Coal Market Set To Collapse Worldwide By 2040 As Solar, Wind Dominate (bloomberg.com)

Jess Shankleman reports via Bloomberg: Solar power, once so costly it only made economic sense in spaceships, is becoming cheap enough that it will push coal and even natural-gas plants out of business faster than previously forecast. That's the conclusion of a Bloomberg New Energy Finance outlook for how fuel and electricity markets will evolve by 2040. The research group estimated solar already rivals the cost of new coal power plants in Germany and the U.S. and by 2021 will do so in quick-growing markets such as China and India. The scenario suggests green energy is taking root more quickly than most experts anticipate. It would mean that global carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels may decline after 2026, a contrast with the International Energy Agency's central forecast, which sees emissions rising steadily for decades to come.

The report also found that through 2040:
-China and India represent the biggest markets for new power generation, drawing $4 trillion, or about 39 percent all investment in the industry.
-The cost of offshore wind farms, until recently the most expensive mainstream renewable technology, will slide 71 percent, making turbines based at sea another competitive form of generation.
-At least $239 billion will be invested in lithium-ion batteries, making energy storage devices a practical way to keep homes and power grids supplied efficiently and spreading the use of electric cars.
-Natural gas will reap $804 billion, bringing 16 percent more generation capacity and making the fuel central to balancing a grid that's increasingly dependent on power flowing from intermittent sources, like wind and solar.

Comments

Excellent! But no nuclear?

[blindseer]

There was absolutely no mention of nuclear power in this article. Is not China and India investing in that technology too?

It would be great if solar could in fact be cheaper than coal in 20 years or so but I've already been told for 20 years that solar will be cheaper than coal in 20 years. I stopped believing these claims a long time ago. Solar has a lot of issues that merely lowering the price of the panels will not solve.

I do believe that wind can get their prices down to where it could compete with other energy sources. Like solar though it has problems of being intermittent. I hear claims that batteries and other storage systems can address this but I ask, what stops people from charging these batteries with cheap and reliable coal or nuclear? Batteries can follow load changes better then coal or nuclear can, so use those for peak load and forget about wind or natural gas.

One thing that puts a limit on the costs between wind and nuclear, wind takes ten times the steel and concrete of nuclear per megawatt of installed capacity. People ask, where is all that concrete? All I you are steel towers and a three big blades turning about. The answer is that the concrete is in the anchor that holds up that tower. If we can assume that the concrete anchors fatigue in 50 years or so, just like it would in a nuclear reactor, then we will need a continuous recycling of concrete to keep up with even an unchanging demand for electricity. If you need X tons of concrete for a gigawatt nuclear power plant then you will need 10X tons for a gigawatt of wind power.

Making concrete has a carbon footprint associated with it. That means that nuclear not only can have a smaller carbon footprint than wind but already does. Future nuclear reactors will likely require less concrete and steel than it does now with advancements in technology. So wind is already behind and the competition is not standing still.

So, it's great that we can look forward to cheap wind and solar in a decade or three. What should we do until then? We can keep burning coal. We can shutdown large sectors of our economy, which would likely delay this new wind and solar advancement. Or we can use nuclear power.

I believe that nuclear power is the only logical choice today. When or if wind and solar catch up then we can switch to that.

Re:China and India are the biggest markets

[blindseer]

China and India are the biggest markets for just about everything. That includes nuclear power. It seems odd that an article that wants to sing the praises of how wind and solar are going to power the world that they'd not even mention that nuclear power already powers a good sized portion of it, more than what wind and solar do now, and nearly as much as coal.

I see this as just another example of bias in the news. Bloomberg is an organization with a far left bias and nuclear is seen as some sort of threat or something. Like some evil entity that is only alluded to with words like "he who must not be named" or something. If they left out nuclear power in this piece then I have to wonder if it is because wind and solar don't look so great by comparison. They'll mention coal because coal is no real threat, but nuclear cannot even be mentioned once.

What we do see is that China and India are taking a true "all the above" strategy on energy since they have active development of nuclear energy. Unlike the USA which has an "all the above... except nuclear" strategy. I believe this attitude will change in time. But will it be soon enough? Until wind and solar is cheaper than coal we will be burning coal. We know nuclear is cheaper than coal, and as green as solar. Obama and friends held back the industry for a decade. We could have saved a lot of carbon in that time.