By Paul Homewood

A new report has found that the number of coal-fired power plants around the globe is in steep decline. The research was conducted by the Global Energy Monitor, Greenpeace India and the Sierra Club who say there was a 20 percent drop in newly commissioned coal power capacity between 2017 and 2018. As well as that, pre-construction activity and new construction starts also fell 24 and 39 percent respectively. Since 2015, the number of newly-completed plants fell 53 percent while new constuction starts plummeted 84 percent.
The following infographic visualizes the decline across the world with planned capacity in pre-construction status falling from 1,090 GW in 2015 to just 339 GW last year. The biggest drops were seen in India and China with the latter planning 515 GW of new coal capacity in late 2015. That has now declined 86 percent, falling to just 70 GW. In India, the trend is similar with pre-construction dclining from 218 GW in 2015 to 36 GW in 2018, a fall of 83 percent.
Even though the planning trend is positive, there is some negative news in Asia where new construction of coal power plants increased 12 percent in China between 2017 and 2018. This is primarily due to work resuming on 50 GW of coal power capacity which had been postponed by the central government. 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. As positive as trends in pre-construction are, the report warns that global climate goals cannot be reached without a full halt in new coal plants and the retirement of existing ones.

https://www.statista.com/chart/17519/pre-construction-coal-power-capacity-in-development-worldwide/

There is a lot of excitement among greenies about a new report suggesting that new coal power projects are declining rapidly. There is an assumption that this is related to the Paris climate targets.

But, as is often the case, bald statistics can be misleading.

Most of the drop claimed comes from China and India, so I will focus on the former today, and look at India tomorrow.

  https://endcoal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BoomAndBust_2019_r6.pdf

The first thing to note is that the pre-construction figures include three categories:

•  Announced: Projects that have appeared in corporate or governmental planning documents but have not yet moved actively forward by applying for permits or seeking land, coal, or financing
• Pre-permit development: Projects that have actively moved forward in one or more of the following ways: applying for environmental permits, acquiring land, acquiring coal, acquiring water rights, acquiring transmission arrangements, or securing financing.
• Permitted: Projects that have secured all environmental permits but have not broken ground.

In reality, the only ones of any significance are Permitted, as many projects prior to that stage are cancelled for all sorts of reasons. Permitted schemes have dropped from 174 MW in 2017 to 122 MW last year.

Most of this drop has occurred in China, and the reasons are obvious, as the report highlights:

There was an explosion of permits in 2015, the result of devolving decisions to the provinces. Given that this created far too much capacity, the central government took action to rein back in new permits, until things came back into balance. As the report explains though, half of the “suspended" projects appear to be back under construction:

Worse still for anybody hoping that China was busily abandoning coal power is this bit of news:

The CEC may not get all of the extra capacity they want, but they are the experts tasked with ensuring China gets all the power its growing economy is going to need.

Indeed, when we look at what is under construction worldwide, we find that capacity has risen since 2017, mainly in China:

And new coal power capacity in China has been added at fairly consistent amounts since 2010. There is no evidence of any tail off:

https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/2011-detailed-electricity-statistics/

Currently, coal power capacity is about 1020 MW, so a target of 1300 MW by 2030 would imply net additions to capacity of 23 MW a year. Given that some older plants will inevitably retire, new capacity added will need to be higher.

According to the report, China has added 864 MW of new coal power capacity since 2000, and with another 280 MW is due by 2030, nearly all of China’s coal capacity will be less than 30 years old by 2030, and will be modern, highly efficient plants. It is inconceivable that they will be prematurely shuttered, and are all likely to be operating well into the 2050s and beyond.

In addition to building its own coal plants, China is also busy constructing and financing new coal power stations around the world. The report claims that it is financing one quarter of all global coal power capacity under development outside China, mainly through its state-owned entities (SOEs).

Greenpeace’s hopes that the recent global decline in coal projects heralds the end of coal are, I suspect, rather premature!

The report by Global Energy Monitor, Greenpeace India and the Sierra Club, Boom and Bust 2019, is available here.

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March 29, 2019 at 02:21PM

Mark Hendrickson writes at The Epoch Times March 28, 2019 Open Letter to a Journalist About His Paper’s Position on Climate Change Mark patiently lays out information and context for someone to think more deeply about superficial opinions on global warming/climate change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Commentary

Mark Trumbull, Staff Reporter
The Christian Science Monitor
Boston, MA 02115

Dear Mr. Trumbull,

Last month, in your introductory remarks to The Christian Science Monitor Daily online news stories, you addressed the issue of the Monitor’s coverage of climate change. Your challenge is how to report when you and your Monitor colleagues believe that “human emissions of CO2 are triggering dangerous climatic conditions” while some of your readers do not.

You wrote, “Part of good journalism is to seek out a range of viewpoints rather than just present a story through one lens. But a corollary journalistic responsibility is to weigh the credibility and relevance of viewpoints.” I agree wholeheartedly, and I hope you will follow through in fairly reporting opinions with which you may personally disagree.

Climate change science does not lend itself to facile conclusions. The science itself is complex, many relationships are imperfectly understood, and then there is the daunting challenge of predicting the future. As I have written elsewhere, in fields like economics and climate change, there is no such thing as expertise about the future. In the words of a report from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—which your paper accepts as arguably the most credible authority that espouses the catastrophist position—“The climate system is a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

Your statement that there is a “strong consensus within the climate science profession that human emissions are now the leading factor affecting changes in Earth’s climate” is almost correct, but not quite. Some climate skeptics object to the use of the word “consensus.” They state (correctly, I believe) that “consensus” is more appropriate in politics, where majorities shape reality, than in science, where what a majority may believe to be true today may be disproven tomorrow. You, however, used the word “consensus” correctly, because your supporting hyperlink takes the reader to a story about the political consensus that has been forged at the U.N. through the reports of the IPCC.

It is important to understand that the IPCC is a political organization (after all, it is the Inter-governmental Panel), not a scientific body. I can cite a number of quotes from scientists who have done work for the IPCC, but disagreed with the published “consensus.” The political nature of the IPCC and its reports is underscored by Appendix A of the Principles Governing IPCC work. It authorizes the few dozen political appointees who actually write the Summary for Policymakers to alter what scientists have written in order to conform to what the Summary states.

Hundreds of peer-reviewed articles every year differ from the official pronouncements of the IPCC. There is not so much a “strong consensus within the climate science profession” in general that human activity is causing a dangerous climate as there is a “strong consensus” within the extensive but not all-encompassing government-employed climate science clique.

Journalists often ask those who dissent from the official position of the IPCC if they receive or have received remuneration from fossil fuel companies. The ugly insinuation, of course, is that a person receiving compensation from a conventional energy company is automatically suspected of being a paid propagandist. Is it not equally as plausible that a scientist funded by government grants might tailor his findings so as not to risk losing a valuable source of income? There should be symmetry here, treating people on both sides of the issue with equal respect, instead of proceeding from the unfounded assumption that those receiving money from nongovernmental sources are not trustworthy while those receiving government funds are.

Regarding your assertion that “human emissions are now the leading factor affecting changes in Earth’s climate.” That assertion would have more credibility if it were proven that carbon dioxide is, in fact, the principal driver of global temperatures. However, when one looks at the historical record, one encounters a couple of inconvenient facts: 1) over hundreds of millions of years, graphs plotting global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 show no fixed relation or meaningful correlation; 2) the Vostok ice core graph shows the two variables following similar paths over the past several hundred thousand years, but with changes in CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature by 800 to 1,000 years, and effect cannot precede cause in a temporal universe.

Space prevents me from discussing other unresolved issues—the numerous measuring limitations and errors; the logarithmic scale of how much heat CO2 can “trap”; the fact that CO2 concentrations before the modern increase were dangerously low (plant life would cease to exist if the concentration fell much below 150–170 ppm, whereas it will flourish optimally nearer 1,000 ppm); whether warmer temperatures, on the whole, are better or worse for humans than cold.

I would urge the Monitor’s reporters to not rely so heavily on the scientists employed by the IPCC. Very subtly, the dangerous perception has set in that these are “the best scientists in the world.” I am not saying that there aren’t many fine scientists employed by Uncle Sam and contracted for by the IPCC, but to assume that if the government employs them, that stamps them as the best is unfounded. Politicians have no special power to identify which scientists’ output comes closest to the truth, but they are shrewd enough to pick scientists whose work can be used in support of pre-determined political agendas.

I hope none of your reporters is allied with the Society of Environmental Journalists—a group dedicated to censoring dissent. It does appear that your principal environmental reporter has become over-reliant on the eminently quotable Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, and a lead author for the IPCC.

Dr. Hayhoe is very, very skilled at verbal manipulation. Take, for example, this cleverly constructed straw man: “[Climate] science is so old and so basic that to deny that science, we would have to be denying basic thermodynamics … and basic fluid dynamics that explains how airplanes fly. And there’s not a lot of politicians and pundits claiming that airplanes don’t fly.”

Brilliant! Unfortunately, it is also disingenuous. Skeptics about the catastrophist scenario aren’t rejecting the basic laws of physics; they don’t deny that Earth’s climate is volatile; they don’t deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas or that human consumption of fossil fuels is increasing its concentration in the atmosphere.

There remain important disagreements about the degree of climate change, the impact those changes will have, whether any benefits that can be gained by retooling our lives would exceed the costs of making those changes, and other issues with public policy implications that need to be studied and discussed. I hope that the Monitor will contribute to these needed discussions by reporting today’s minority positions as well as the most popular ones.

Mark Hendrickson is an adjunct professor of economics and sociology at Grove City College. He is the author of several books, including “The Big Picture: The Science, Politics, and Economics of Climate Change.”

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March 29, 2019 at 01:40PM

From The Financial Post Special to Financial Post Joe Oliver I recently returned from a Petroleum and Energy Summit in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (PNG), which put into stark relief the moral imperative of developing fossil fuels, especially for the poorest people in developing countries. By implication, it reinforced the profoundly unethical stand of…

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March 29, 2019 at 12:05PM

The Sun In February 2019.

By Frank Bosse and Fritz Vahrenholt
(Translated/edited by P Gosselin)The sun was also very sub-normally active in February. Although we are in the middle of the minimum, the sunspot number of 0.8 for the 123rd month into the cycle is very low. On 26 days of the month no spots were visible, only on 2 days was there a little, symmetrically distributed over both solar hemispheres.The only exciting question currently: When will the minimum be finished and will solar cycle 25 begin? Although 6 spots of the new cycle were already visible in February with a significantly higher resolution, estimates are difficult.March again was dominated by some spots of the “old” SC24.  The rule: “weaker cycles often last longer than stronger cycles” could hold.

Fig. 1: The monthly resolved spot activity of the Sun over the solar cycle (SC) 24 at the beginning of December 2008 (red) compared to a mean cycle, calculated from the arithmetic mean of all previously systematically observed cycles 1-23 (blue) and the not dissimilar cycle 5 at the beginning of May 1798.

The long solar minimum since October 2017 (cycle month 107) can be seen very well, the mean SSN in this period was only 7.1. The comparison of the cycles among each other follows:

Fig. 2: The strength of the sunspot activity of each cycle in comparison. The numbers in the diagram are obtained by adding up the monthly deviations between the observed values and the mean value (blue in Fig.1) up to the current 123rd cycle month.

Figure 2 shows that five cycles (No. 8, 15, 16, 18, 22) did not have a month 123 at all. Instead the following cycle started. In this respect, the picture is now somewhat distorted towards the end of the cycle.

A look at the solar polar fields shows that the minimum may have passed the peak, both smoothed hemispheric values decrease.  The maximum strength of the smoothed average is currently 64, in the last minimum we saw 55, in the minimum before SC 23 the value was 104.

There is a lot that points to a SC25 that will be slightly stronger than SC24, but will remain below the zero line (standing in Fig.2 for an average cycle). Thus the sun therefore likely to remain on low flame for another 12 years. The operators of satellites and the ISS will be pleased, the upper atmosphere expands less with less solar activity and this saves orbital manoeuvres to maintain the height of the objects.

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March 29, 2019 at 11:41AM