I have mentioned that some of the usual suspects think that the public will demand more expensive and more polluting power in response to the covid-19 pandemic. I am delighted to have facts to report, showing that this turns out not to be the case. Of course, it was malarkey all along. We knew that coal was dying. But we have to step back sometimes to take it all in.
So far, COVID-19 fallout not altering plans to retire US coal-fired plants
In 2019, U.S. power generators retired 13,863 MW of coal-fired generation, the highest amount of coal capacity retired since 2015 when new mercury regulations drove the retirement of 15,124 MW of coal-fired capacity, an S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis shows. As of April 17, generators had 9,038 MW worth of capacity slated for retirement in 2020 and another 23,010 MW of coal capacity set to retire between 2021 and the end of 2025.
In April, renewables generated more electricity than coal every day of the month, the first time that has happened in the U.S., an analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis recently pointed out. Lower power demand due to the coronavirus pandemic is one of several reasons the transition away from coal has accelerated in 2020, the group added in a May 4 news release.
Here, have some more.
Looming Coal and Nuclear Plant Closures Put 'Just Transition … — Greentech Media
4 days ago - In Europe, the fate of displaced power plant workers is increasingly a matter of national concern. So far, things look very different in the U.S.
Jan 13, 2020 - Coal plant operators in the PJM Interconnection have retired more than 18,800 MW of coal capacity since 2014 with more than 3,100 MW of shuttered coal plants on the horizon. The Midcontinent ISO will have shut down 20,433 MW of coal capacity between 2014 and 2025 based on completed, approved and announced retirements.
Coal-fired power plants closing at near-record pace: report
An estimated 39,000 megawatts of coal-fired power plant capacity has shut down since Trump took office in 2017, according to Reuters.
About 46,600 megawatts could be reportedly shut down in Trump’s first four years in office if the trend continues, which would be more than the approximately 43,100 megawatts during former President Obama's second term.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
The Maple Grove-based company Thursday announced the closure of Coal Creek Station — one of the Upper Midwest's largest power plants
The latest casualty in a string of closures as power companies find alternatives more attractive than coal.
The announcement came after failed attempts by Great River Energy, which serves 1.7 million electricity customers in Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin, to sell or even give away Coal Creek Station.
WCCO | CBS Minnesota
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The company that operates the largest coal-fired power plant in North Dakota announced Thursday it will close the factory and replace most of its energy with new wind farms in Minnesota.
Maple Grove, Minnesota-based Great River Energy said it’s Coal Creek Station near Underwood in west-central North Dakota will be shuttered in the second half of 2022. The plant that has operated for more than 40 years employs 260 workers.
Great River supplies electricity to 28 rural Minnesota cooperatives, serving about 1.7 million people. The 1,150-megawatt plant will be replaced by a similar amount of wind energy by the end of 2023, after a $1.2 billion investment, the company said.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum called the closure of the Coal Creek Station disappointing but said his administration is determined to “find a path forward for it” and keep it “on the grid.”
North Dakota has seven coal-fueled electric power plants and a factory that produces synthetic natural gas from lignite coal. The state’s lignite mines in west-central North Dakota produce close to 30 million tons of fuel annually. North Dakota’s vast lignite reserves are second only to Australia’s.
Greentech Media
In Europe, the fate of displaced power plant workers is increasingly a matter of national concern. So far, things look very different in the U.S.
Courier Journal
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The researchers found that there were nearly 400 fewer hospital admissions or emergency room visits for asthma attacks in Louisville in the year following the closure and the addition of pollution controls.
Tapping into data from an earlier research project, the researchers also found a 17% drop in the use of inhalers by 207 asthma patients in the month after additional scrubbers were installed at Mill Creek in 2016.
3 weeks ago
InsideClimate News
Hospital Visits Declined After Sulfur Dioxide Reductions from Louisville-Area Coal Plants
No!
A new study found a 55 percent reduction in lung-irritating pollutants and 400 fewer hospital admissions after one coal plant closed and others added scrubbers.
The findings come at a time when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been attacking the science used to establish federal air pollution regulations that have helped cities like Louisville clean up their historically dirty and deadly air quality.
The research also has implications for the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which amounts to another "natural experiment" where air quality has been suddenly improved—this time, because large sectors of the global economy have shut down.
There were no major coal plant closures in 2019, though Duke has been retrofitting some coal units to burn a mixture of coal and natural gas.
Electrek
... its last coal power plant, Sweden has followed suit with the closure of Stockholm Exergi AB's Värtaverket plant, two years ahead of schedule.
Yes, we took a look at that just recently, didn't we?
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Modeling performed for the state Department of Environmental Protection and released on Thursday predicts that a large share of Pennsylvania’s remaining coal-fired power generation would be priced out of the market once plants have to buy credits for each ton of carbon they emit, beginning in 2022.
Mar 31, 2020 —Large electricity generators use lots of water to cool their coal-fired plants. As those units shut down, expect to see battles heat up over how the massive amounts of water can be repurposed.
Now, if we could just get some back into the Colorado River, enough so it could flow to the Gulf of California…
Kentucky coal plant closure spells doom for struggling industry — Fox Business
Mar 24, 2020 — President Donald Trump tried to stop it from happening. The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, did too.
Despite their best efforts to make good on Trump’s campaign promise to save the beleaguered coal industry, including an eleventh-hour pressure campaign, the Tennessee Valley Authority power plant at Paradise burned its last load of coal last month.
Since 2010, 500 coal-burning units, or boilers, at power plants have been shut down and nearly half the nation's coal mines have closed. No U.S. energy company, big or small, is building a new coal-burning plant. Employment in the U.S. coal industry is the lowest in decades.
US coal-fired power plants are decommissioning — EIA
Between 2010 and the first quarter of 2019, U.S. power companies announced the retirement of more than 546 coal-fired power units, totaling about 102 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity. Plant owners intend to retire another 17 GW of coal-fired capacity by 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory. After a coal unit retires, the power plant site goes through a complex, multi-year process that includes decommissioning, remediation, and redevelopment.
Coal-fired power plants in the United States remain under significant economic pressure. Many plant owners have retired their coal-fired units because of relatively flat electricity demand growth and increased competition from natural gas and renewables. In 2018, plant owners retired more than 13 GW of coal-fired generation capacity, which is the second-highest annual total for U.S. coal retirements in EIA’s dataset; the highest total for coal retirements, at 15 GW, occurred in 2015.
Coal power plants in the U.S. are closing. Here are the companies sticking with coal — LA Times
Feb 4, 2020 — January 2020 began with two coal-fired generators in Montana shutting down for good. A few days later, a subsidiary of billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway committed to closing a coal unit in Arizona this year. The same week, an electric cooperative based in Colorado also pledged to shutter a New Mexico coal plant by the end of 2020.
Two weeks after that, Arizona’s biggest utility promised to retire its last coal plant seven years ahead of schedule.
There are just 20 coal plants in the continental West whose owners haven’t committed to fully retiring them by specific dates, data compiled by the Sierra Club and additional research by The Times show. That’s compared to 49 coal-burning generating stations with units that are slated for closure or have shut down since 2010.
More than half the coal plants without retirement dates are in Montana, Utah and Wyoming — states led by fossil fuel-friendly politicians with little or no regulation requiring cleaner energy. Some of those facilities were built relatively recently and have access to dirt-cheap coal from the Powder River Basin, meaning continuing to operate them is less expensive than transitioning to renewable power, according to Robert Godby, director of the Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy at the University of Wyoming.
Godby pointed to Dry Fork Station near Gillette, which opened in 2011 and may prove to be the last coal plant ever built in the West. The facility is majority-owned by the nonprofit Basin Electric Power Cooperative, which serves customers in nine states. Godby said Dry Fork “has won awards for being the lowest-cost electricity producer in the country.”
New York's Last Coal-Fired Power Plant Is Closing - The New York Times
Mar 20, 2020 — Here in the northwest corner of New York, about an hour’s drive from Buffalo, the story is of the plant’s unusually close-knit workplace gradually dissolving over the past decade; of a school district banking for survival on the plant owner’s experimental new business model; and of nearby residents debating whether
solar-panel farms and wind turbines should be the landmarks of the future.
The plant’s closure is also an early test of the state’s new climate law, one of the most ambitious in the nation, and whether it can get buy-in from some of the most affected New Yorkers.
The law, passed last year, is supposed to transform the state’s energy grid to carbon-free by 2040, something officials say cannot be done without eliminating coal power. The state has separately committed to eliminating it this year.
Mapped: The world’s coal power plants
Since 2000, the world has doubled its coal-fired power capacity to around 2,045 gigawatts (GW) after explosive growth in China and India. A further 200GW is being built and 300GW is planned.
More recently, 268GW has closed due to a wave of retirements across the EU and US. Combined with a rapid slowdown in the number of new plants being built, this means the number of coal units operating around the world fell for the first time in 2018, Carbon Brief analysis suggests.
Another 213GW is already set to retire and 19 of the world’s 80 coal-powered countries plan a complete phaseout of the fuel, including the UK and Germany.
Meanwhile, electricity generated from coal has plateaued since 2014, so the expanding fleet is running fewer hours. This erodes coal’s bottom line, as does competition from other fuels. It would now be cheaper to build new wind and solar than to keep running half of existing coal plants.
The way coal’s next chapter unfolds is key to tackling climate change. Global unabated coal use must fall by around 80% this decade if warming is to be limited to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to recent Carbon Brief analysis.
If I may make a suggestion,