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Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

reuters.com

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Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#81

Post by [deleted] »

kstrauser wrote: post #57
newswriter99 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, I love lighting my water on fire and fracking earthquakes Natural gas from fracking does not cause burning tap water. https://www.cred.org/is-fracking-connected-to-burning-tap-wa... Fracking-related earthquakes are either minimal or bebeficial https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/does... 0/10 "green energy" shill. Fracking gave us dirt cheap natgas, which is damn cleaner than coal AND why yo…

> Natural gas from fracking does not cause burning tap water. I'll take a step back from "burning", because that seems hard to prove, but it most certainly does contaminate ground water: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont... > Fracking-related earthquakes are either minimal or bebeficial That's the most insane claim I've read on the Internet this week. You should be ashamed for saying that.…

[deleted]

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#82

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

greglindahl wrote: post #50
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you’d think if 41% were unprofitable this year then next year there’d only be 4000 odd coal-fired plants, and so on and so forth. So obviously profitability isn’t the only thing keeping these plants open or not. Additionally: but this risks locking in high-cost coal power Coal is only high-cost when compared against certain metrics that favour non-coal electricity sources. On the whole electricity is extremely…

I assume you're counting the cost of pollution and carbon into your price of coal electricity, right?

It’s a good point, and I tend to agree.

However, why would I do that when everyone else isn’t.

And how would I do that when there’s no economic framework for me, as an individual retail customer, to do so?

Sure, I can buy 100% renewables, but here in Australia the retailers want to charge me more for that choice. Here in Tasmania the local retailer, Aurora Energy, wants an additional 6.023 cents / kWh for 100% renewable, that’s that’s on top of their peak rate of 32.587 cents / kWh. An additional 18.5%!

Why would I do that if I’m already living near my economic ability?

Edit to add:

And, even if I did choose to pay that premium, it’ll have approximately no effect whatsoever on global climate outcomes. Me paying an additional 18.5% on my bill to feel good won’t suck the carbon out of the air!

This is why we neee regulation in this scenario more than we need individual choice.

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#83

Post by greglindahl »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #82
greglindahl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're counting the cost of pollution and carbon into your price of coal electricity, right?

It’s a good point, and I tend to agree. However, why would I do that when everyone else isn’t . And how would I do that when there’s no economic framework for me, as an individual retail customer, to do so? Sure, I can buy 100% renewables, but here in Australia the retailers want to charge me more for that choice. Here in Tasmania the local retailer, Aurora Energy, wants an additional 6.023 cents / kWh for 100% renew…

I was asking about the underlying assumptions, not the retail market. Those are two different things. You appear to be only referring only to the latter. Surely we should be able to talk about the first before considering the second?

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#84

Post by toohotatopic »

ineedasername wrote: post #26
toohotatopic wrote: post #14

Why 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.

Indeed. My point is that we are far away from outpacing demand.

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#85

Post by toohotatopic »

pfdietz wrote: post #31
toohotatopic wrote: post #14

Why 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?

You might as well ask why should computer prices fall. Energy costs fall because of advances in technology. Wind and PV have now brought the very rapid cost reductions of the tech sector to the energy sector. PV costs fell by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade.

Computer prices are only falling when you compare processors with the same speed and monitors with the same resolution. Overall, prices might as well increase if you look at the prices of the last flagship phones or at least remain stable if you look at main memory.

It comes down to the [1] Jevons paradox.

>In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.

PV and Wind fell because they were above the market costs of energy. Once they are below, they will stop falling further. Prices will only go further down if energy supply outpaces demand. Why should that ever happen? Have you seen people stop buying SUVs? Once energy gets cheaper, SUVs will become even bigger.

Being well-off essentially means being able to waste energy. To signal status, people will burn all available non-essential energy, however much there is to burn.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#86

Post by vkou »

bobthepanda wrote: post #69
eunos wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Sino-Soviet_Border_Agreem... I think border disagreement already solved. Besides, I believe they realize the contention between them only strengthens NATO over them. I think the possible conflict nowadays is influence over central Asia. However, they might share the influence with China got the economic influence and Russia got political influence. It is interesting to pre…

I mean, that's for now. Russia and the US also signed an agreement over the Ukraine in 1994 and look how that went.

Ukraine moving out of the Russian, and into the NATO sphere of influence is the reason for why that went the way it did.

The China-Russia dynamic is a little different.

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#87

Post by bpodgursky »

Danieru wrote: post #80

Japan is building new plants. You'll see that news a bunch. What you do not see is the why. Japan has companies which are building new coal plants in order to replace existing plants. Old coal plants have lower efficiency. Old coal plants produce more pollution. A none trivial reason why so many old coal plants are unprofitable is because other newer fossil fuel plants can out compete them. Sure renewables play a par…

The other "why", is that Japan decommissioned a huge percentage of their nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster.

Renewable (or at least less dirty) solutions would have filled that gap and prevented the need for even replacement coal plants, if that baseline capacity continued to exist, or grown.

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#88

Post by deusexepsilon »

csomar wrote: post #10

> 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.

IOWA CITY, Mich. (AP) — In an ominous sign that could be looming, the federal government recently approved new rules on opening new public residential buildings to electric utilities this spring, giving a boost to the country's power sector, a first in U.

S. history.

In 2013, the Interior Department announced that it would open eight new public residential buildings to electric utilities for construction and construction of low-cost utilities, allowing them to become more than just one-third renewable energy utilities.

While the federal EPA recently approved three new public buildings in 2017, the new regulations only require utilities to open about 60% of the electricity that is needed.

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#89

Post by H8crilA »

Androider wrote: post #63
H8crilA wrote: post #18

That's still so much better than tech companies, even tech companies 6 months ago /s Never forget how absolutely huge coal is. Those Joules are not going to be replaced with renewables any time soon. It's literally impossible because renewables need Joules themselves to be built, not just money. Money does not synthesize power generating objects; materials and energy and machinery and the approval to do so (capital)…

When did you last look at the current state of renewables? Even two years ago, the picture was completely different, but renewables are absolutely catching up. The change is fast and accelerating. 17% of energy production in the US is now renewables. 26% in China. 46% in Germany. The economic case for deploying renewables continues to improve, and will soon hit a tipping point where operation of legacy generation sys…

The only thing that matters is world's total usage, because co2 does not respect borders.

Could you point me to updated world energy usage data then?

Re: Nearly half of global coal plants will be unprofitable this year

#90

Post by olau »

Danieru wrote: post #80

Japan is building new plants. You'll see that news a bunch. What you do not see is the why. Japan has companies which are building new coal plants in order to replace existing plants. Old coal plants have lower efficiency. Old coal plants produce more pollution. A none trivial reason why so many old coal plants are unprofitable is because other newer fossil fuel plants can out compete them. Sure renewables play a par…

Do you have a source for that information?

Old coal plants will presumably be able to operate on the marginal cost of the coal plus maintenance, where as new plants have a big initial capital spending they need to fund.

Now, it is clear that some plants are so old that they're going beyond their planned lifetime and need investments. But that does not seem to be what you are hinting at?

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