Thank you natural gas!
Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#22time for yet more subsidies to unprofitable businesses.
Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#23> It looked at 6,696 operational plants and 1,046 in the pipeline and found that 46% will be unprofitable this year, up from 41% in 2019 I thought this is due to Covid-19 but apparently it's a chronic trend. > That will rise to 52% by 2030 as renewables and cheaper gas outcompete coal, the think tank said. A very slow one too.
A lot of coal plants in developed countries are closing. The least efficient ones are most likely to close. That should tend to make the % unprofitable fall, but it's rising instead.
Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#24> It looked at 6,696 operational plants and 1,046 in the pipeline and found that 46% will be unprofitable this year, up from 41% in 2019 I thought this is due to Covid-19 but apparently it's a chronic trend. > That will rise to 52% by 2030 as renewables and cheaper gas outcompete coal, the think tank said. A very slow one too.
A lot of coal plants in developed countries are closing. The least efficient ones are most likely to close. That should tend to make the % unprofitable fall, but it's rising instead.
Electricity production (in the building power plants sense) isn't very elastic. Profitability wouldn't be the only, or likely the primary consideration for what to close and when.
The market for electricity isn't very "efficient" in that way, a utility or market doesn't buy and sell from an individual power plant so the price/profitability of a single plant doesn't reflect the supply/demand from that plant.
Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#25Why should energy costs fall below their current levels? There are billions of people who only consume a fraction of the energy that citizens of industrialized countries consume. If anything, energy prices will rise and coal will remain profitable. Energy will be needed to build all those roads and cars. And then there is the scarcity of sand. How can sand for concrete be artificially created but with more energy?
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Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#26Why should energy costs fall below their current levels? There are billions of people who only consume a fraction of the energy that citizens of industrialized countries consume. If anything, energy prices will rise and coal will remain profitable. Energy will be needed to build all those roads and cars. And then there is the scarcity of sand. How can sand for concrete be artificially created but with more energy?
If increased supply outpaces increased demand then energy costs will fall.
Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#27If this comes true which is a BIG if since the calculations include "carbon pricing and pollution policies" which are not happening anytime soon in China. It will be almost completely due to the cheap price of natural gas not renewables as the article implies.
I'm just googling, but FWIW, from 2017: The China Carbon Market Just Launched, And It's The World's Largest. Here's How It Can Succeed. https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2017/12/19/the...
At a cursory glance, it seems like it's still ongoing, at a price of 8$/ton: https://www.icf.com/insights/public-policy/china-carbon-pric...
Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#28Thank you natural gas!
Yeah, I love lighting my water on fire and fracking earthquakes.
Switching America's oil subsidies to solar and wind would be much better than pretending that fracking shale is a net plus.
Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#29If this does happen it would represent a win for everyone, but a substantial intellectual victory for the people who delayed action against climate change in the '00s and '10s. If we're all going to switch to renewables in the '20s for economic reasons then it would have been madness to force their adoption 10 years earlier to deal with a threat that materialises in 2050+.
a) The economic snowball we're finally starting to see for renewables is largely driven by governments finally being forced by the undeniable reality to take real regulation steps. b) The economic cost of waiting 10 years to address an exponential process is going to far outweigh the cost there would've been to give an extra "oomph" to action, I'm sure.
"Exponential processes just don't really exist in nature". Hopefully no one (cough, politicians) says this anymore, after Covid-19.
Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year
#30If this does happen it would represent a win for everyone, but a substantial intellectual victory for the people who delayed action against climate change in the '00s and '10s. If we're all going to switch to renewables in the '20s for economic reasons then it would have been madness to force their adoption 10 years earlier to deal with a threat that materialises in 2050+.
The switch can't just happen in an eye blink. The push through the 00's and 10's for renewables are the precise reason we have enough renewable infrastructure that the balance can begin tipping. Saying the actions weren't justified is basically saying "See? We got the effect! We didn't need the cause at all!"
It's also possible that an even bigger push to get to this tipping point earlier would have saved even more money that will be spent mitigating the extra years of ecological harm, but counterfactuals like that are admittedly hard to prove and we're not at a point in history where that judgment could be assessed.