By Paul Homewood
https://www.statista.com/chart/17519/pre-construction-coal-power-capacity-in-development-worldwide/
Back to that claim that “new coal power projects are declining globally”. As promised, a look at India (and hopefully I’ll not confuse my MWs with my GWs!).
According to Statista:
In India, the trend is similar with pre-construction declining from 218 GW in 2015 to 36 GW in 2018, a fall of 83 percent.
But does this mean the beginning of the end for coal in India?
To understand, we need to look at the recent history of permits, as presented in the Boom and Bust 2019 report, which lies behind Statista’s claim:
https://endcoal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BoomAndBust_2019_r6.pdf
In short, far too much capacity was being built and in the pipeline, because of excess permitting a decade ago. Naturally the government has had to rein back, and once existing projects are finished there will be little more built for the next few years, as there will be sufficient capacity with what is in the system already.
This has been well known about for a long while, and I posted reports on the situation here and here.
However, this does not mean that coal generation will not increase in the next decade.
As at March 2017, India had coal power capacity of 192 GW, according to the National Electricity Plan of January 2018:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/nep_jan_2018.pdf
The Boom and Bust report tells us that this capacity has already increased to 221 GW, with another 36 GW in construction, making a total of 257 GW, an increase of 34% over 2017:
https://endcoal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BoomAndBust_2019_r6.pdf
The NEP also targets a coal fired capacity of 238 GW by 2026/27:
There will of course be some closure of older plants, so at least some of the 57 GW in pre-construction will need to be brought forward too.
Either way, India’s plan is to have much more coal capacity by 2026/27 than it does now, even if construction slows down.
Beyond 2027 is anybody’s guess. But independent experts reckon that India will need to increase coal power capacity to 440 GW by 2040, in order to meet growing energy demands.
Coal Power Retirements
The report also engendered much excitement about decommissioning of older coal plants:
According to Statista:
The United States leads the way in decommissioning older coal plants with retired capacity in 2018 totalling 17.6 GW. That’s the second highest year on record after 2015 when 21 GW was taken out of service. 50.2 GW of new coal capacity was commissioned globally in 2018 while retirements totalled 31 GW.
Anybody expecting that retirements will start outstripping new builds soon will be severely disappointed however.
As we know, the UK has already shut many coal plants, and the ones left are generating very little power. Other EU nations are following suit, so there will soon be little scope for further retirements.
Meanwhile Germany and several eastern European countries, such as Poland have no intention of moving away from coal for many years to come.
In the US, coal power generation has fallen by 39% in the last decade, principally due to low gas prices. It now only accounts for 13% of global coal generation.
Worldwide, there is 574 GW of coal power in the pipeline, including 281 GW outside of China and India. Whatever the US and EU do will scarcely make a dent in that lot.
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via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
March 30, 2019 at 05:21PM
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