Japan is building new plants. You'll see that news a bunch. What you do not see is the why.

Japan has companies which are building new coal plants in order to replace existing plants. Old coal plants have lower efficiency. Old coal plants produce more pollution.

A none trivial reason why so many old coal plants are unprofitable is because other newer fossil fuel plants can out compete them.

Sure renewables play a part, but the single biggest reason those old plants cannot make money at current energy prices is simple competition. New plants are buying the same coal but getting more electricity per ton while using larger and more automated plants. Meaning more revenue per ton with lower overhead.

Coal as a whole will decrease, but along the way new plants need to be built. Yet the media treats all coal plants as a single monolith. "How could a country be building new plants when existing old plants are unprofitable". The media would do well to educate and inform instead.

> It looked at 6,696 operational plants and 1,046 in the pipeline and found that 46% will be unprofitable this year, up from 41% in 2019

I thought this is due to Covid-19 but apparently it's a chronic trend.

> That will rise to 52% by 2030 as renewables and cheaper gas outcompete coal, the think tank said.

A very slow one too.

The World Resources Institute publish a fascinating dataset of global power plants here: https://www.wri.org/publication/global-power-plant-database

I run a Datasette instance using this data with a map visualization here: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan...

Here's a map of all 2,390 coal plants (click "Load all" to see all of them on the same map) https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan...

If this comes true which is a BIG if since the calculations include "carbon pricing and pollution policies" which are not happening anytime soon in China.

It will be almost completely due to the cheap price of natural gas not renewables as the article implies.

From what I understand there is an ongoing battle in the Chinese government between those who understand the country desperately needs to get off of fossil fuels as soon as possible, and those who want to stay on coal forever. So at the same time that China has been building an enormous number of coal plants, it is also building renewable power plants and pushing hard on ev's.

Thank you natural gas!

Is this good or bad news? I assume good for the environment, right? Or creating the alternative sources would generate more CO2?

Energy markets are highly subsidized, in China too.

To have this discussion, one needs to include information about the entire energy market. If you heavily subsidize low-no carbon footprint sources, you devalue the others.

Additionally you need to separate base load sources from load following sources. Load following coal plants might be more prevalent by number (ie 95%) and in direct competition with natural gas. The smaller the total energy output the more competition you have from solar and wind, which are highly subsidized and reduce margins.

Reuter’s would do better to give this proper context.

Can anyone comment on the state of grid scale battery storage? Surely it's the holy grail to eliminate coal. As we approach 100usd per kWh it must be becoming a viable alternative.

But at such low prices unfortunately OIL and natural gas will be burning even more in Chinese factories and other uncaring nations who place profits over health everyday.

time for yet more subsidies to unprofitable businesses.

Coal is one of the cheapest energy sources we have (before taking climate damage into account). Is the energy sector in general not very profitable lately?

Why should energy costs fall below their current levels? There are billions of people who only consume a fraction of the energy that citizens of industrialized countries consume. If anything, energy prices will rise and coal will remain profitable. Energy will be needed to build all those roads and cars. And then there is the scarcity of sand. How can sand for concrete be artificially created but with more energy?

That's still so much better than tech companies, even tech companies 6 months ago /s

Never forget how absolutely huge coal is. Those Joules are not going to be replaced with renewables any time soon. It's literally impossible because renewables need Joules themselves to be built, not just money. Money does not synthesize power generating objects; materials and energy and machinery and the approval to do so (capital) all together do:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

If this does happen it would represent a win for everyone, but a substantial intellectual victory for the people who delayed action against climate change in the '00s and '10s. If we're all going to switch to renewables in the '20s for economic reasons then it would have been madness to force their adoption 10 years earlier to deal with a threat that materialises in 2050+.