More Than 40 Percent of World Coal Plants Are Unprofitable, Says Report (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: More than 40 percent of the world's coal plants are operating at a loss due to high fuel costs and that proportion could to rise to nearly 75 percent by 2040, a report by environmental think-tank Carbon Tracker showed on Friday. London-based Carbon Tracker analyzed the profitability of 6,685 coal plants around the world, representing 95 percent of operating capacity and 90 percent of capacity under construction. It found that 42 percent of global coal capacity is already unprofitable. From 2019 onwards, it expects falling renewable energy costs, air pollution regulations and carbon pricing to result in further cost pressures and make around 72 percent of the fleet cashflow negative by 2040. In addition, by 2030, new wind and solar will be cheaper than continuing to operate 96 percent of today's existing and planned coal plants, the report said.

Comments

Nat Gas

[Mr D from 63]

Natural Gas has depressed prices so much, coal can't compete. Intentionally reduced capacity factors, using more gas instead, makes it even harder for coal.

Re:No source

[Joce640k]

They wouldnt/couldnt continue operating at a loss...that premise is ridiculous.

Not if there's a government propping them up, because, "jobs".

Good

[Alain Williams]

Hopefully this will lead to increased adoption of cleaner power production - that is not so bad for the environment.

I am not saying that all clean power is cheaper but the more of it that gets used the cheaper that it will become.

Re:Good

[El Cubano]

Hopefully this will lead to increased adoption of cleaner power production - that is not so bad for the environment.

I agree. When I was younger I spent lots of time outdoors. Preserving the natural beauty of the world should be something humanity strives to do.

I am not saying that all clean power is cheaper but the more of it that gets used the cheaper that it will become.

I think what was happened is that we have reached the "tipping point" where clean energy is actually competitive in the marketplace. Interestingly, all the various governments around the world that have pushed for clean energy production have varying economic and regulatory philosophies (as evidenced by the various approaches to regulation of dirty power and economic incentives/penalties for varies participants in the energy market), but the end result has been the same: for the longest time it just looked like a money pit, and now we start to see some large scale benefit.

I think that a solution based on market forces (i.e, people doing what benefits them economically) will always be stronger, healthier, and more effective than one based on regulatory forces. Granted, sometimes regulatory forces are required (e.g., to maintain clean air and water in the era of industrial production and dirty power), but those are never as good as market forces because regulations mean people do what they are required to do (and people will try to find ways to avoid meeting the requirements) while market forces mean people act in their own best interests.

Re: Cheaper solar and wind

[orlanz]

Coal isn't being "sabotaged" by regulations. The environmental costs are being incorporated into its usage. And coal does get a lot of subsidies, from mining, usage, and disposal.

And coal plant designs are of a long gone era. Even the latest approved nuclear plants are 2-3 core design versions past current operations. This isn't true for coal. Of course renewables are all new. The only thing as old as coal is hydro.

Missing data point

[virtig01]

Utilities are one of the most regulated and subsidized industries in the world. Additionally, in some places, generating capacity is government-owned, and public enterprises frequently operate at a loss. So the real question is: how much of all generating capacity is unprofitable?

Coal will die, but saying that plants are currently unprofitable isn't necessarily an indication of anything. It needs to be compared on a relative basis to alternatives.

Re:Missing data point

[AmiMoJo]

On-shore wind in the UK is profitable without subsidy now. Off-shore will take a few more years.

But a better question is how much of the subsidy is necessary to keep the lights on and how much is enabling unnecessary environmental damage.

Source "environmental think-tank Carbon Tracker"

[raymorris]

The stated source is "a report by environmental think-tank Carbon Tracker". So people whose full-time job is literally energy propaganda.

In other news, Coke tastes bad, according to a report by Pepsi. Linux sucks, according to Microsoft

The only thing suprising here is how many Slahdotters let BeauHD get away with posting this crap.

Re:No source

[KermodeBear]

It is propaganda. Notice how they mention "regulations and carbon pricing," and you must also be aware that "renewable" energies are often heavily subsidized. You can make anything unprofitable with enough government interference in the free market.

Re: Cheaper solar and wind

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with deaths from respiratory disease! Yay!

The original post says nothing about relaxing emissions of anything but CO2, so you are wrong nobody's lungs would be harmed by this. The original post was right, the problem with coal has been the artificial raising of their fuel costs, specifically tied to CO2 emissions.

Re: Cheaper solar and wind

[Ol Olsoc]

Artificial? Since when does burning coal causes no CO2 emissions? Perhaps we should also start taxing those mountain hating coal mining companies for the toxic runoff from their mines that ruins the land of people down hill from their strip mining operation? ... and if you think that toxic runoff is some kind of 'artificial construct' like CO2 emissions I can introduce you to some very angry Appalachian Hillbillies who are ready willing and able to let you bathe in a pond of your choosing full of toxic coal mine runoff.

And how! Not too far away from me is land that was destroyed by coal mining, and before the companies had to restore the land.

I've thought of having tours of the area to show off what has been done. And as a twist, play down he obvious environmental impact, and play up the money lost.

Streams - once highly profitable tourist fishing destinations with almost no cost of doing business, and with high earning tourists who fish and stay in hotels and eat in restaurants. Millions lost every year (adjusted for inflation)

Deforestation. The trees - if any grow after the area is strip mined - are worthless. Usless for providing profit and jobs for logging. Untold millions lost.

Real Estate. The highwalls and tailing piles look like Mars, and are a profit opportunity lost. The modern trend of building communities 10 -15 miles out of town isn't going to work. The land is destroyed,

I reckon I'll have the human Ferengi bawling like babies in no time.

That's only slightly tongue in cheek. How we could ever allow one group - the mining interests, to permanently destroy land that could be useful for many purposes both profitable, providing entertainment, and ecologically sustaining is so short sighted.

Re: Cheaper solar and wind

[drinkypoo]

"Coal isn't being "sabotaged" by regulations. A tiny portion of the environmental costs are being incorporated into its usage."

There, FTFY. Coal would have been gone long since if it had to pay anything like its full costs... which are arguably infinite, since we literally can't clean up after it.

Misleading: coal being killed by natural gas

[XXongo]

The summary is a little misleading. A portion of the competition for coal is indeed the "falling cost of renewables", but that ignores the other competition that's the main reason coal is not profitable: the low cost of natural gas, and the low cost of building turbines that produce electrical power with natural gas.

Natural gas power plants also spin up and spin down more quickly than old coal plants, allowing them to track the short-term changes in the demand curve better.

Here's a graph. Notice that the drop in coal is mirrored by a rise in gas. https://www.eia.gov/energyexpl...

Re:Misleading: coal being killed by natural gas

[Luckyo]

Even that is only half of the truth. The other half is how much of Western world started treating electric generation vs consumption. On many spot markets, wind and solar get "first dibs", in that no one else gets to sell their generation until all of wind and solar are sold. This is followed by various power generation systems that are ranked in order of CO2 emissions. That means coal lands on the bottom, and is legally forbidden from selling when others are producing enough to cover the consumption.

Hence the lack of profitability. When you plant takes many hours to spin up or spin down, and you can't sell much of what you produce because you're forbidden from doing so even if you can sell at prices lower than competition, you're going to go into red very quickly.

That's why CCGTs are popping up. They can spin up and take load much faster, so when wind drops out of the grid, they can pick up the load and get paid premium for peaking, and they can also economically produce during longer periods of higher consumption. Add to that the unique situation in North America where fracking is producing massive amounts of natgas that is essentially free as a byproduct of oil extraction, and you have a situation where in developed countries, coal is really struggling.

But go outside developed countries, without the rules for punishing coal and subsidizing wind and solar, and situation reverses completely. Unlike natgas, biomass and other coal replacements in developed countries coal is inherently very cheap to extract, transport and store. That means that in developing world, coal continues to be one of the most economical sources of power.

The only problem with coal we still can't solve is CO2 emissions per power generated. It's just too high. But developing countries overwhelmingly don't care about it. They just go with what is inherently cheap and efficient. Which is more often than not coal.

Re: Misleading: coal being killed by natural gas

[Luckyo]

Like I said, in many countries, the spot exchanges literally mandate this, because laws and regulations require it.

Which in turn require it because wind and solar are intermittent generators who's generation capacity cannot be predicted reliably and is controlled by environmental factors largely outside human control. So to function in anything that even remotely resembles economical fashion, they must be given priority over generators who's output is human controlled and highly predictable.

This is not a wrong approach to take per se. It's just that you should have compensation for reliable generators so you don't end up like Denmark. A sovereign state that allowed this process to bankrupt the reliable producers, and is now paying a heavy price to Norwegian and Swedish grid operators because its spinning and cold reserve is now wholly dependent on their co-operation. And last year, those two literally demanded that not only does Denmark pay much more for this service, but it also cede full control over who gets to produce power over which time on Denmark's territory to Swedish and Norwegian grid operators.

They gave the same terms to us Finns to, to which we rightfully told them to get fucked. Unlike Denmark, our grid is not dependent on foreign interconnects for immediate reserves, so we could operate completely disconnected from Sweden in Norway in case of an emergency. Notably around here, it's mandated by the law that we cannot even cede control over who gets to generate electricity at what time to foreign entity for reasons of national security.

Denmark on the other hand is fucked because of its ideologically motivated choices, and those chickens have been coming home to roost over last few years in a very painful way.

Re:Cheaper solar and wind

[Joce640k]

Ah, the first random brainfart that entered the tiny mind of an internet dweeb. Yes, I'm sure it does.

What's needed is a thing called "storage". Tesla has been busy providing solutions to that:

https://electrek.co/2018/01/23...

Of course now you're going to say "what if there's no wind or sun for a whole month?"

Haters gonna hate.

Re:Cheaper solar and wind

[mikael]

You use the surplus energy generated from your renewal systems to push water uphill (potential energy), or to charge up batteries (electrical energy), spin up flywheels (kinetic energy), compress gas (kinetic energy), charge up hydrogen fuel cells (chemical energy). Then you release energy from these sources when you need it.

Isn't that just a reverse argument from Authority?

[rsilvergun]

Not saying it doesn't mean their findings shouldn't be looked at more closely since they clearly have an agenda. But it's in line with the coal plant closings we're seeing. Can you site a study where coal plants _are_ profitable in aggregate?

Put another way, here's the left wing bastion of Forbes discussion the same thing.

Posting this particular study on /. is just an excuse to talk about a trend that seems pretty obvious. If Coal wasn't losing ground Trump wouldn't have been able to capitalize on out of work miners. The market would have those folks well employed.

Re: Cheaper solar and wind

[dunkelfalke]

Are you, by chance, Don Quixote?

Re: Cheaper solar and wind

[Rick Schumann]

How we could ever allow one group - the mining interests, to permanently destroy land that could be useful for many purposes both profitable, providing entertainment, and ecologically sustaining is so short sighted.

This is the sort of thing I'm referring to when I say "Capitalism gone bad" or "Out-of-control capitalism"; there was a time, dim in our memories now (and absent completely in the memories of some too young or too unaware of history to know it) when 'capitalism' operated differently, operated with more regard for the needs of society, i.e. capitalism that had more of a conscience. A good way for me to illustrate this, maybe, is it's like a certain yeast-like micro-organism that naturally exists in the human body: when it's not over-fed with sugars, it exists in a symbiotic role, helping regulate the natural balance of your body, but when it's fed too much sugar, it changes it's nature entirely, goes into a spore-like mode, over-reproducing, and actually causes harm. That's the road capitalism seems to have gone down, causing all the harm you mentioned in it's mad rush for more, more, more profit. Note that I'm not saying capitalism is bad; it's not, but there needs to be a sense of scale observed, to keep it from running mad and destroying everything in it's wake.

Re: Baloney, No. it's accounting slight of hand

[ShanghaiBill]

In other words, you have lowered your standard of living

Not at all. PG&E pays me to conserve peak power, and I then have that money to spend on more important things, thus RAISING my standard of living.

Re: Cheaper solar and wind

[Ol Olsoc]

How we could ever allow one group - the mining interests, to permanently destroy land that could be useful for many purposes both profitable, providing entertainment, and ecologically sustaining is so short sighted.

This is the sort of thing I'm referring to when I say "Capitalism gone bad".

Capitalism without any sort or moral structure destroys itself.

Re:No source

[Hadlock]

Solar and wind were already cost effective a decade ago on every island on the planet, the problem was sourcing quality materials and labor to install them. This problem has been solved, and the price of solar and wind continue to fall, as does grid scale battery technologies. There is no reason to not forecast solar and wind destroying coal in the long term. Public utilities like them because it improves their image with their customers, plus maintenance and fuel costs are rock solid stable to forecast for decades at a time.
 
Long term, energy problems are solved globally, forever, using local resources. This solves a lot of global problems, like invading oil-rich countries periodically to ensure energy supply for one's economy. And the price will continue to come down to the point where even subsidized, clean energy will end coal.