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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

#41

Post by zxcmx »

ineedasername wrote: post #32
nick_kline wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Exponential processes just don't really exist in nature". Hopefully no one (cough, politicians) says this anymore, after Covid-19.

"Exponential processes just don't really exist in nature" Wait, do people actually say that?

Well you very quickly run out of mass, space, hosts etc so on a long enough timescale...

Like an exponential process that starts at 1 atom with a 1 year doubling time would affect all the matter in the universe in less than a century (lets pretend it happens spookily at whatever distance).

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

#42

Post by ineedasername »

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)…

Renewable GW capacity in the US has grown at a 7.8% per year compound annual growth rate. [0]

That is more than a linear increase in renewable capacity, indicating that renewable capacity will be increasing faster and faster in absolute GW terms.

[0]https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72170.pdf

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

#43

Post by ineedasername »

zxcmx wrote: post #41
ineedasername wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Exponential processes just don't really exist in nature" Wait, do people actually say that?

Well you very quickly run out of mass, space, hosts etc so on a long enough timescale... Like an exponential process that starts at 1 atom with a 1 year doubling time would affect all the matter in the universe in less than a century (lets pretend it happens spookily at whatever distance).

On a long enough timescale they may burn themselves out, but on a long enough time scale everything comes to an end. Things happen, and then they stop happening. Exponential growth occurs, and then it stops occurring. Its eventual end does not disprove its prior existence.

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

#44

Post by zxcmx »

ineedasername wrote: post #43
zxcmx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you very quickly run out of mass, space, hosts etc so on a long enough timescale... Like an exponential process that starts at 1 atom with a 1 year doubling time would affect all the matter in the universe in less than a century (lets pretend it happens spookily at whatever distance).

On a long enough timescale they may burn themselves out, but on a long enough time scale everything comes to an end. Things happen, and then they stop happening. Exponential growth occurs, and then it stops occurring. Its eventual end does not disprove its prior existence.

Sure, we can agree it's exponential until it's not.

And then we can start to think about whether it's going to be a logistic curve or oscillate and what factors might amplify or damp and our model is much more interesting.

Like, the original statement is about systems that people study and model, and how the exponential condition can really only exist for brief periods relative to the lifetime of almost all systems of interest.

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

#45

Post by Reason077 »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #2

If 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.

Unlike the USA, China does not have huge resources of natural gas. For the most part, natural gas will not replace coal in China.

China does have a lot of renewables[1] - enormous solar and wind farms in the interior and west, and the potential for far more. These can produce energy much cheaper than coal plants can. But the challenge is getting that energy to the more populous provinces in the south and east where it’s needed. Transmission infrastructure is expensive, even in China.

[1] Renewables supplied 27% of China’s electricity in 2017, compared to only 4% for natural gas.

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

#46

Post by mhh__ »

XCSme wrote: post #38

Is this good or bad news? I assume good for the environment, right? Or creating the alternative sources would generate more CO2?

Coal is probably the worst possible way to generate power at scale. People complain about nuclear power being dangerous but the air pollution from a coal power station kills people every single day.

(yes)

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

#47

Post by Analemma_ »

newswriter99 wrote: post #36
jethro_tell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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…

What is cred.org?

CRED (Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development)

Our Membership

Our members are leaders in the Colorado oil and natural gas community: Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Noble Energy, Bayswater Exploration and Production, DCP Midstream, Liberty Oilfield Services, PDC Energy

Not exactly a trustworthy source you've got there.

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

#48

Post by aeh45jnsrt5sr5t »

saiya-jin wrote: post #11
roenxi wrote: post #5

If 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 threat that materialises in 2050+ What the heck are you talking about? We see the issues globally for last 20 years at least. Droughts, heatwaves in Europe killing tens of thousands, Islands in pacific being flooded due to sea rising and so on and on.

The models did not predict those things, and sea level has only risen 3.3mm since 1995 according to NOAA data. While the examples listed are certainly tragedies, we must be careful about attributing them post-hoc, as it weakens credibility for longer-term political optics.

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

#49

Post by adventured »

Reason077 wrote: post #45
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #2

If 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.

Unlike the USA, China does not have huge resources of natural gas. For the most part, natural gas will not replace coal in China. China does have a lot of renewables[1] - enormous solar and wind farms in the interior and west, and the potential for far more. These can produce energy much cheaper than coal plants can. But the challenge is getting that energy to the more populous provinces in the south and east where i…

> Unlike the USA, China does not have a lot of natural gas.

China doesn't need a lot of natural gas within its borders. It's neighbors with Russia, which can supply via pipeline all the natural gas that China can take. The issue is it remains cheaper to do coal domestically in China than to buy natural gas from Russia, so they overwhelmingly prefer to do that still. It's also of course expedient for China to use coal, whereas pipelines and energy deals can take a decade.

Their 2014 deal was a $400 billion arrangement involving an 8,000 km pipeline. China has greater access to natural gas thanks to bordering Russia, than nearly all of the world's largest natural gas producers have access to natural gas in their own backyards.

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

#50

Post by greglindahl »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35
colechristensen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?
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