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6 Major Countries Have Recently Announced Plans To Phase-Out All Coal-Fired Power Plants (electrek.co)
At least 6 major countries, including Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Finland, have all recently -- several within the past few weeks -- announced the imminent phase-out of all coal-fired power plants. Electrek reports: Earlier this week, Canada, which has already significantly reduced its use of coal to about 7% of its energy generation, announced a phase of the resource by 2030. The country's strong hydropower should keep dominating its energy generation, but the country has also been investing in wind and solar to make up the difference. A week before Canada's announcement, France announced a more aggressive timeline of 2023 for its own phase-out of coal, but it should be more easily achievable since they have already reduced the use of coal to 3% of their electricity generation -- thanks to a strong local nuclear industry. Finland is the latest country to join the group, but it also announced a more aggressive solution of simply banning entirely the use of coal to produce energy by 2030. The country gets about 12% of its electricity from coal, which it has to import. Peter Lund, a researcher at Aalto University and chair of the energy program at the European Academies' Science Advisory Council, told New Scientist: "These moves are important forerunners to enforce the recent positive signals in coal use. The more countries join the coal phase-out club, the better for the climate as this would force the others to follow." As for the U.S., it gets about 33% of its total electricity generation from coal and will likely grow the coal industry rather than phase it out under President-elect Donald Trump.
quote: "As for the U.S., it gets about 33% of its total electricity generation from coal and will likely grow the coal industry rather than phase it out under President-elect Donald Trump."
I don't believe it.
The coal business is dying from natural causes in the USA, and I don't think there's anything Trump can possibly do to turn that around. Thanks to the fracking revolution, cheap natural gas is rapidly undercutting and replacing coal, and some existing coal plants are even being converted to gas. Wind turbines have been going up in large numbers -- including here in Texas, where the wholesale price of electricity (dynamically auctioned via computer) has sometimes been pushed to zero. At the same time, the cost of solar panels has plummeted. How is coal going to compete with all that? It just can't.
Coal is obsolete due to technological change and is a vastly inferior good. Look it up. Claiming conspiracy as alternate explanation is putting your head in the sand.
He has a plan. Just wait. You'll see.
Coal isn't the cheapest fuel and has multiple logistical challenges renewable generation avoids. Nuclear is profitably run by French state (85% ownership), and is increasing in Finland. Germany is increasingly involved in Energy trade due to its central position in Europe, so the eventually outcome may be 100% renewable which work for industry - Porsche has a solar-powered factory in Berlin-Adlershof.
I keep hoping that maybe with Reid gone we can get nuclear + renewables going strong here in the USA and dump coal ourselves.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not very optimistic about that--it's more of an unfounded hope.
The rest of the world doesn't care what your Emperor Trump feels like declaring. We're getting rid of coal because we see an obvious benefit to do so. You don't even need to believe in global warming to see why this is a good thing. So go ahead and mine all the coal you want, but don't be surprised when there's no export market for any of it.
"Make America Great Again" caps.
Table-ized A.I.
If Trump isn't going to grow coal use, then how does he plan on getting those 40,000 unemployed coal miners back to their jobs mining coal? It was one of his most-used campaign promises. He even repeated the exact number of jobs he was going to get back over and over.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nobody's planning to phase out coal. In fact, they've discovered that coal dust sprinkled on breakfast cereals helps build growing children's bodies 12 ways.
But you won't hear about that in your mainstream media. No sir.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If we place the coal under his ego, we could get into the diamond industry.
Pretty sure Trump promised West Virginia coal miners their jobs back, meaning he's promising to bring coal consumption back to it's historical peak levels, despite the lack of demand. Sad. Disgusting little idiot, isn't he? People are saying he may be brain damaged.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There isn't much difference. Note: "And despite the many innovative coal combustion technologies being developed, the only practical way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal is to get more energy out of each pound of coal -- to increase the efficiency. But the efficiency of typical coal plants has peaked at about 33 percent, limited mostly by their steam turbines. What doesn't become electricity becomes waste heat."
Well, according to Wikipedia there are 195 countries and the six listed are:
17. Germany
21. France
38. Canada
65. Netherlands
95. Austria
114. Finland
On the one hand, you can count that five out of six are in the upper half and not small island states that don't really do coal anyway. I mean it could be Bahamas, Barbados, Vanuatu, Samoa, Grenada and Tonga which would be considerably less impressive. On the other hand the top ten are about 4.3 billion people so even if the other 185 countries agreed the majority would still use coal. It's definitively still in the "we'll put our money where or mouth is" phase where they try to be practical, large scale examples that it's possible rather than really make a dent in world consumption.
But that's basically the EU led by Germany and France, realistically nobody believes China and India or the other developing nations will stop modernizing to keep emissions down. Population will also rise to 10 billion from an aging population despite the explosive growth is over. So the EU is trying to find a greener way to deliver a high quality way of life, hoping the rest of the world will be more EU-like than US-like. CO2 emissions in US: 16.4, EU: 8.6, World: 4.9, so if the world follows the US example emissions will triple...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The best plan! Put together by the smartest people! Bigly!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Fusion will both eliminate the need for dirty energy and relieve the world's helium shortage... any day, real soon now!
All they gotta do is bring the pieces together.....
I do have to wonder about the motivations behind posts like these, or the minds of anyone who is swayed by them. Your anti-wind factoids in particular are comical.
minor? What kind of fifth-grade copy-editing is this?
Same way Hillary promised to, by giving them different jobs.
Surely you didn't just look up countries by population, right?
Oh, of course you did.
*facepalm*
"Old man yells at systemd"
That's God Emperor Trump
No thanks. I'd rather we have public policy that favors low / no carbon energy sources. Believe it or not, we DO get to pick winners in that regard so long as we don't pick WHICH low/no carbon source and don't pick which company is going to do it. But we 100% can decide to incentivize environmentally friendlier options that have longer term viability than pulling it out of the ground. Especially when there exists an entrenched system actively resisting competition and resists the internalization of external costs.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
"Wind and solar are viable, they just don't lessen the needed amount of fossil fuel capacity needed"
I call bullshit. We could put in HVDC transmission lines (Max distance around 3500km or 83% of the width of the contiguous United States) running from east to west and north to south. Those lines are each longer than a weather system is big, so you ship wind power from windy areas to calm areas that need power, and from sunny daylight areas to dark or cloudy areas that need power.
For the rest of the balancing needed, we could, for example, put in one gigantic hydrogen electrolysis and storage and fuel cell generator facility in the geographic center of the country. It would only be 30% round-trip efficient (energy out compared to energy in) however then you just need to install three times the wind and solar you would otherwise need, and Bob's your Uncle. If you don't want to do that, use a bunch of large compressed air storage facilities http://energystorage.org/advan... running at 70% round-trip energy efficient.
And if you still don't want to do very large storage for some reason, then tap into the enormous geothermal energy rersources under the US. Way more than enough energy for the country's needs there. No GHG emissions.
How about a combination of all these strategies. The technology is there. The price is becoming reasonable, and a small and not too punitive carbon tax would make it economical to build all this new infrastructure fast. We just need to get off our asses and do it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If I had to pay "who's the shill" here it would be you. No power system is entirely clean but coal is well recognized as having higher external costs than almost everything else, even if you exclude carbine dioxide (which you should not.) And its operational costs are nothing to write home about either. Inertia is the only thing keeping the industry going.
Also, JFYI #4 is particularly wrong given most geothermal plants are closed loop, #2 WRT to birds is a solvable problem that is being addressed already (and there is fake news in google results still that lies about the numbers, the numbers are less), and #3 computer models only show this for much more wind power than we require, though localized effects are probable... which is just another reason not to have all your wind turbines in one place, and we don't. Also #1 is hypocritical given what mines do to the environment.
Someone had to do it.
Nuclear fuel!
sudo ergo sum
Nope, even India is backing away from Coal. Trump is just incompetent.
America has been shutting down coal plants since Obama came to office. However, it NOTHING to do with regulations from him. It had to do with the fact that Nat Gas and wind are MUCH CHEAPER than coal is here. Combine that with all coal plants having to have ZERO mercury emissions.
Coal WAS 33% in 2015. Coal is now down to 27% of America's electricity. and for 2017, should be around 20-24%.
In addition, only idiots will think that trump can bring back coal (yes, he promised, but again, only idiots believe that). WHy is this so? Because coal is TOO EXPENSIVE compared to nat gas and wind. IN addition, with the new nukes that will be on-line and tested in the next 4 years, these will replace MORE of our coal plants.
The real question is less about Western nations, and more about CHina.
China currently gets either 75 or 88% of their electricity from fossil fuel (depends on which chinese gov group gives you information).
They currently have around 1.2TW of coal capabilities, and are building out 35-50 GW of new coal plants EACH YEAR. Even this year, they will do 35 GW.
Around the year, 2030. they will have 1.9-2 TW of coal plant capabilities and only then will they quit building new coal plants.
Even if the ENTIRE west, including Japan and South Korea, shuts down 100% of our coal plants, that is actually less than 1TW. So, China will build out ~3/4 of what the west has. Unless that stops, nothing we do will matter.
The far left has to quit ignoring science and numbers and start hammering on CHina FOR REAL. In addition, so does the entire western gov.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
One of the down sides of global warming getting so much press is that people have started to conflate carbon dioxide with pollution. Releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in large quantities is a bad idea, but it's far from the only thing that coal-fired plants pump out in large quantities. In particular, the effects of carbon dioxide are global, whereas most of the other pollutants have a more significant local effect.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Those jobs aren't coming back. Even if the mines come back to full operation they are going to be automated as much as possible. The mine owners don't care about the workers. They were a convenient thing to be used in the election but neither Clinton nor Trump really care about the miners. The best thing they can do is find other work because coal mining as a way of life is over. Even if the environment could take the burning of the burning of the coal, which it can't, the robots are here to take over the jobs.
Under Trump coal use will not grow, it just will stop shrinking for a while until renewables get more cost effective. Also coal mining will ramp up again to access cleaner coal, so even the U.S. will be continuing to reduce carbon emissions just as we have been for decades now (unlike many other countries).
Some thoughts.
How is this "stop shrinking for a while" happen? Are we going to force other countries to buy US coal? Force US industries to not use other energy sources? Punish the gas industry somehow by kicking them out of the picture?
The coal jobs that are gone, are gone. Unless we are deploying a communist or fascist (in the true sense) government that is. It will take a communist type planned economy to force them back, one which denies the industry the automation that played a huge part in decimating the employment opportunities of the coal industry. It is pretty impressive to watch a stripmine operation these days. Even moreso when you see them move a mountain with just a few people.
Windpower will decline though because wind power is the most idiotic way to generate power, if you think at all about long term viability.
Give your rationale and your cites, not your yahoo comments level conclusion. You figure the wind is going to go somewhere, reducing the "long term viability of windpower?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Electricity, however, may be.
Just as we saw France exporting Nuclear generated electricity to Germany as it switched to renewables, you could possibly see the US export cheaply generated electricity to Canada or Mexico.
Hell - exporting cheap electricity to Mexico may be one way to pay for that wall/fence/barrier thing he wants to build.
Solar? Not such a good idea here, it rains all the time. Might be a good idea in Eastern Oregon.
Oddly enough, solar pops up in some strange places, like Alaska. Obviously you don't get it in the winter, but it allows them to cut way down on the amount of diesel fuel they need. So they store that during the summer when it's easy to get, and survival during the winter is more assured.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
realistically nobody believes China and India or the other developing nations will stop modernizing to keep emissions down.
China is working hard to shift away from coal too. See http://arstechnica.com/science.... In particular where it says, "Accounting for the fact that 2016 was a leap year with an extra day, they estimate that China’s emissions will drop by about 0.5 percent (largely due to coal use declining nearly two percent)."
They have huge pollution problems, and they know that shifting to cleaner energy sources is necessary to do anything about it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...: "In 2015 China became the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power, at 43 GW installed capacity. China also led the world in the production and use of wind power and smart grid technologies, generating almost as much water, wind, and solar energy as all of France and Germany's power plants combined."
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Since population does not equal energy usage how about energy production by nation. Canada is #6, Germany #7, France #9, Netherlands #33, Austria #41, and Finland #42.
Not all energy production pollutes in the same way in the same quantities, so that's not really a valid comparison either.
How about simply using the tons of coal burned by each country? That's the current topic isn't it?