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Spare a thought for the people of India having to bid against a desperate China to get enough coal.
India’s coal crisis brews as power demand surges, record global prices bite: Times of India
CHENNAI: Indian utilities are scrambling to secure coal supplies as inventories hit critical lows after a surge in power demand from industries and sluggish imports due to record global prices…
Over half of India’s 135 coal-fired plants have fuel stocks of less than three days, government data shows, far short of federal guidelines recommending supplies of at least two weeks.
That is a lot of coal burning:
India is the world’s second largest importer of coal despite having the fourth largest reserves.
“Domestic consumption increased by about 10% in the last two years because of work from home and air conditioning,” a senior Tamil Nadu government official told Reuters.
Remember when coal was a stranded asset?
Australian coal prices
9.9 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
China doesn’t want to win the Glascow Climate Beauty Contest. It just wants the other contestants to keep fighting for the booby prize. They win the trophy and lose the trade war.
It’s Green paint for President Xi
China’s great green theatrical ploy fools the gullible Western leaders
Coal power is the cheapest source of electricity in the world and China controls most of it. Meanwhile it’s doing a smashing job of cheering on the other competitors as they take Coal Chastity Vows and run barefoot, naked and green into the quicksand pit of Energy Doom.
The UK and Europe are already thigh-deep, struggling with an energy shakedown of their own making. Yet China, with more coal power than the entire rest of the world combined, puts on the Green-cloak, beaming from Coal Mountain to tell us what sacrifices it will make.
This is the same China that built three times more coal power than the rest of the world did last year. The nation in 2020 that opened more new coal power than the rest of the world shut down.
China’s net construction of coal power capacity within the country grew by 29.8 gigawatts, essentially […]
The Humelink transmission line does not connect a single large city.
Just another hidden renewable subsidy.
Boy O boy, that bill blew out fast:
Households could be up for $2b electricity transmission cost blowout
Peter Hannan, Sydney Morning Herald
Transgrid now expects its proposed HumeLink – a 500-kilovolt line connecting Wagga Wagga, Bannaby and Maragle – to cost $3.317 billion, up from $1.35 billion estimated in January 2020. That would make it “by far the most expensive transmission project” in Australia, said Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre…
NSW Households will be forced to pay $60 per year above their already-inflated-costs whether they want renewable energy or think windmills are a bird-killing, shamanistic health-hazard that won’t stop storms, floods or droughts any better than crystal shields do.
We can see why the government won’t let people choose to buy green power voluntarily.
Transgrid said the steel and materials costs more, but wow, golly, there was also a bill for “environmental offsets” through the Kosciuszko national park of an eye-watering, wait for it, $935 million. Perhaps they are transplanting the trees they cut […]
What will it solve if Australian coal stays underground? | Graph IEA
If Australia stops digging up clean high energy coal, hands up who thinks Indonesia, Russia, India or China will cut back too? Anyone?
Australia is stopping the world from digging up more dirty coal.
To lower greenhouse gas emissions — burn more Australian coal
But it’s never been about carbon dioxide…
Abolish our coal industry? Tell ’em they’re dreaming
Greg Sheridan, The Australian
Australia is typically the second biggest exporter of coal. But we are not the dominant producer of coal. Australia produces only about 6 per cent of the world’s coal. China produces about 50 per cent of coal globally.
Most nations that use coal have some coal of their own. Australia, with such a small population of 26 million, exports most of its coal. Our biggest coal export competitors are Indonesia, Russia, Colombia and South Africa.
In the event that we were self-destructive enough to abolish our coal industry, global coal use would not decline. Our export markets would be taken by Indonesia, Russia and so on. Countries such as China and India would be forced […]
In Australia, the subsidy bandaids are piling up.
…
We subsidized weather-controlling generators in the hope that our electrical infrastructure could not only provide electricity but would also stop storms, floods and The Taliban. However the weather-controlling-generators were also weather-dependent, and it was costing quite a lot to add storage, stability, transmission lines and synchronous condensors. Who knew changing global weather would cost so much?
Once upon a time Australia had a full complete electricity grid that was cheap and efficient. Then we added inefficient things to it until we had two whole grids, one that changed the weather (in theory) and a spare one that filled in for all the other grids failures. For some reason it was not cheaper to run two whole grids rather than just one.
The subsidies were needed to drive out the cheapest player (coal power), but having succeeded, we then needed different subsidies to keep the coal power in.
What a tangled web we weave when first we lie to ourselves.
Grid and bear it: subsidised coal part of energy overhaul
Geoff Chambers, The Australian
Special payments will be needed to keep ageing coal-fired and gas […]
Coal is dead, an old relic, but Germany is burning a lot more coal
If the world cools and gets cloudier will renewables stall as margins become even less appealing? Will wandering jet streams interrupt reliable trade winds as the intersection of hot and cold air generates more clouds over solar panels?
German Wind Power Consumption Plummets 20% In First Half 2021… Coal Power Consumption Jumps 38%!
Pierre Gosselin
What would we do without coal?
The first half of 2021 saw a massive 20% drop in wind power consumption in Germany…while “coal power saw a renaissance.”
The reason for the steep drop, according to the findings, was due to unfavorable weather conditions.
The Germans ran out of wind both on and off shore. People stopped investing because the subsidies ran out and the populace insisted on not having the giant industrial plants in their backyard. Then the winds slowed (why didn’t their climate models see that coming?) Europe talked itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then got an extra cold winter, and they also run out of gas. So what was left was good old reliable […]
….
Australia and the UK can close one coal plant each, but Asia will build 600.
There’s a socially awkward moment coming at the G20’s next dinner, but despite the combined selfish evil of the theoretical Asian Planet Wreckers, no one will really say much, put trade embargoes on, or boycott the Olympics.
Ultimately, everyone at the table knows that Carbon Voodoo is a Western dinner party game, not a serious pollutant.
China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units
Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian
Five Asian countries are jeopardising global climate ambitions by investing in 80% of the world’s planned new coal plants, according to a report.
They are all developing nations, apparently, so they can be forgiven, even though the list includes number 2 and 3 on the Worlds Biggest Economies list, and one of these fledglings just left the nest and landed on Mars.
Spot the craziness:
Carbon Tracker, a financial thinktank, has found that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units, even though renewable energy is cheaper than most new coal plants.
Why […]
God’s joke on governments that try to control the climate with their electricity grid:
Europe talks itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then after an extra cold winter, they also run out of gas, and now they have to go back to burning coal.
Spooked investors weren’t funding many gas plants now that the glorious renewable era was here and policy makers were all wearing their Hydrogen badges, and waving their carbon capture wands. In the last year all the geniuses of the European Investment Bank, the IEA, the European Commission were saying “gas is over” and it would be a stranded asset.
One month ago, Nina Chestney was predicting a gas supply crunch:
Gas faces existential crisis in climate wary Europe
May 14, 2021, , Reuters
Europe faces the prospect of higher electricity bills and a supply crunch, as utilities struggle to finance new gas-fired power plants unless they meet tougher emissions criteria imposed by banks pressured to stop financing fossil-fuel projects.
…Gas projects worth some 30 billion euros were cancelled, delayed or indefinitely postponed last year as they struggled to find funding.
The […]
Росгвардия
The West is switching to trendy unreliable energy while Russia is ramping up coal and gas production.
Russia is building a ten billion dollar railroad to sell coal to Asia, but Australia is building a ten billion dollar hydro bandaid “battery” just to make unreliable energy slightly less useless.
Russia is being left behind on renewables, and they’re probably delighted. The more the West cripples itself in a quest to make sparkly green-electrons that stop the storms, the richer the Russians will get.
With the second largest coal reserves in the world, they’re well positioned to meet the growing demand from India and China. Indeed, if Russia could just think of a way to stop the USA and Australia from producing coal, they could corner the market.
If Russian Intel isn’t paying climate activists and child-complainers a retainer, they must have rocks for brains. But since they are apparently paying French and German bloggers to discredit the Pfizer vaccine perhaps they already are some of the great minds behind Greenpeace?
And if they were funding climate disinformation campaigns, which media outlet would tell us?
h.t GWPF
Source EIA 2021
Give me one reason Russia […]
Tuesday was a wild day for Queensland Electricity. An explosion struck the Callide C Power Plant triggering a cascade of other plants to switch off within seconds. The massive 2.5GW fall in supply took the grid frequency in Brisbane to a hair raising 49.55Hz. How close did it come to falling over? Half a million people lost power for a couple of hours but a Statewide blackout was averted. Luckily no one was hurt.
Meanwhile the people in power were not saying “Hydrogen”, or “explosion” but the Supercritical Units at Callide are cooled with hydrogen, and there was an explosion. The owner CS Energy called it just “a fire”. But in other news reports people in the nearest town said it was “the loudest explosion they have ever heard”.
Hydrogen, it seems, is used in some coal plants as a coolant, but Holy Hindenberg, it is known to explode. (See Ohio in 2007, Pittsburg in 2017 and India, 2019) . A Union official said it appeared the hydrogen filled generator of the main turbine had suffered a catastrophic failure. And it’s all exquisitely awkward, as David Archibald points out, happening while a two day Hydrogen Conference is on — as […]
It’s all a charade. The news was no news. A group of countries that mostly don’t fund coal plants overseas agreed to keep not doing it. And Japan and Korea, who had already said they were phasing out their programs in 2016, said they would keep phasing it out.
This abdication of global charity leaves the path clear for the largest funder of foreign coal plants, the Chinese Communist Party. China can win even more favours and UN votes by being the only supplier of coal fired assistance to a desperate third world. That’ll suit President Xi. He thanks the G7 patsies who limit their gifts to dinky unreliable solar panels and wind towers. Ten or twenty years from now, those gifts will be so much landfill. The coal plants will power on.
This was another nothingness press release just to look like a “win”, like progress was happening, and to give irrelevant former PMs a chance to grandstand. And the ABC and SBS bored us with another advert for Green-Fantasy-Island and didn’t mention that this was largely a repeat of a 5 year old agreement. Nor did they mention that China is the largest funder of foreign coal, […]
China seems to operate in its own bubble of rules
Image by Chris Feser
Imagine the apoplexy if our ecology minister said we’d fund coal power in the third world? Why is it only China that gets to build coal at home and abroad? What kind of developing nation can’t afford to run on “solar and wind” but is rich enough to be helping build coal plants in other nations too?
China has ‘no other choice’ but to rely on coal power for now, official says
Evelyn Cheng. CNBC
“China’s energy structure is dominated by coal power. This is an objective reality,” said Su Wei, deputy secretary-general of the National Development and Reform Commission. CNBC translated his Mandarin-language comments, which he made late last week following Xi’s separate remarks at a U.S.-led global leaders climate summit.
“Because renewable energy (sources such as) wind and solar power are intermittent and unstable, we must rely on a stable power source,” Su said. “We have no other choice. For a period of time, we may need to use coal power as a point of flexible adjustment.”
He added that […]
In the next ten years, Australia will close a couple of coal plants, while Africa will build 1250.
Africa is going to double its energy and almost all the increase is coming from fossil fuels. This is hard to explain, given that renewables are “free” and Africa is poor. But at the end of the decade unreliable renewables will still make less than 10% of the energy in Africa.
Thanks to the GWPF:
Fossil fuels to dominate Africa’s energy mix this decade – report
Power Engineering International
A new study into Africa’s energy generation landscape uses a state-of-the-art machine-learning technique to analyse the pipeline of more than 2,500 planned power plants and their chances of successful commission.
African power generation, 2030, graph.
The study predicts that in 2030, fossil fuels will account for two-thirds of all generated electricity across Africa. While an additional 18% of generation is set to come from hydro-energy projects. These have their own challenges, such as being vulnerable to an increasing number of droughts caused by climate change.
This is only the start. Most countries in Africa are not even in the race yet:
South […]
And some people wondered why I paid any attention to the US election. Apart from being the biggest political story in my life, there is that effect that US leaders have even on the other side of the world.
It’s only been five weeks since the inauguration and our largest military ally is already leaning on Australia to get out of coal fired power. To put some perspective on the size of this favour — Coal is our largest single export commodity about half the time, and most years Australia is the largest single exporter of coal in the world. We export more than 400 million tons of coal per annum. We also keep some and use coal to generate more than half our electricity. Even burning through the blackstuff like that, we still have another 300 years of supply underground. It could be very profitable stuff for another twelve generations of Australians. Or not.
So our largest trading partner is launching a trade war and acting hostile, while our largest military ally is saying they want a big favour. How much room is there for Australia to manouver?
Meanwhile last year China built three times more coal power than […]
…
Mexico, the eleventh biggest population on Earth, was all enthused about renewables a few years ago, but now they are actively winding back wind and solar and reactivating coal projects. Mines are being reopened, coal miners are being hired and the state owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has been told to buy electricity from its own coal generators before they buy electricity from the privately owned renewables generators.
López Obrador is called a populist, he talks of energy sovereignty, and speaks badly of predecessors who opened up the energy sector to foreign and private interests. He vowed to put ” at least 80% of the budget – into fossil fuels.””
Mexico was once a climate leader – now it’s betting big on coal
David Agren in San Juan de Sabinas, The Guardian
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, has unveiled plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers like Rivera. He also plans to reactivate a pair of coal-fired plants on the Texas border, which were being wound down as natural gas and renewables took a more prominent role in Mexico’s energy mix.
Not […]
Coal power is surging in the second largest economy even as China tells the rest of the world to “cut carbon”
If, hypothetically, China were to fund anti-coal groups in the countries it competes with — it would be a successful strategy to hurt them and advantage China. Which journalists would tell us if that were happening?
China’s new coal power plant capacity in 2020 more than three times rest of world’s: study
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China put 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020, according to new international research, more than three times the amount built elsewhere around the world and potentially undermining its short-term climate goals.
The country won praise last year after President Xi Jinping pledged to make the country “carbon neutral” by 2060. But regulators have since come under fire for failing to properly control the coal power sector, a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gas.
Including decommissions, China’s coal-fired fleet capacity rose by a net 29.8 GW in 2020, even as the rest of the world made cuts of 17.2 GW, according to research released on Wednesday by […]
Because Big Bankers really want to save the Earth, right?
BlackRock, the 10 trillion dollar “global investment fund” is urging the Australian company AGL to shut Bayswater and Loy B Yang Coal Plants much sooner than planned. BlackRock is a NY based and as wikipedia says “Due to its power, and the sheer size and scope of its financial assets and activities, BlackRock has been called the world’s largest shadow bank.”
The move only got 20% support from investors. Australian investors largely said “no thanks”. Where are The Greens in exposing multinational powers that want to influence Australia — they’re part of the Big Banker Promotion Team.
BlackRock turns up the heat on AGL’s coal exit plans
Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald
AGL faced an investor revolt on Wednesday, as more than 20 per cent of the company’s shareholders backed a resolution for the board to align the retirement of the Loy Yang A power plant in Victoria and its Bayswater station in New South Wales with a strategy to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
This would mean shutting Loy Yang A, the largest brown coal fired power plant in Victoria, […]
The global economy has been sucker punched by a world wide pandemic, but ABC propaganda writers don’t miss the chance to push their ultimate fantasy, that coal has turned a magical point in a terminal decline. Global coal fired capacity fell by an awesome 0.14 percent for the “First Time On Record”. Hyperbole knows no bounds.
How excited can someone get over a decline of one sixth of one percent? This much:
The world is now shutting down coal plants faster than it’s opening them
by James Purtill, ABC
The world’s combined coal power capacity has fallen for the first time on record as the closure of generators outstripped stations being commissioned. That’s good news for global emissions.
Note the numbers:
Coal power capacity fell by 2.9 gigawatt in the first half of 2020 — a small though significant drop of about 0.14 per cent, according to US research group Global Energy Monitor, which monitors fossil fuel developments.
By comparison, the global coal fleet had grown by an average of 25GW every six months over the previous two decades, from 2000-2019.
In a nutshell, or just a nut, coal power grew by […]
Due to the pandemic fully eighty percent of China’s economy ground to a halt in February, but even despite that — coal use still grew in China by 0.9% in 2020. Another nine billion more tons of coal was discovered in 79 northern regions. And China has as much coal generation being built or planned as the USA has in total.
The numbers are still the conversation stoppers they always were. Ponder that China uses half the worlds coal. While the USA closed 32 GW of coal plants over the last two years, China added 43 GW just last year.
China has promised a few meaningless deck-chair-type vows which it then ignores anyway. The government vowed to cut the number of coal mines, as if that matters. It’s just closing the smaller less efficient mines and opening larger ones instead. As it happens, the number of coal mines was 3,373 in 2018 but now China is aiming just to cap it at 5,000.
Talk of reducing coal use is still just a performance for the West. Two years ago China was caught building coal plants that it said it had abandoned.
China outlines coal capacity plan for 2020
In 2017 in its last month of operation, the 53 year old Hazelwood coal plant was still operating reliably 24 hours a day at around $30/MWhr and producing 1360MW of electricity. Despite its age, it could peak at 86% of its original rated output.
After Hazelwood closed, wholesale prices jumped 85% in Victoria. And the annual average spot wholesale price in Victoria in the last year was $100/MWH.
So naturally Victoria wants to build more wind power, and blow up old reliable coal. Every single week in January, when electricity demand peaks in Australia, there were days when one old coal plant could have provided more electricity than all 57 new wind farms on the National Electricity Market could.
How much did it cost to build 57 not-there-when-you-need-it wind farms?
The output of all the wind farms in Australia still isn’t enough to reliably produce more than one 50 year old coal plant.
In its lifetime Hazelwood made $15 billion dollars worth of electricity (or 520TWH). It paid for itself many times over.
Source: Anero.id
h/t David B, Serp
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