Coal is too expensive and inefficient. Solar/Wind with battery backup is becoming the new hotness, as rechargeable lithium and sodium battery prices/kwh plunge below coal mining costs.
A big appeal of natural gas was its dirt cheap extraction and transportation cost. You pressurize a well and it pumps itself. Gas is lightweight and easy to pump along pipes, so transportation is low-cost and very easy. And the machinery to convert the gas into electricity is cheap and prolific.
Coal doesn’t work that way. Huge manual labor for extraction and transport. And using coal to generate electricity requires enormous capital investment that is heavily centralized. If you don’t already have a coal plant, you’re unlikely to build any new ones. Even in the US, a country flush with coal, the federal government is needing to force plants to stay open and operating at a loss in order to keep demand up.
Most of that isn’t too important. The real failure you neglected to mention is the loss of the negative reinforcement that comes with coal based energy generation. If we keep burning the stuff, the big man can’t give out as many lumps to the bad children, and so they grow up to be criminals running big companies.
People arent understanding how free solar is, its cheap to install and maintain and has no further cost for producing energy, the fuel is the sun. Why would China want to spend money on coal, on the plants, the maintenance of them, when they can erect a solar array in the vast space they have and cut some grass around it every couple weeks.
Some of it will but the more prices go up the more the economicals of renewables stack up, there was a massive surge in renewables installations after Russia invaded Ukraine due to higher coal/gas prices
It will probably get replaced by coal meanwhile.
Coal power drops in China and India for first time in 52 years after clean-energy records
Coal is too expensive and inefficient. Solar/Wind with battery backup is becoming the new hotness, as rechargeable lithium and sodium battery prices/kwh plunge below coal mining costs.
A big appeal of natural gas was its dirt cheap extraction and transportation cost. You pressurize a well and it pumps itself. Gas is lightweight and easy to pump along pipes, so transportation is low-cost and very easy. And the machinery to convert the gas into electricity is cheap and prolific.
Coal doesn’t work that way. Huge manual labor for extraction and transport. And using coal to generate electricity requires enormous capital investment that is heavily centralized. If you don’t already have a coal plant, you’re unlikely to build any new ones. Even in the US, a country flush with coal, the federal government is needing to force plants to stay open and operating at a loss in order to keep demand up.
Most of that isn’t too important. The real failure you neglected to mention is the loss of the negative reinforcement that comes with coal based energy generation. If we keep burning the stuff, the big man can’t give out as many lumps to the bad children, and so they grow up to be criminals running big companies.
People arent understanding how free solar is, its cheap to install and maintain and has no further cost for producing energy, the fuel is the sun. Why would China want to spend money on coal, on the plants, the maintenance of them, when they can erect a solar array in the vast space they have and cut some grass around it every couple weeks.
You can’t just scale it that quickly. Some of it will be replaced by coal, not all.
Some of it will but the more prices go up the more the economicals of renewables stack up, there was a massive surge in renewables installations after Russia invaded Ukraine due to higher coal/gas prices