Big Coal Plants Begin to Close

[jasoncartwright]

From the UK... "A decade ago, coal plants generated almost a third of the UK’s electricity, but in the first half of this year they have provided only 3%."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon...

https://electricityproduction.uk/from/coal/?t=8y

[nathell]

Meanwhile in Poland it's been 78.2% in 2018, "down" from 78.4% in 2017. And the Polish government has made it clear that coal will remain the basis of energy production here.

I'm frustrated as I'm writing this on a train from Berlin to Warsaw. One of the reasons why I chose to travel by train rather than fly was the carbon footprint journey, and I'm cutting it down much less than I should be.

[benj111]

As a Brit I could point out many idiotic brain dead things that the political class of this country does. But the switch from coal is quite frankly astonishing, and then you take a look at the biggest offshore wind farms [1] and you see what's replacing it, and then you look at the size of the planned wind farms [also 1] and you start to believe maybe our carbon reduction targets can be met.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms

[tialaramex]

It's weird though, if you look back at this week, yesterday for a few hours it was sunny _and_ windy in the middle of the day. That ought to depress the hell out of prices, most of the gas plants were idled. But for some reason a cold plant was fired up.

Did they lose money running that plant? Is there some setup where running the plant a certain amount (maybe on windy days when pollution effects in the vicinity are smallest) is just treated as a good thing even though we really ought to be burning less fossil fuels not more?

I don't understand the economics of coal versus gas in this space in a market like the UK. It seems as though with gas being cheaper it would just never make economic sense to burn coal when gas plants aren't 100% flat out. But clearly I am wrong somehow.

[maxk42]

In the US it's approximately 30%.

[cmrdporcupine]

Here in Ontario all coal plants were shut down over a decade ago. The difference in air quality seems to have been forgotten by many people, but it was a drastic and obvious improvement.

The power mix here is now 90% nuclear & hydro, so not emitting CO2 (directly), with the remainder being a mix of natural gas, wind, and solar.

[Fogest]

I am happy these changes were pushed forward before a politician like Doug Ford got into power as I think we know these would have been reversed as we saw with the carbon tax.

[40acres]

Great to see coal phasing out but I feel like the risks of natural gas have not been well publicized, data regarding methane leaks from natural gas is sketchy at best and fracking has almost certainly caused more frequent earthquakes (albeit small on the Richter scale) at sites.

Big oil pushes natural gas as a bridge energy, and despite lots of skepticism towards them I think they're correct. The window where natural gas is a plurality of global energy consumption has to be as small as possible.

[tbabb]

Yeah, this article celebrates the closure of coal, which is great because coal is super dirty, but it's tallying up all the carbon emissions they put out as if that annual emission has been eliminated. That's super misleading given that much of the demand is taken up by natural gas. I'd rather hear about the net reduction; that'd be a better indicator of progress.

[mhh__]

Has there been any earthquakes which are actually significant? No matter how bad fracking is, coal is much worse (the goal needs to be to get China and India onto Natural Gas and then renewables)

[stevenwoo]

It is hypothesized that the increased release of methane via fracking is a large driver in recent short term global warming and the amount of methane released has been vastly understated by previous industry and government studies, even though it only lasts a relatively short time in the atmosphere. https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/

[notJim]

Renewables with storage are already starting to compete with natural gas. It seems better to do what we can to tilt that scale even further, rather than investing in more assets that will need to be stranded in 2–10 years.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/13/1755187...

[JTbane]

Fracking also causes significant groundwater pollution which is often handwaved away by politicians. Keeping gas cheap gets you more votes.

[mattbk1]

Earthquakes related to oil and gas are almost entirely because of wastewater injection, not the fracking process itself. One could argue that the increased wastewater production from the development and production of fracked wells is therefore responsible, but the connection that "fracking = earthquakes" isn't direct.

[_bxg1]

Unfortunately it's not as big a win as it sounds like. Per the article much of the economic force can be attributed to natural gas, which is better but not much, and most of the really huge coal plants have just adapted to regulation and don't show signs of imminent closure.

[wpasc]

I was under the impression that natural gas was twice as good as coal[1]? 50-60% less CO2. not perfect but far from "not much better" in my opinion

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fu...

[rossdavidh]

Coal is really, really bad from an environmental standpoint, even compared to natural gas, even with the methane issue factored in. Coal is really bad.

[EarthMephit]

The good thing about natural gas plants is that they complement renewables well

They can start up in around a minute to provide base-load at times when renewables are not able to provide enough energy

[willvarfar]

In other news, Australia just sank a climate treaty meeting by refusing give up coal mining: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49365918

And also on the BBC today, on a lighter note: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-49165336

[robocat]

Why is Australia part of a Pacific Islands Forum? Did they include other Asian Island Nations? Was Hawaii included?

I think New Zealand also refused. NZ exports about two small trainloads a day from Christchurch I think.

[JauntTrooper]

Much of this is due to the fracking tech revolution of the early 2000s, which dropped the price of energy from natural gas below coal in the US.

Shale gas has been replacing coal: https://images.app.goo.gl/zb2bBfkBuAvWePVU6

[Gibbon1]

A friends dad who is a retired nuclear engineering professor said said as much, coal can't compete with natural gas on price. He said his former department and others were heavily dependent on grants from coal, oil, and the nuclear industry and those have all but disappeared. Quote: I got out at the right time.

[raphaelsaunier]

On the topic of coal, as a more worrying counterpoint, the NY Times just published an article about the actions of the Adani Group in Australia under the clickbaity yet accurate title “How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/climate/coal-adani-india-...

[resters]

Keeping the coal plants online is just another way of paying welfare to the workers and the firms that own them. Taking money from everyone else and giving it to the outdated machines and workers with outdated skills.

Note that I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with being on welfare. But as a society I think we should decouple our determination of who deserves to be on welfare from our decision about how rapidly we want to destroy our environment.

In other words, let's just pay them normal food stamps or welfare checks, not keep the polluting plants open for decades longer than necessary.

For some reason many American workers feel totally proud being the indirect recipients of corporate welfare, yet would feel ashamed simply getting food stamps every month. There is zero difference between the two, except that in this case the food stamps are a LOT better for the environment.

[Ma8ee]

And instead of either keeping dying industries alive or giving out food stamps, why not employ the people to do something about ,e.g., US infrastructure. It’s not there’s a lack of work if you have the money to pay someone.

[beat]

I've said it before and I'll say it again... market forces are accomplishing what regulation and public awareness never accomplished, in terms of reducing greenhouse emissions.

I am so glad the market is on our side for once.

[Andrex]

We wouldn't be at this point (this early) without large public investments, regulation, and advocacy. Simply saying "oh the market's got it, we cool" is misguided thinking.

[bjourne]

But you are forgetting the huge amount of subsidized R&D (via universities) and subsidized investment costs that has already been spent. Without that, it is very hard to believe that the wind power industry would have bootstrapped itself.

The same can of course be said for the nuclear industry. Without massive R&D spending and cheap capital costs, nuclear energy would never have been viable. Today, wind and solar is beating both nuclear and coal, which is great. But perhaps The Market shouldn't get all the credit.

[jayd16]

Isn't it pollution regulations that make coal uneconomical? Coal is still a cheap option in China, for example. Have we simply used up our supply of cheap coal?

[bloaf]

One of the easiest ways for companies to claim huge carbon emission reductions is for them to buy old coal plants and shut them down.

[kenned3]

It can be done, Ontario shut down Nanticoke (largest coal genrator in North AMerica) and repalced it with solar.. But something seems off with the capacity??

The Nanticoke Generating Station is a 44 MW solar power station which started operation in April 2019.[2] Previously from 1972 to 2013, it was the largest coal-fired power plant in North America. At full capacity, it could provide 3,964 MW of power into the southern Ontario power grid from its base in Nanticoke, Ontario, Canada,[3] and provided as much as 15% of Ontario's electricity.

[rossdavidh]

The coal industry is, over the next decade, going to go the way of Venezuela, and the parts of America still dependent on it economically will go with it. We are not ready.

[godtoldmetodoit]

Arby's already employs more then the coal industry. Coal is already dead, and they are already dealing with it (poorly).

[CydeWeys]

It feels like it's already mostly gone this way; the vast majority of the coal-associated jobs (those involved in mining) are already gone. Automation plus large closures already gutted the industry.

[isostatic]

> the parts of America still dependent on it economically will go with it. We are not ready.

And you'll never be. You didn't learn from the lessons in the UK of the 60s through 80s when output dropped dramatically. It's taken decades of EU investment for places like the Welsh valleys to begin to recover.

[thinkcontext]

There are going to be big bills to the taxpayer. Pensions, retiree health care, site cleanup, etc. The Black Lung Fund which operates off of a coal tax already has a ballooning deficit, we're going to be paying for those people for decades.

[rkimmel]

I’m ready to breathe clean air though.

[adrianN]

Time to retrain the coal workers to build wind turbines instead. We'll need a lot of those in the next ten to twenty years.

[perfunctory]

Comparing industries to countries is absurd. What do you even mean by that?

[Havoc]

Wouldn't it make sense to build a solar farm there instead. I mean the power lines etc are all there already

[thoughtstheseus]

Just look at the companies who provide maintance...they're leaving the business.

[bwb]

Nice to feel a little hope and see this :)

[hsbaut76]

Yeah, not in Australia though.

[okmokmz]

It's sad that there are genuinely people that have this kind of reaction to an article about a reduction in coal plants. Taking care of the environment isn't some weird competition, what would anyone be gloating about and to whom....

[lifeisstillgood]

One of the great ironies of political life in the UK is that we are now celebrating generating electricity for "X days without Coal".

This is of course a positive thing, but it was arrived at by the politically motivated near-total destruction of UK's mining industry in the 1980s (the then right wing Tory government wanted to destroy the heartland support of its left wing Labour opponents).

What was a socially divisive, bitter class struggle for years and years, that nearly brought down the government, is now a strategic masterstroke of climate change planning.

Life is odd.

[#] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984%E2%8...

[m23khan]

this is great news -- proud of USA and Americans! Americans truly teach the World when it comes to technology and advancement.

Also, it is great to see more and more usage of coal in products ranging from toothpaste all the way to food products.