India’s coal plant plans conflict with climate commitments

Proposed plants could jeopardize target of avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius of mean global warming

Mundra Thermal Power Plant, Mundra, Gujarat, India. The nine-unit Mundra thermal power plant is one of the largest coal-fired plants in the world.

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION WASHINGTON, DC — India will not be able to meet its Paris climate agreement commitments in the coming years if it carries through with plans to build nearly 370 coal-fired power plants, a new study finds.

“India is facing a dilemma of its own making,” said Steve Davis, associate professor of Earth system science at the University of California Irvine and coauthor of a new study published today in Earth’s Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. “The country has vowed to curtail its use of fossil fuels in electricity generation, but it has also put itself on a path to building hundreds of coal-burning power plants to feed its growing industrial economy.”

According to Davis and his colleagues, India has pledged to the international community to reduce its emissions intensity–the amount of carbon dioxide released per unit of gross domestic product–by as much as 35 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, and to increase the percentage of renewable energy in its power grids. The construction of 65 gigawatts worth of coal-burning generation with an additional 178 gigawatts in the planning stages would make it nearly impossible for India to meet those climate promises, the researchers say.

Further, by developing all of the planned coal-fired capacity, India would increase the share of fossil fuels in its energy budget by 123 percent. If the country also met their goal to produce at least 40 percent of their power from non-fossil sources in 2030, the total power being generated would greatly exceed its own projected future electricity demand, according to the new study.

“In looking closely at all of India’s active coal plant proposals, we found they are already incompatible with the country’s international climate commitments and are simply unneeded,” said Christine Shearer, a senior researcher with CoalSwarm, a research institute in San Francisco, California and lead author of the new study. “These plants therefore risk either locking out the country’s renewable electricity goals or becoming stranded assets operating well below optimal rates and leading to financial losses.”

“India’s Paris pledges might be met if they built these plants and only ran them 40 percent of the time, but that’d be a colossal waste of money, and once built there’d be huge incentives to run the plants more despite their contrary climate goals,” Davis said.

India relies heavily on coal; 70 percent of the country’s power comes from plants burning the fuel. Because of its historically low cost and accessibility (India has large domestic coal reserves), it is seen by the country as an aid in its quest to become a manufacturing and economic power and a way to provide electricity to the roughly 300 million people in the country who don’t have it.

But the researchers stress there are significant downsides to the fossil fuel habit. In addition to spewing harmful soot and other types of air pollution into the atmosphere, coal-burning power plants are the largest carbon dioxide source on the planet, making up 41 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in 2015.

Choices individual countries make with regard to their energy mix have a global impact, according to the study’s authors.

“India’s proposed coal plants will almost single-handedly jeopardize the internationally agreed-upon climate target of avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius of mean global warming,” Davis said.

The researchers are not convinced coal is the way to go for India, pointing to the example set by the only country in the world with a larger population, China. India’s neighbor to the north started building too many coal plants at the height of its economic boom. Now it’s having to suspend hundreds of unneeded plants that were under development, Shearer said.

Further, India’s own draft National Energy Plan, released in December 2016, states no further coal power capacity beyond that currently under construction will be needed until at least 2027–although it remains unclear what the country will do about its many proposed coal plants. “India should take a hard look at these coal proposals and avoid the mistakes of China,” Shearer said.

Turning the ship around will be a challenge for the world’s largest democracy. Davis said one of the problems may be communication.

“The people going to the international meetings to participate in climate negotiations aren’t the same one that are permitting new power plants in the country,” he said. “Maybe this paper will help bring that conflict out into the open.”

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New research describes for the first time the role that warm, dry winds (katabatic winds) play in influencing the behaviour of Antarctic ice shelves. Presenting this week at a European conference scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explain how spring and summer winds, known as föhn winds, are prevalent on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, West Antarctica and creating melt pools. The Larsen C Ice Shelf is of particular interest to scientists because it of the collapse of Larsen A in 1995 and Larsen B in 2002.

The researchers observed the föhn winds, which blow around 65% of the spring and summer period, extend further south and are more frequent than previously thought, and are likely to be a contributing factor that weakens ice shelves before a collapse. The results are presented this week (Tuesday 25 April) at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly (EGU) in Vienna.

In 1995 and 2002, the Larsen A and B ice shelves collapsed, depositing an area the size of Shropshire into the Weddell Sea. Whilst ice shelf collapse doesn’t directly contribute to sea level rise, the glaciers which fed into the ice shelves accelerated, leading to the loss of land ice, and subsequently indirect sea level rise. The processes responsible for the collapse of these ice shelves were largely debated, and it is now thought that crevasses on the ice shelf were widened and deepened by water draining into the cracks. Föhn winds are thought to be responsible for melting the ice shelf surface and supplying the water.

The findings describe when and where the warm, dry winds occur over the Larsen C Ice Shelf, the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula (roughly the size of Wales). Föhn winds were measured from near-surface weather stations and regional climate model data over a five year period and observed all year-round, but were most frequent in spring.

PhD student and lead scientist on this project from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Leeds University, Jenny Turton says:

“What’s new and surprising from this study is that föhn winds occur around 65% of the time during the spring and summer. And we didn’t know how much they influence the creation of melt pools and therefore are likely to weaken the ice shelf. Whilst a high number occur in spring, the combined warming over a number of days leads to much more surface melting than was experienced during days without föhn winds. This is important, as melting during summer and re-freezing during winter weakens the ice surface, and makes it more at risk of melting again the following season.

“We know the ice shelf often melts a little during summer, however we have found that when föhn events occur as early as September (three months earlier than the start of the summer melt season), the ice shelf surface is melting. Now that we know how prevalent and spatially extensive these winds are, we can look further into the effect they are having on the ice shelf.”

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