up in perhaps the worst possible place.
Some of these pipes became filled with magnetite and as a result are mined for this rich iron ore.
> Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geo-chronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key, short intervals, rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions.
Modern CO2 increase has been going on for 200 years, and is theorized to be comparable to one of the bursts that occurred during the Permian-Triassic extinction. However the PTME witnessed a few such bursts over the course of tens of thousands of years. CO2 levels sextupled from a base that was not much lower than where CO2 levels are today.
It's a warning about the dangers of CO2, but given the corrective actions already taking place I don't think CO2 levels will reach anywhere near those seen during the PTME. Most importantly CO2 level increases are driven by human activity which is a lot easier to modulate than volcanoes.
Steel uses so much carbon that it’s been a target for using hydrogen as a reducing agent. There are a couple ironworks that have already started converting.
That’ll still leave concrete as one of the next largest sources, even if the rebar gets a smaller footprint.
That would be true if there had been zero effort and money spent in subsidizing fossil fuels, hiding data about its true long term impact for decades and sabotaging efforts to move away from carbon dependence.
There are two types of coal, metallurgical and thermal.
Energy for steel production can come from coal, but doesn't need to, coal bound with iron to make steel is a different reaction to burning coal for energy.
"Green steel" (as odd as that sounds) is an active area of research ATM, promising but there's a looong way to go to reduce the emissions from a billion+ tonnes of steel per annum (and concrete production and other resource processing).
One of the biggest Steel mils here in Argentina had a dedicated forest with 30.000.000 eucaliptus to make the coal. So it's possible to use carbon-neutral coal. More details (Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceros_Zapla_S.A.
Yes. Already during the Roman empire the Ruhr valley was denuded as the trees were cut down to make charcoal for iron making.
With modern technology we can do better, e.g. torrefaction produces bio-coal with about 90% of the original energy in the wood, but OTOH the scale is way beyond what was seen in the ancient world.
Baseload power comes at the expense of renewable power, the latter of which is much cheaper, much faster, and less riskier to deploy than nuclear. Peaking gas plants are much quicker to build than nuclear and should tide us over until grid storage (of all kinds) catches up – which looks to be around 1-2 decades at current scaling and about the lead time for a nuclear power plant
> No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.
The dollar density is also huge.
Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive. And figuring in the cost of nuclear waste disposal kills the project.
All other means of grid power generation are able to externalize expenses. Our society, for better or worse, won't let anything "nuclear" get away with that.
I don't think I'm anti-nuclear power. The only thing that works against nuclear, in my opinion, is the time it takes to build. A lot of solar and wind and battery can be built in the decade (if not more) that it seems to take a nuclear power station to be built.
Having said that, given the increasing power demands of civilization, why not both in parallel?
Why does it take time to build though? Is it a technical reason, or economic and regulatory reasons? If the latter, we could probably go faster if as a society we prioritized it.
Nuclear is seriously unfriendly stuff. Just read up on all the lessons (and coverups) the US nuclear industry learned about making nuclear fuels. The metals involvsd are toxic AF and unforgiving of any stupidity. We have a ton of regulations around this because businesses of the past just dumped things like mildly radioactive tailings to blow around in the wind.
I have heard the argument that the standard nuclear plant have the inefficiencies of any large building project, like building a big bridge. You never get the optimizations of mass production that you get in a factory that produces tens of thousands of solar panels or lots of wind turbines. I guess that is what SMR is trying to solve. I don’t know how that is going.
You don't need dispatchable baseload and batteries do scale enough. If nuclear was cost competitive, I'd support it, but it's just not. Look at how much renewables China is building vs. nuclear, if you think this opinion is somehow political in nature, it's not.
Coal is key to current steel manufacturing process. There are experimental green steel processes but very nascent. If you're building stuff, you need coal.
https://archive.today/B7hkD
In the US, coal consumption is down 60% since the peak year of 2008.[1] The trend looks linear. Hits zero sometime in the 2030s. Coal is over in the US. Even the coal industry thinks coal is over.[2] Conversion of coal plants to natural gas is proceeding rapidly.
China, though, is still adding coal capacity.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/243934/coal-consumption-...
[2] https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity...
> China, though, is still adding coal capacity.
It's a bit misleading because China is mostly _replacing_ old coal power plants now.
China has probably passed the peak coal consumption this year, or it will in 2025.
I flew across Northern China 5 years ago, you could see open cast mines next to power plants to the horizon .... but they were rapidly filling in the space with wind generation 1000s of turbines using the coal plant's transmission lines - they knew that the pollution drifting east to Beijing wasn't sustainable
There's something to be said for a dictatorship that at the very least thinks climate change is real.
Air quality issues in Beijing have nothing to do with climate change. China is not acting as though they care about CO2 emissions at all.
China just builds any energy sources it possibly can.
The impetus is more to ensure people don't get pollution in the big cities (which indirectly helps with climate change, but that was never the real goal).
Not that this is a problem.
We've been conditioned to think democracy is the perfect form of government but why did people vote for Trump? Why in my country does less than 50% of the voters show up for elections?
The masses just want food and security.
The US is rated as an "flawed democracy" and not a "full democracy" for the last decade by the Economist Intelligence Unit (an offshoot of the Magazine that published this article).
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2024/03/21/why-amer...
That would be my guess as to both why Trump got elected and why voting isn't very popular.
>That would be my guess as to both why Trump got elected and why voting isn't very popular.
A turnout of 63.5% isn't popular? Even compared to past elections it's the second highest turnout in the past 3 decades. The highest was in 2020.
Switzerland has usually a less than 50% turnout, for a comparison - and still gets brownie points for democracy. Yes, I'm sad myself, but I'll still take it over any other systems.
First past the post systems generally have lower turnout than proportional systems. Even record turnout for the US isn't very high in international terms.
And if that record turnout is to support and/or oppose a candidate that seeks to burn the whole system down and gets votes due to the system not reflecting voters priorities for a while then it further supports my theory.
> record turnout for the US isn't very high in international terms
Who are you comparing it to? The U.S. is middle of the pack in the OECD [1].
The highest-turnout countries are Equitorial Guinea, Rwanda and Turkmenistan [2]. None are democracies.
[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/reg_glance-2009-35-e...
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/voter-tur...
What conditioning? I've always heard it described as the "least bad" form of government. It definitely beats having a communist dictatorship though.
"Vox Populi, Vox Dei": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Populi%2C_Vox_Dei
While I personally think of democracy as "the worst except for everything else we've tried", there's plenty who speak as if it's tautologically the best.
In the historical context I would see "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" as intentionally juxtaposed against the "Divine Right of Kings" (the leading political philosophy in Europe for the last few thousand years).
I think there is a TON of interesting discussion to be had on the best ways to _implement_ democracy, but locating the source of political power directly in the people who are governed seems like a pretty solid idea to me... I have not been able to come up with anything better.
The problem with giving people choices is that sometimes they make the wrong choice.
Indeed. Democracy is "least bad" because it at least allows people to choose, but don't be surprised if they make the wrong choice. Evidently one problem outweighs the other, and for advocates for democracy it's that the latter issue is outweighed (the former is that the people have no choice, this is people making the wrong choice). If men were angels, a nominally totalitarian government could be absolutely ideal.
>We've been conditioned
That's a very interesting phrase to use here.
Either you live in a very different bubble, or you are building a strawman to demolish.
I never even heard anybody claiming that democracy is perfect form of government. People in democratic countries usually accept that democracy is messy.
The real killer app of democracy is the ability to change leaders without death or bloodshed. Of course it results in fewer big projects being built (though the US was very good in building things like Apollo or the Interstate System, once - it is mostly environmental regulations that get in the way now, and not pure democracy).
But the stereotypical danger of autocracy is that its big projects will be a useless money sink (like this [0]), or even destructive.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Monument
> The masses just want food and security.
sure, but half of the country believes that's achieved with some measures and the other half believe those measures are the cause of the problems. A dictatorship doesn't change that, you'll only have half of the country incapable of voting for a change.
Dictatorship of the proletariat
A few decades ago, a French minister was being interviewed on US TV about the French nuclear power program. He was asked how France had managed to get all their nuclear plants approved and built. He said, "We had a vote in the Chamber of Deputies. I understand you do things differently in America."
The one thing where dictatorship is very efficient. One man says that let's reduce the pollution and others will do it.
Let's see if democracy is ever able to do the same.
I disagree.
Pollution in China was terrible. Pretty much everybody hated it, and it was not possible to hide or whitewash it.
The US was in the same position during 60-s and 70-s, and it fixed the worst of the pollution rapidly. The EPA was established during the freaking Nixon administration.
And it had a good fifty years or so before being abolished.
I think there were a lot of factors at play behind the will of the leader or form of government, including resources and technologies available to the respective nations.
Another anecdote where a democracy can deal with sufficiently bad pollution… eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
But these are only examples when the pollution is so bad that it affects even the visibility in your own house.
The whole problem of the crisis is that you should also make actions for things that you cannot see. Or if they happen for your neighbor country.
That has not really happened yet.
Still working on it with ULEZ and Oxford Street.
Americans will always do the right thing, after they have tried everything else”; often attributed to Winston Churchill
Well, they'll at least report that they're doing it. I've heard that autocracies tend to have data quality issues that derive from messengers not wanting to be shot.
The thing with the air quality is that others can measure it too, or even see from the space.
https://dialogue.earth/en/pollution/how-climate-change-compl...
Problem is when the dictator is wrong and chose not to address it. Then it doesn't get done. That is not very efficient.
The Soviet Union's environmental record is significantly worse than the democracies.
I don’t recall anyone enforcing pollution reduction in there
China is also massively building nuclear with 29 reactors being built in parallel.
Source: https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstruction...
And thats small potatoes compared to their wind and solar efforts, something like 339 GW in 2023 and going way up every year.
Or, using percentages:
~ https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...And they're roughly a decade behind schedule on their nuclear plans, and roughly a decade ahead of schedule on their renewable plans.
How are they ten years behind on a schedule launched three years ago?
The Chinese publish their plans on a 5 year schedule. They abandoned all plans for inland nuclear plants, in total they cancelled twice as much nuclear as the US has currently running.
China is right now just reaching the goal it set for 2020 capacity in 2016 and things appear to be slowing down.
I just don’t get this. Why is it so damn hard to do nuclear anywhere when France does it so well? You’d think regulations in china would not be the reason
France is not doing nuclear well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
> In December 2007, construction of the unit itself began. This was expected to last 54 months, with commissioning planned for 2012
However it is still under construction. Olkiluoto was also a major disaster for France, though it was eventually completed.
South Korea is probably the best example for nuclear construction success, but they have had to jail a few people for forging inspection results.
All in all, I think China has done fairly well with nuclear. Nuclear is a massive project that is insanely complex. It is not helped by trivializing the complexity, nor is it helped when people focus more on public opposition than the construction challenges, IMHO.
Are they varied, or mostly the same model?
Mostly similar but with a lot of breadth, eg: they have three generations of molten salt reactors on the go ATM (one pilot complete, one 10x large half complete, one even bigger on the drawing board being modified on basis of results from first two).
See: (for example) https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...
Coal has peaked globally, there's no global expansion, 190+ countries are winding back coal save for both India and China which are still expanding at a declining rate and expected to peak and decline in the mid term.
WRT China, they can't over produce renewable energy and be the largest global supplier of green energy without coal .. at least not yet.
China’s growing coal capacity could be seen as a mix of welfare and bureaucratic waste. Each prefecture is incentivized to build its own redundancy, and in a flagging economy, government spending is up to keep the economy going. The resulting overcapacity could be used for ‘peaking’ to offset intermittency in renewable power, something that’s being experimented with currently. And in the shorter term, coal can have less warming effect than gas, but I’m not sure this would be true of China’s coal plants in particular
China’s growing coal consumption is part of Cina's growing energy demands, their middle class is growing and exceeds the entire popultion of the USA in size.
While that middle class has a per capita energy and consumption figure that is lower than the USA per capita figures it is the case that the US has set an aspiration life style expectation that sees demand grow.
China's coal use has become increasingly more efficient; much is made of additional new modern coal power houses, little mention is made of the larger numbers of older inefficient far dirtier coal plants have been closed down and are still being closed down.
Nuclear and renewables are part of overall energy production in China to a far greater proportion and absolute number than in the US.
The scale of China's energy production is substantial and not easily characterised.
Nuclear and renewables are part of overall energy production in China to a far greater proportion and absolute number than in the US.
China has a smaller nuclear fleet capacity than the US and meets a much smaller percentage of its electricity needs with nuclear power:
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
As of 2023 US got 18.55% of electricity from nuclear power (775 terawatt hours) while China got 4.86% (433 TWh).
As of 2023 China does get a larger share from renewables:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Pr...
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
It's 29.1% renewables in China (2,756 TWh) vs. 21.4% (894 TWh) in the United States.
Grouping nuclear and renewables together as low-emissions sources, the US gets 47.65% of its electricity from low-emissions sources and China gets 33.96% from low-emissions sources.
China is building nuclear and renewable sources faster than the US, so will narrow the gap over the rest of the decade, but it's also growing its total electricity consumption faster.
Fair correction, I was focused more on China's renewable sector than it's nuclear (which China plans to increase to 15% of their projected 2050 electricity production) and on absolute size.
I mostly check my figures before comments, this is what I deserve for going off the cuff :-) ( thanks )
I made a mistake too when I was adding and copy-pasting numbers. US is at 39.55% low-emissions electricity. So I got the ranking right but originally overstated the size of the gap.
China in 2024 is on track to install more solar and wind capacity than it's consumption growth add the fact that of lcoe of solar + battery storage is now cheaper than what retail electricity is selling for in China. So move off coal electricity for China might be a lot faster than people are predicting.
China's coal plants are running at steadily reduced capacity (while their renewables capacity is growing exponentially).
> In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They’re now running around 50%.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/141628065/chinas-c...
Most coal plants in China will probably be used a peaker plants in the future. They don't make the best peaker plants, but China doesn't have much natural gas.
The linked article by Hannah Ritchie states the case for this. There's also this article about an Australian experiment to shut off and turn back on a coal plant within 5 hours:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41831861
Battery storage is pricing out gas peaker plants everywhere so unlikely coal will take over peak usage in china
Coal has already taken over peak generation in China. They've only started to build battery plants, so coal will be covering peaks for anther decade at least.
Grid battery peakers can be built really fast. China is going to have a lot of mothballed coal plants soon.
You could be right, if there’s innovation in storage tech. I currently have my eyes on sodium ion, which doesn’t have the resource issues of lithium ion, and is already dirt cheap. Hasn’t got great gravimetric density, but perfect for grid storage
Although sodium is good, LFP batteries are already below $65-68/Kwh and do not have the same risk of thermal runaway that lithium-ion batteries do. These batteries are being rated for 6000+ cycles without more than 80-90% degradation (i.e. daily charge discharge for 20 years). So LCOE of battery storage systems like Tesla Megapack are now around $0.06c/Kwh, which is cheaper than the average electricity price in most of the world.
The biggest problem the world faces to decarbonize now is finance rather than technology, as few can afford to pay 10-20 years of electricity usage upfront, apart from rich countries. I hope the battery storage prices keep the cost trajectory as smaller the payback period, the faster and larger the adoption will be.
Well aware of LFP. The device I’m using now was charged by it. The problem is that grid storage needs tremendous scale, and for that lithium battery chemistries are constrained by lithium extraction. Sodium is already abundantly available
I was bullish on sodium ion batteries last year but now I don't see them taking off at least for the next few years unless sodium ion tech is 40-50% cheaper today. The reason being no matter how much oil and gas companies keep harping about lithium shortage reality is lithium production is likely to stay ahead of demand for the next few years. And the incremental improvement in lithium battery tech and production each year keeps sodium ion tech from keeping any cost advantage.
Last I checked they were always on par for household energy storage units, leave aside grid scale. If this is their starting price before economies of scale really kick in, then I can’t see what the next couple of years bring. Esp. as new grid scale batteries are coming online. There’s still more innovation to do in terms of improving cycle life though
I think there may be a military aspect to it. So they can crack on if they get blockaded for invading Taiwan.
In India, coal just dipped below 50% for the first time since the 1960s. https://m.economictimes.com/industry/energy/power/coals-shar...
EDIT: but apparently it went back up in April. Installed coal capacity is 49.3% but since hydro dropped in April it went up again
This is wishful thinking. Large parts of Africa is yet to become a developing economy. Once that happens, coal consumption is going to increase. Unfortunately, it's the easiest and cheapest way to generate electric power.
Africa is also one of the sunniest places around. With both solar and battery capacity still rapidly falling in price, and infrastructure generally being problematic in many African nations, it seems likely enough that they'll skip past to off-grid / micro-grid power.
Why would Africa install coal? It's way more expensive than solar, and coal makes them dependent on imports. Once installed, solar is independent energy.
The same reason African nations build railways and ports they strictly don't need - China and various world banks are continuing what European countries used to do, cheap "upfront" capital loans for expensive infrastructure projects that benefit resource extractors and other that prey on small nations.
https://www.seforall.org/press-releases/new-research-finds-u...
Your rational long term argument has little sway when key decision makers are bribed and offered a chance to retire to a mansion elsewhere on the planet.
China pledged to stop funding coal plants in Africa a few years ago. More recently the seem to be aiming to fund green energy transitions abroad.
Nice pledge.
As of today the majority of China's coal activity in Africa is directly related to China's mining activity in Africa to provide power for ectraction, processing and townships.
That mining activity is 'small' in the sense that Chinese mining companies represent ~ 8 percent of Africa’s total output in the sector and are concentrated in just five countries: Guinea, Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Resource extraction from those regions back to China is currently approx. $13 billion US (for resources that would likely cost 5x that cost if sourced from Canada or Australia)
China is not alone and by no means the greatest extractor; Anglo-American alone accounts for more than double that 8% share.
It's a statement of current fact.
The future maybe different, but right now coal use has peaked and is starting to fall. See (for example) actual data [1].
> Once that happens ..
you speculate, you engage in wishful thinking, you ignore actual resource consumption projections gathered globally over decades by major resource companies.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023
Nah, nat gas is cheaper
The problem is that not all parts of the world have access to cheap nat gas
Is that with or without the external costs of additional CO2 releases?
> Is that with or without the external costs of additional CO2 releases?
Without. But on a global scale those externalities aren't priced in. Particularly at the margin.
Such external costs should only be included if the uncertainties on estimates of external costs of CO2 emissions are somehow represented. And I’m referring to factoring in all structural and parametric uncertainties inherent in climate models. Cutting to the chase, you can never factor in, or even meaningfully bound, those structural uncertainties. Not a big deal for million dollar investments, a big deal for trillion dollar investments.
Modelers of all ilks generally avoid reporting the underlying uncertainties in their results. And when they do report them, they are woefully underestimated. Fine in the abstract, but not acceptable when trillions of dollars are at stake. Dollars that can be spent instead on direct low risk, high impact improvements in third world child health (clean air, clean water, infectious diseases, etc.). Maybe choose those that also mitigate climate impacts (as we currently understand them), but directly save the living children/people first.
Keep on improving the models with scientific research, but don’t fool ourselves about the accuracy and completeness of such models for policy analysis. I’m old enough to remember the Club of Rome/Limits to Growth controversies.
The geophysics behind, say, the Santos Barrossa gas project appears pretty tight; the C02 emmissions estimates are directly tied to the economic feasibility estimate process .. if one is wrong then so is the other, if so it must be a bad investment and a foolish project?
~ https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Santos-2022-Cli...At this point in time there's a clear understanding of the consequences of the current 11 billion tonne of CO2 equivilant emmissions released annually .. an increase in trapped solar heat energy that directly leads to increased storm intensity, climbing global mean tempretures, and edging closer to positive feedback thresholds which are significantly hard to reverse when crossed.
It's worth contextualizing that the decline of coal in the US has been fuelled (sorry) more than anything by the rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas extraction. The US is now the world's largest natural gas producer with 60% of that gas being produced by hydraulic fracturing. This isn't going to be easily accessible — or acceptable — everywhere around the world.
Solar and batteries are getting so cheap so fast it won’t matter for the rest of the world. China installed a 3GW solar facility in 14 months, just turned up, second largest in the world [1] [2]. 14 months. And they are not slowing down.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/11/12/worlds-second-largest...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42124253
Is there any data on the lifecycle of large-scale solar batteries? Are they any better than the small-scale ones? If they aren't, it would seem impractical to rely on them, because of the costs to replace/recycle them every few years.
Just to be clear, I'm referring to the use of electrical batteries for the temporary storage of solar power, so that the power can be available when the sun is not.
Non-electrical storage techniques (gravity, hydro) would seem better suited for long-term reliability.
Lithium batteries typically have a 10-15 year service life, depending on who you buy from (I am most familiar with Tesla's Megapack and Autobidder product in this regard; Tesla will warranty for up to 20 years [1]). CATL has a battery they warranty for 1M miles in EV applications [2], extrapolate to daily stationary storage cycles. Sodium ion is moving very fast, and is likely superior for this use case (both in regards to cost and service life) [3].
Scale up manufacturing, scale up deployment, scale up recycling, and you've got a circular supply chain system. At end of life, new (very likely better) batteries are installed and the old ones (in decades) are shipped back for recycling. In the US, this is Redwood Materials [4], founded by JB Straubel (former Tesla CTO). They have agreements to both recycle batteries with major automakers as well as supply feedstock for new battery components [5]. I'm unsure if this circular supply chain system exists in China yet, but I presume it is straightforward with their nation state resources to encourage along.
Pumped hydro is great where you can build it and it is cost superior to batteries, but batteries can be shipped and installed anywhere a concrete pad is waiting for them, very rapidly.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/megapack ("Each Megapack unit ships fully assembled and ready to operate, allowing for quick installation timelines and reduced complexity. Systems require minimal maintenance and include up to a 20-year warranty.")
[2] https://electrek.co/2024/09/16/catl-launches-new-ev-battery-... ("CATL launches ultra-high-energy-density EV bus battery that lasts nearly 1 million miles")
[3] https://electrek.co/2024/05/17/china-first-large-scale-sodiu... ("China’s first large-scale sodium-ion battery charges to 90% in 12 minutes")
[4] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ ("Redwood Materials: We’re building a circular supply chain to power a sustainable world")
[5] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/#partners ("Redwood Material: Partners")
> Pumped hydro is great where you can build it and it is cost superior to batteries
Given the dramatic price decline of LFP cells in the past year, I'm not sure this is still the case.
I cannot speak authoritatively as to whether the LFP cell cost decline curve has enabled stationary storage to be cost superior in all cases compared to both short and long duration pumped hydro, hence the caveat. I have no doubt we'll get there, just not sure we're there yet.
Probably something for Lazard's next LCOE report, to act as a canonical reference for such discussions.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
The cost difference depends on number of cycles. If you fill and empty your storage daily, batteries are way cheaper. If you fill and empty annually, pumped storage is way cheaper.
Annual (or seasonal) cycling is also bad for pumped storage. Chemical storage, like hydrogen, becomes much cheaper for that storage case.
Hydrogen is a very poor long term storage. It either uses very expensive tanks or it leaks away. It's also a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive.
No, hydrogen is excellent for long term storage. It is stored underground.
"Couple of orders of magnitude more expensive" is not correct. For long term storage, the capex per energy storage capacity dominates, and the cost of underground storage caverns (especially solution mined in salt) is very cheap, an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of stored energy than reservoirs for water.
It doesn't matter how cheap the storage is if the hydrogen costs $3/kg.
You seem to be changing your argument there.
It absolutely does matter. If one is cycling the storage system annually, $3/kg for hydrogen becomes a minor part of the cost. The cost of this input is proportional to the number of charge/discharge cycles over the timescale indicated by the discount rate, and for annual storage that's not very many.
It's a common mistake to think that the importance of round trip efficiency for diurnal storage carries over to annual storage.
Thank you.
As I understand it, the Tesla warranty was factored into the purchase price as a way to stabilize the TCO, and has little to do with the physical lifecycle of the lithium cells.
Sodium looks very promising, but it's "not there yet."
> As I understand it, the Tesla warranty was factored into the purchase price as a way to stabilize the TCO, and has little to do with the physical lifecycle of the lithium cells.
Where does that understanding come from? Because Tesla's warranty is consistent with every other manufacturers warranty that I have seen, basically 4000-5000 cycles is standard for grid storage lithium ion.
The warranty doesn't guarantee that the batteries will not fail, it just compensates the owner when they do. Buyers may be hesitant to purchase an expensive system such as a Powerwall or a Cybertruck unless the system comes with a warranty. So Tesla can raise the sales price to cover the inevitable warranty claim, and the purchaser will be none the wiser.
It's clear how warranties work, what's not clear to me is why Tesla would be using them in a way different from any other use of them over the years, and why every single other manufacturer is also using them in some sort of different way.
The Australian batteries paid for themselves in 2 years. So they're worth it whether the batteries last 10 or 30 years.
Employment in coal extraction is also an interesting graph. Although a lot of it has dropped due to mechanization over the generations (like, from ~1910 on downwards) it's still pretty clear that the old heights of job-creation people might remember with nostalgia are never[0] coming back.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001
[0] Barring a discovery that coal can be converted into the elixir of youth, etc.
I didn’t read where the US is mining out all their coal deposits and dumping them in the ocean.
Current exploitation of coal in the US maybe be declining, but it is still an important part of a robust portfolio of energy technologies. The US is, in fact, the Saudi Arabia of coal and, to meet robustness requirements for meeting short and long term US energy demand, coal is a common sense component. Maybe eventually only in some mothballed-annual testing-fast restart sense, but it’s a very cheap insurance policy. Keeping the pilot light on for the US coal industry as well, from a National Security standpoint.
Keep improving renewables, but don’t throw away what works. There’s a beauty to a highly diverse portfolio. You sleep better at night.
>The US is, in fact, the Saudi Arabia of coal
No, that's Australia. We do a lot of stupid shit to earn that title. We're the #1 coal exporter in the world (note: exporter, the US beats us on production), despite having a tiny population and economy compared to the USA. We're also mostly desert and have a pop of ~20 million, just like Saudi Arabia, and we also pour our fossil fuel profits into a sovereign wealth fund, just like Saudi Arabia - oh wait no we don't, we're less financially prudent than Saudi "let's build a ski resort here" Arabia.
The reason it's over is because wind and solar have become cheaper than anything else. Solar is currently around $23/MWhr.
Nuclear is around $70/MWhr, one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.
Solar is highly distributeable so it can be placed closer to where the power is used, reducing transmission losses. It doesn't need to be very carefully sited in terms of where it goes on the grid, and nobody needs to worry about the long term geological stability of the area. It doesn't need to be partnered with another plant for cold starts. It has no safety concerns. It doesn't need any labor to operate - mostly occasional repairs to damage and cleaning. It has no capacity to cause any sort of disaster. It does not generate toxic waste in operation.
Nobody has ever said "don't shoot tank rounds near that solar farm or you might cause thousands of square miles of land to be uninhabitable for centuries."
Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"
The administration kowtowing to industry lobbyists to fund nuclear energy when the market was already adding seven times as much renewables as it is decommissioning nuclear capacity...is just corporate welfare, pure and simple.
Solar and wind definitely make the most sense wherever feasible, but it's important to keep in mind you can't just build solar and wind farms anywhere. China has moderately good solar capacity in the north, but generation there will be seasonal due to how far north it is. The north of China is also not close to the majority of the population, so transmission will be an issue.
China's high to moderate quality solar capacity will be built out very quickly, and it won't provide enough to close the gap from fossil-based generation. From there, the cost of solar generation will rise as low quality capacity is developed.
China will need a way to import some of their energy generation, possibly through by importing goods like iron and steel that have a high energy production cost, from countries like Australia that can produce them using renewable energy (green iron / green steel) using Australia's almost limitless solar resources.
Since much of Australia's coal is also used in places like China to smelt their local and imported iron and steel, this could further drive down production of coal.
China is building a nation spanning UHV ("ultra high voltage") power transmission system.
> According to China Energy News, the combined length of the UHV transmission lines operating in China had reached 48,000km (30,000 miles) by the end of 2020, more than enough to wrap around the Earth by the equator.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/chinas-energy-infrastructure
> Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"
Well, if hydrogen from electrolysis really takes off, it would be possible to piggyback an exchange tower on the system to also get heavy water production.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980IJHE....5..409H/abstra...
(that's an old reference; the CECE process has since been driven to maturity by Canada.)
Solar doesn't work at night, so doesn't the cost need to include batteries?
It does, but battery prices have also been falling precipitously.
Or some other form of energy storage. If there's a nearby higher-altitude lake, you can pump water uphill. Or you can even just lift blocks of cement or whatever up a tower. Or split water into hydrogen and oxygen and store the hydrogen. Or melt sodium. Etc.
Solar + battery storage is cheaper than nuclear, and also far more flexible.
Nuclear, as a baseload generator, is not capable of meeting demand peaks, so if we are going to require batteries for solar, we should require batteries for nuclear as well. Which does not help its case very much.
> Solar + battery storage is cheaper than nuclear
Solar + battery storage is cheaper than Vogtle, but Vogtle was an exercise in mismanagement before COVID caused it to be even worse. Compare:
https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/
> Nuclear, as a baseload generator, is not capable of meeting demand peaks, so if we are going to require batteries for solar, we should require batteries for nuclear as well.
Being a baseload generator is what nuclear is used for. It doesn't require batteries because you're not trying to use it for demand peaks.
Suppose you have 10GW of demand at night (minimum daily demand), 16GW at midday during peak solar generation and 20GW for two hours right after sunset (maximum daily demand). Do you want 20GW of nuclear? No, you want 10, to handle the first 10GW of demand at all times. That's baseload. Then you want another 10GW of solar, most of which is used directly during midday and the rest of which is used with storage to handle the demand peak just after sunset.
Doing it this way means you only need storage for the amount the demand peak after sunset exceeds baseload, which might be 20GWh of storage, instead of needing enough storage to satisfy the entire demand all night, which could be 140GWh.
It also improves resistance to low renewable generation because if renewable output is at 50% of normal for a week or more but the grid is half nuclear then the overall grid would have a 25% deficit instead of a 50% deficit. And then you need less in long-term storage, or peaker plants, to pick up that load.
Using nuclear for base load is silly. Why would you use the 12c/kWh nuclear energy while the sun is shining when you could be using the 0.5c/kWh solar instead?
Because you already built the nuclear plant to provide power at night and during periods of low renewable output, and once you're already paying to build and operate it, the incremental cost of also using it during the day is effectively zero and zero is less than any non-zero cost for needing more solar farms.
Also, the real numbers aren't actually that far apart because you're using the high end of the estimate range for nuclear and the low end of the range for solar.
To replace nuclear with solar for baseload you need the solar farms and batteries for at night and peaker plants for extended periods of low generation during the day and to maintain fueling infrastructure for those peaker plants. You add all of those up and it costs more than using nuclear for baseload.
I think that commenter is asking: since the nuclear+solar solution requires batteries, why do we account for them as the cost of solar but not as the cost of nuclear? shouldn't it be equal parts both?
The solution that uses both nuclear and solar requires fewer batteries than the one that uses only solar, ergo the extra batteries are a cost of using only solar.
The solution that uses both nuclear and solar might also require fewer batteries than the one that uses only nuclear, but that's exactly why the optimal solution is to use a combination of nuclear and solar instead of exclusively one or the other.
Thank you for clarifying my point, that's exactly what I was trying to say!
My understanding on China's coal plants is that it's not the number of them, it's whether they're running that counts. Coal-fired generation is currently cheaper than storage for backing up wind and solar generation and their plants are typically running about 50% of the time right now, expected to run less often as storage and more renewables come online. So China’s coal use could fall despite it adding more capacity.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants
There's a lot of speculation about when peak coal and fossil usage is going to be in China. There is some suggestion that that might actually be right now. China's aggressive rollout of solar, wind, and battery is shifting a lot of their plans by years or decades. The official line is still that they want to be carbon neutral by 2060. But they might actually get there a lot sooner if the current trends continue.
In any case, the economic case for coal is indeed pretty clear at this point: it's simply too expensive in most markets. Even in markets where coal mining is a big part of the local economy.
And while gas has taken up some of the slack (especially in the US), the vast majority of additions to the grid world wide are renewables.
Peak gas usage world wide is a bit murky. Projections range from right now to 2030 (IEA). But the bottom line is that we're not really replacing coal with gas. There are a lot of gas peaker plants not running all the time that were designed originally to be running 24/7. That massively changes the economics and profitability of these things and makes them a lot less attractive to investors.
Gas peaker plants aren't intended to be run 24/7. That's why they're called "peaker plants". Most of the cost is fuel, so they can be profitable if run only during peak periods.
Nuclear plants are all fixed cost. So reducing power produced during off-hours increases cost per KWh.
Isn't China adding all capacity ?
As China's power consumption grows, is coal occupying a bigger percent of the energy pie or is it proportional growth?
China wants to annex Taiwan. To fight any wau laden with sanctions, it needs energy independence. They don't have natural gas so they're burning coal.
It's not ideal, but at least they have a better reason than Germany shuttering nuclear plants or the US keeping coal alive.
Environmentally, converting coal to natural gas isn't that much of a win. Take methane leaks into account and it might even be worse.
It'd be interesting to see the cost per ton CO2e of paying to shut down gas plants as well.
On the last few years, China's coal consumption has been almost unchanging.
What yeah, makes them one of the countries mostly investing in coal out there. But there hasn't been an increase, and it ought to fall fast at some point to one of the cheaper alternatives.
Isn't "natural" gas a scam to keep polluting? Why not nuclear and within a lifetime renewable energies?
Natural gas is terrible, but arguably less terrible than coal which aside from CO2 spews out a plethora of other nasty compounds.
One small plus for coal is that it doesn't leak. With better satellite observation now, we're finding out how underreported the emissions of methane from natural gas extraction were.
Of course coal "leaks" .. it's a major issue worldwide.
https://www.osmre.gov/programs/mine-fires
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fireCoal mines also leak methane.
It very much is natural, it comes right out of the ground. Why not nuclear? Its 10x more expensive than gas
Coal and Asbestos are natural too, the point is that "natural" there is a greenwashing term as it's quite polluting and not the best energy source out there considering global warming.
A proper evaluation includes the financial cost of the coal's climate impact. Climate change is very expensive. That cost affects,
* The investor's return, without subsidies.
* The cost to the public of replacing coal with something else.
The article says,
> the cost per tonne of CO2 emissions avoided is just $34.
Does anyone grasp what they mean exactly, and where that number comes from?
If I'm reading this right, they just added up the remaining amortized capital cost of the plants, doubled that to give the investors a return, and divided by the amount of CO2 emissions that would be avoided.
They don't mention cost of replacements, or the costs of climate damage.
The fallacy of the cost argument here is that it fails to take into account the cost and economics of operating a coal plant. Coal energy is simply too expensive. Any time wind/solar pushes energy prices down, coal plants are operating at a loss. Shutting down and starting up coal plants is expensive too.
A lot of the reduction in coal plant capacity is not driven by environmental concerns but by economics. This is investors cutting their losses. The cost of continuing to operate these plants is higher than the cost of just getting rid of them. Keeping these plants going requires ongoing investments with very dubious returns. Financing that is getting hard; it's a bad investment.
Which is why a lot of countries are pretty far done decommissioning their coal capacity.
Yeah if we did something like this for real, we should make a more realistic estimate of how much of a return the plant owners are really likely to get, instead of just arbitrarily multiplying their investment by two.
But while coal is declining, it's still spewing large amounts of CO2 and probably will for some time yet. It's doing better in areas outside the US, where it doesn't have to compete with such cheap natural gas.
We could also apply this plan to natural gas, which is doing better economically, accounts for a lot of CO2, and has a warming impact as bad as coal if you take methane leaks into account. I wonder what the cost per ton CO2e would be for that.
Why should the investors be getting that much of a return? The whole premise of why investments gain value is that there is a risk associated with it. The risk didn’t pay off, try not getting in the planet killing business
The problem is that the risk is still paying off. The coal plants continue to run, and it's not that easy getting the political support to shut them down before the economics make it happen anyway.
The installed capacity of solar has been doubling every 3 years for the past 15 years. And if it keeps going on this pace for another 15 years, solar will exceed the energy production of all other energy sources (coal, oil and gas’s).
It is my opinion that this should be a global roadmap. Double solar installed capacity every three years. It’s doable. We should do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Wrongly framed. The price of not shutting down coal is an planet that would uninhabitable. That would cost more than all of the value humans ever created, create, or ever would create had we chosen more wisely to stop killing ourselves for the temporary "crack high" of profits today. Now, the challenge is in decarbonizing energy and all other industries one-by-one to limit the damage and destruction that has already been set in motion by energy already imparted and will be retained using the sky as an open sewer.
Japan has converted all of their largest hydroelectric plants to pumped storage, as far as I can tell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Japa...
Presumably countries with a higher proportion of electricity from hydropower, like Canada and Brazil, could get even more out of this than Japan does in terms of stabilizing renewables.
You can also float solar PV on the reservoirs, re-using the grid connections with extreme complementarity (since you want to hold the hydro power back when the solar is producing).
One of the ways China is killing coal is of course with coal, aaaand the worlds largest ultra high voltage transmission power lines~30000 km's, which is so extensive that moving power from supply to demand works over several time zones. Enabling maximisation of solar and wind production by sending noon solar in one place to power the end of day surge somewhere else and coal is playing a role by bieng run at full efficiency, with no need for load dumping. Currently more than half of the load on the ultra high voltage transmissiin network is bieng provided for by renewables, and a mad mix of anything and everything to fill in the gaps. kind of like finding anything to put in empty shipping cans going back to china driving American production of Hay, watered from aquifiers,ending up in China or possibly mountains of wierd suspect corn,bieng shipped and then burned as fuel in a coal plant.Thermal plant here in Nova Scotia, burns wood to make electricity. And then back to hay, which is pelletised and used as fuel.World wide the use of bio fuels is going to be in the millions of tons, so it is too soon to close the book on carbon.
> which is so extensive that moving power from supply to demand works over several time zones.
It's not really possible to do that in China...
I thought the article on the meaning of "energy transition" was more interesting. The idea that oil is reliant on steel and steel on coal is a thought. https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/10/energy-transiti...
Coal is already dying by degrees:
https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/energy/whats-driving...
We have a long way to go to shut down coal power. Here's a graph of current global fossil fuel consumption in exajoules. China uses about 84 exajoules of coal power, and is approaching 4 exajoules of nuclear, so that's a big job to replace with nuclear. China plans to triple their nuclear from their current ~50 plants, but that's still a smallish fraction of total demand.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/China-and-the-US-Are-Respo...
For current coal consumption:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Global-Coal-Production-Hits...
> "Global coal consumption also hit a new high, exceeding 164 EJ for the first time. This represented a 1.6% increase from 2022, a growth rate seven times higher than the average over the previous decade. China remained the largest consumer, responsible for 56% of global coal use. China’s coal consumption increased by 4.7% in 2023, more than four times the country’s 1.1% average coal consumption growth rate of the past decade. For the first time, India’s coal consumption in 2023 surpassed the combined consumption of Europe and North America. Meanwhile, coal consumption in both Europe and North America dropped below 10 EJ each, marking their lowest levels since 1965."
The planet thus continues to head full tilt towards Pliocene conditions last seen 2-5 mya. A rational civilization would at this point be investing in a massive infrastructure project on a global scale to adapt to these new conditions, while simultaneously stepping up wind/solar/storage deployment at scale.
Global high, sure, and yet at the same time a very probable peak with a future of steady fall:
~ https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023Strange little thinkpiece. The classic "No Country for Coal Gen" report in 2017 suggested that most coal generation in the states at that time was being propped up despite being uneconomic due to warped incentives and that the US would save billions just in energy costs by closing them (health and carbon benefits were on top of that energy cost saving and were further billions).
Ironically I have more faith in Communist China actually following the economic incentives in phasing out coal, despite sporadic reports of regional governments alledgedly following their local preogatives to build coal.
Someone in China drew an interesting picture of a slow rotating skyscraper shaped like a vertical axle wind turbine. Tall but the proportions of a bucket. Say such a thing has half a million ton in mass and 500 m diameter. The fun part is that losses are less than zero if there is some wind.
India is an outlier, they are addicted to coal so much so that an entire family tycoon (probably in cohoots with the government) owns coal supply lines.
Off topic but I saw in a YouTube video how they suspect one of the earths greatest extinction events was partly driven by volcanic material igniting massive coal beds, the combination of the vulcanism and the coal burning killed like 90% of life on earth.
The Permian-Triassic extinction. A massive intrusion of basaltic magma into the The Tunguska Basin that also created the Siberian Traps. The intrusion heated organic-rich sediments and evaporites (salt, anhydrite) and caused eruption of gases. Siberia is littered with enormous pipes as much as 1 km in diameter that erupted massive amounts of gas during the event. In addition to CO2 and methane, the gas was loaded with chlorinated hydrocarbons from the salt, which could have devastated the ozone layer.
I've seen an estimate that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may have reached as high as 30,000 ppm (3%).
It was bad luck for the Paleozoic world that this massive mantle plume came up in perhaps the worst possible place.
Some of these pipes became filled with magnetite and as a result are mined for this rich iron ore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_ext...
> Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geo-chronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key, short intervals, rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions.
Modern CO2 increase has been going on for 200 years, and is theorized to be comparable to one of the bursts that occurred during the Permian-Triassic extinction. However the PTME witnessed a few such bursts over the course of tens of thousands of years. CO2 levels sextupled from a base that was not much lower than where CO2 levels are today.
It's a warning about the dangers of CO2, but given the corrective actions already taking place I don't think CO2 levels will reach anywhere near those seen during the PTME. Most importantly CO2 level increases are driven by human activity which is a lot easier to modulate than volcanoes.
[dead]
[dead]
I feel like coal is really useful for new steel
Steel uses so much carbon that it’s been a target for using hydrogen as a reducing agent. There are a couple ironworks that have already started converting.
That’ll still leave concrete as one of the next largest sources, even if the rebar gets a smaller footprint.
Fun fact: carbon footprint was an expressions put forward by Exxon decades ago to shift blame for global warming to the consumers of energy.
Words aren't magically bad by their now-forgotten etymology, unless you keep bringing up said etymology.
Did I say a word is bad?
Yes
consumers are to blame for global warming. Companies are responding to what consumers demand.
That would be true if there had been zero effort and money spent in subsidizing fossil fuels, hiding data about its true long term impact for decades and sabotaging efforts to move away from carbon dependence.
There are two types of coal, metallurgical and thermal.
Energy for steel production can come from coal, but doesn't need to, coal bound with iron to make steel is a different reaction to burning coal for energy.
"Green steel" (as odd as that sounds) is an active area of research ATM, promising but there's a looong way to go to reduce the emissions from a billion+ tonnes of steel per annum (and concrete production and other resource processing).
One of the biggest Steel mils here in Argentina had a dedicated forest with 30.000.000 eucaliptus to make the coal. So it's possible to use carbon-neutral coal. More details (Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceros_Zapla_S.A.
Yes. Already during the Roman empire the Ruhr valley was denuded as the trees were cut down to make charcoal for iron making.
With modern technology we can do better, e.g. torrefaction produces bio-coal with about 90% of the original energy in the wood, but OTOH the scale is way beyond what was seen in the ancient world.
Electrocatalytic production or using electrolytically produced hydrogen can also make new steel.
Build more nuclear power plants since wind and solar do not provide dispatchable baseload and batteries don’t scale enough.
No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.
Baseload power comes at the expense of renewable power, the latter of which is much cheaper, much faster, and less riskier to deploy than nuclear. Peaking gas plants are much quicker to build than nuclear and should tide us over until grid storage (of all kinds) catches up – which looks to be around 1-2 decades at current scaling and about the lead time for a nuclear power plant
> No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.
The dollar density is also huge.
Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive. And figuring in the cost of nuclear waste disposal kills the project.
All other means of grid power generation are able to externalize expenses. Our society, for better or worse, won't let anything "nuclear" get away with that.
> Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive
I heard that might be a regulatory problem more than anything. Doesn't change the reality, but it's US-specific.
I don't think I'm anti-nuclear power. The only thing that works against nuclear, in my opinion, is the time it takes to build. A lot of solar and wind and battery can be built in the decade (if not more) that it seems to take a nuclear power station to be built.
Having said that, given the increasing power demands of civilization, why not both in parallel?
Why does it take time to build though? Is it a technical reason, or economic and regulatory reasons? If the latter, we could probably go faster if as a society we prioritized it.
Nuclear is seriously unfriendly stuff. Just read up on all the lessons (and coverups) the US nuclear industry learned about making nuclear fuels. The metals involvsd are toxic AF and unforgiving of any stupidity. We have a ton of regulations around this because businesses of the past just dumped things like mildly radioactive tailings to blow around in the wind.
50 years ago France build more than 50 reactors in a decade.
This is not pertinent, for many reasons: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
Japan's average build time is apparently 5 years[0]. It depends on the regulatory environment and the expertise available.
[0] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
I have heard the argument that the standard nuclear plant have the inefficiencies of any large building project, like building a big bridge. You never get the optimizations of mass production that you get in a factory that produces tens of thousands of solar panels or lots of wind turbines. I guess that is what SMR is trying to solve. I don’t know how that is going.
I think nuclear power should be expanded.
I don't think nuclear power centrals should be rushed.
You don't need dispatchable baseload and batteries do scale enough. If nuclear was cost competitive, I'd support it, but it's just not. Look at how much renewables China is building vs. nuclear, if you think this opinion is somehow political in nature, it's not.
Article mainly talks about stopping coal, when the goal should be increased generation of power.
China does it well - they are building out nuclear, coal, and carpeting entire rooftops with solar and mountain ridges with wind turbines.
The goal should be increased generation of power while mitigating worst climate change scenarios. Coal deserves to die.
Coal is key to current steel manufacturing process. There are experimental green steel processes but very nascent. If you're building stuff, you need coal.
Better eliminate all other coal-burning as fast as possible, then, to minimize the damage done while the hydrogen-based steelmaking industry grows up.