Cheap Coal Is Dead. Long Live Renewable Age
Cheap Coal Is Dead. Long Live Renewable AgeBy Carl Pope, Bloomberg
June 20, 2012
"Sustainable Energy for All" is the main theme for this week's Rio+20 United Nations gathering in Brazil. The challenge of making energy both accessible and sustainable has grown more complicated in the past year or so, and also more exciting. These are tough times for coal and other high-carbon sources of energy, while the news about clean energy is more promising.
In March, the power generating arm of India’s largest conglomerate, the Tata Group, announced that it was shifting its investment strategy from coal-fired thermal plants to wind and solar renewable projects. Coal projects, Tata said, were becoming “impossible” to develop, and investment in them had stopped.
With this declaration, one of Asia’s biggest energy players confirmed an emerging reality. The U.S., Europe, Russia, Australia and Japan all had created modern consumer economies dependent on abundant, cheap fossil-fuel energy. In the 21st century that is no longer viable; the high-carbon growth path is closing.
The reason is cost....
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/06/cheap-coal-is-dead-long-live-renewable-age-part-1
June 21, 2012
With oil costing close to $100 a barrel, and most imported Asian coal about $120 a ton, fossil energy costs are crippling emerging economies in Asia and Africa. Although renewable alternatives are far less costly than they were even two years ago, they still can't match the cheap coal and oil that Asia and Africa had counted on.
Fortunately, if Asia and Africa embrace bottom-up renewable strategies, they can restrain energy costs, while leapfrogging dirty energy into the emerging post-fossil global economy. What are bottom-up strategies? They vary based on markets and geography. What they share is a realization that not all electrons are equal; some are worth far more than others, depending, in part, on their proximity to markets. To make a renewable revolution low-cost, countries should roll out solar and wind projects, investing first in those locales where fossil fuels are most expensive.
There are 1.4 billion people without electricity, most of whom aren’t expected to have it for decades. These are the world’s poorest. Counterintuitively, they can best afford the most sophisticated lighting — LED lights powered by off-grid solar panels.
Costly Lighting
The poor already pay a lot for light, mostly from burning kerosene and candles....
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/06/cheap-coal-is-dead-long-live-renewable-age-part-2
June 25, 2012
China announced on March 20 that it would raise retail gasoline prices to more than $5 a gallon. Two days later, the government announced its intention to cap consumption of coal at 3.9 billion tons a year, only 10 percent above its current level.
Concern for the environment is not driving these moves. Instead, they are a byproduct of economic fundamentals, including the fact that importing oil at more than $100 a barrel and coal at $125 a ton or more threatens China’s record trade surpluses. Indeed, in the past three years, high prices for imported oil and coal have contributed to three trade deficits in China.
Alarmed by these trends, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao called in January for restructuring global oil markets, saying they had “deviated, to a great extent, from the supply-and-demand relations of the real economy.” The premier called on the Group of 20 to establish “just, equitable and binding international rules” to govern the oil trade (an appeal not wildly applauded in the Persian Gulf region where he made it).
Energy politics are riling India, as well....
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/06/cheap-coal-is-dead-long-live-renewable-age-part-3
See also:
Coal Power Loses Its Luster in India as Costs Rise
Posted by OKIsItJustMe at http://www.democraticunderground.com/112720815
= new reply since forum marked as read
In the last decade, the world has added ten times more coal than renewables. You can worship the invisible hand, you can pray for enlightened policies, but in the real world coal is still bitch-slapping renewables. It's why we are still fucked.
Don't keep blowing smoke up our skirts with that obfuscatory Tata quote. The numbers tell the true story.
"The economics of the situation may not have restrained coal consumption yet, but it's going to do so any day now."
That's the worship of the invisible hand. It might happen, but it hasn't yet.
This post is just focusing on the facts - the facts of actual coal consumption over the last 11 years. it says nothing about what might happen in the future. I do think that global coal use is going to continue increasing for the next couple of decades, but that's just my opinion. Opinions are overtaken by reality every day. Until that happens, I use the last decade as a guide and expect tomorrow to look broadly like today. When reality does overtake my opinion, as it did with nuclear power and peak oil, I change my opinion.
Regarding Peak Oil, I refer you to the production rates of crude and condensate for the last 7 years, which have not varied by more than a few percent despite the price gyrations. My mistakes were in expecting that we'd see a sharper peak rather than a plateau, and also underestimating the economic impact of the 2008 price spike and the resulting demand destruction.
Your attempt to portray me as a nuclear supporter are funny. I haven't been a nuclear supporter since before Fukushima, and you know it. Your characterization of my position in the absence of any supporting evidence whatsoever is just a lame attempt at a smear.
Is why my opinions matter so much to you. 
Damn primitivists... who can take them seriously... 
Some of us anyway...
IMO most problems in the world are caused by people who take themselves Seriously. Makes me want to poke their balloons with whatever pin is handy.
And you'll be singing a different tune about primitivists when you're living in a mud hut trying to live on meals of grass and sticks... 
Renewables are totally going to save us. 
If it was my post it would be.
Carl Pope serves our Dark Lord, The Invisible Hand...
This Modern World
The invisible Hand will not save us.
