Coal is too expensive and inefficient. Solar/Wind with battery backup is becoming the new hotness, as rechargeable lithium and sodium battery prices/kwh plunge below coal mining costs.
A big appeal of natural gas was its dirt cheap extraction and transportation cost. You pressurize a well and it pumps itself. Gas is lightweight and easy to pump along pipes, so transportation is low-cost and very easy. And the machinery to convert the gas into electricity is cheap and prolific.
Coal doesn’t work that way. Huge manual labor for extraction and transport. And using coal to generate electricity requires enormous capital investment that is heavily centralized. If you don’t already have a coal plant, you’re unlikely to build any new ones. Even in the US, a country flush with coal, the federal government is needing to force plants to stay open and operating at a loss in order to keep demand up.
People arent understanding how free solar is, its cheap to install and maintain and has no further cost for producing energy, the fuel is the sun. Why would China want to spend money on coal, on the plants, the maintenance of them, when they can erect a solar array in the vast space they have and cut some grass around it every couple weeks.
There’s issues of base load, of compactness, of reliability, and of yield. That’s why new Chinese coal plants (and Indian and African/Latin American plants) keep getting built.
But there’s a bottleneck in material supply across the pie of energy options. China gets much of its coal from Australia, a country that’s increasingly hostile to the CCP government. As a result, domestic coal production in China has picked up notably.
It’s still a grim picture of the future, precisely because these emerging market states state puts mid-term economic growth ahead of long-term ecological preservation. The current western governments are, similarly, prioritizing annualized rates of growth/consumption over real ecological limits.
But for Oil/Gas production, this war is definitely reshaping what countries consider viable or sustainable even in these short-term time horizons.
Most of that isn’t too important. The real failure you neglected to mention is the loss of the negative reinforcement that comes with coal based energy generation. If we keep burning the stuff, the big man can’t give out as many lumps to the bad children, and so they grow up to be criminals running big companies.
Coal power drops in China and India for first time in 52 years after clean-energy records
Coal is too expensive and inefficient. Solar/Wind with battery backup is becoming the new hotness, as rechargeable lithium and sodium battery prices/kwh plunge below coal mining costs.
A big appeal of natural gas was its dirt cheap extraction and transportation cost. You pressurize a well and it pumps itself. Gas is lightweight and easy to pump along pipes, so transportation is low-cost and very easy. And the machinery to convert the gas into electricity is cheap and prolific.
Coal doesn’t work that way. Huge manual labor for extraction and transport. And using coal to generate electricity requires enormous capital investment that is heavily centralized. If you don’t already have a coal plant, you’re unlikely to build any new ones. Even in the US, a country flush with coal, the federal government is needing to force plants to stay open and operating at a loss in order to keep demand up.
People arent understanding how free solar is, its cheap to install and maintain and has no further cost for producing energy, the fuel is the sun. Why would China want to spend money on coal, on the plants, the maintenance of them, when they can erect a solar array in the vast space they have and cut some grass around it every couple weeks.
There’s issues of base load, of compactness, of reliability, and of yield. That’s why new Chinese coal plants (and Indian and African/Latin American plants) keep getting built.
But there’s a bottleneck in material supply across the pie of energy options. China gets much of its coal from Australia, a country that’s increasingly hostile to the CCP government. As a result, domestic coal production in China has picked up notably.
It’s still a grim picture of the future, precisely because these emerging market states state puts mid-term economic growth ahead of long-term ecological preservation. The current western governments are, similarly, prioritizing annualized rates of growth/consumption over real ecological limits.
But for Oil/Gas production, this war is definitely reshaping what countries consider viable or sustainable even in these short-term time horizons.
Most of that isn’t too important. The real failure you neglected to mention is the loss of the negative reinforcement that comes with coal based energy generation. If we keep burning the stuff, the big man can’t give out as many lumps to the bad children, and so they grow up to be criminals running big companies.