Coal in ‘freefall’ as new power plants dive by two-thirds

Green groups’ report says move to cleaner energy in China and India is discouraging the building of coal-fired units. The amount of new coal power being built around the world fell by nearly two-thirds last year, prompting campaigners to claim the polluting fossil fuel is in freefall. The dramatic decline in new coal-fired units was overwhelmingly due to China and India because of policy shifts and declining investment prospects, found a report by Greenpeace, the US-based Sierra Club and research network Coal Swarm. The report said the amount of new capacity starting construction was down 62% in 2016 on the year before, and work was frozen at more than a hundred sites in China and India. In January, China’s energy regulator halted work on a further 100 new coal-fired projects, suggesting the trend is not going away. Researchers for the groups said a record amount of coal power station capacity was also retired globally last year, mostly in the US and EU, including Scotland closing its last one. One of the reasons for the fall in new plants is too much capacity has been in recent years, in particular in China. Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the IEEFA, a pro-green energy think tank, said the falling demand for coal power in China and India and plans to curtail new power stations shows that the world has over-estimated the need for the fossil fuel. The report, which tracked power stations through publicly available information, company reports and satellite imagery, said 65GW of new coal-fired units had started construction between January 2016 and January 2017, down 62% on the 170 GW the year before. Most coal power stations are around 1 GW or greater in capacity. Lauri Myllyvirta, a Beijing-based energy analyst at Greenpeace and author of the report, said the fall in China was largely down to government policy to clean up air pollution and encourage clean energy. That policy shows no sign of stopping – at the weekend, Beijing ordered its last coal-fired power plant to close in a bid to improve the capital’s air quality.

Read More: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/22/coal-power-plants-green-energy-china-india

Posted by admin on Mar 22 2017. Filed under News at Now. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry