Coal Remains On Its Throne Despite Transition Push

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

• Both India and China have stated quite plainly that they will not be following the example of the UK and shutting down any coal power plants in the observable future.

• Coal power provides the cheap energy that Chinese and other Asian manufacturers of wind and solar components and equipment—not to mention EVs—use to keep their products cheap.

• These two countries will be driving coal demand growth over the near to medium term.

Report upon report sings praises to energy transition efforts that are leading to record wind and solar electricity generation. Outside the spotlight, however, things look very different. There, coal remains king—and this is not about to change anytime soon.

Reuters recently reported that India’s coal power generation had fallen for the second month in a row in September thanks to higher solar output and lower electricity demand.

Time for some solar praise, perhaps? Not really, because at the same time, India’s coking coal imports surged to a six-year high over the first half of the country’s latest fiscal year.

Meanwhile, in neighboring China, coal remains the largest contributor to the country’s power supply despite China being the largest developer of wind and solar capacity in the world—and by a wide margin. The latest domestic production figures point to an increase. The latest demand figures point to an increase in coal in response to growing demand. Coal accounts for 60% of China’s power generation, and this is not about to change soon.

Both India and China have stated quite plainly that they will not be following the example of the UK and shutting down any coal power plants in the observable future. Both India and China have officially prioritized energy supply security and affordability over emissions, even as they both pursue a more diverse grid.

Ironically, it is coal power that is essentially fueling the energy transition. Coal power provides the cheap energy that Chinese and other Asian manufacturers of wind and solar components and equipment—not to mention EVs—use to keep their products cheap. Also ironically, the surge in demand for electricity from data centers will quite likely add a boost to coal demand in some parts of the world where natural gas is not as cheap as it is—for now—in the United States.

In its latest World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency expended a lot of words in praise of the energy transition and how future energy demand growth was going to be met entirely by wind and solar capacity that will be added.

Citing recent ramp-ups in wind and solar investment in the past couple of years, the IEA wrote in the executive summary that the combined capacity of the two would “rise from 4 250 GW today to nearly 10 000 GW in 2030 in the STEPS, short of the tripling target set at COP28 but more than enough, in aggregate, to cover the growth in global electricity demand, and to push coal-fired generation into decline.”

What the IEA did not write in the executive summary but kept for the full report was that at least until 2030, coal demand is not about to start going down—despite its own projections that demand for all hydrocarbons would be in decline before 2030, stifled by wind and solar growth.

“In the STEPS, the outlook for coal has been revised upwards particularly for the coming decade, principally as a result of updated electricity demand projections, notably from China and India. Total coal demand is 300 million tonnes of coal equivalent (Mtce) or 6% higher in 2030 than in the WEO-2023. Even with this revision, coal demand declines by an average of 2% each year through to 2050.”

This is what the IEA wrote in its report, where STEPS is the stated-policies scenario that the agency uses for its forecasts. In other words, the IEA is admitting that it was wrong last year to project the demise of coal. In this year’s edition of the WEO, it is correcting that incorrect assumption. To be fair, it ends that correction on a transition-positive note, but chances are it will have to revise its projections yet again next year. Because no one outside Europe and the Anglosphere is giving up coal—not least in order to keep supplying Europe and the Anglosphere with the components of their top-priority electrification of everything. As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas put it, the energy transition is powered by coal.

It wasn’t hard to see where that urge to electrify everything would end. The visions were that the electrification of everything would be covered by surging wind and solar capacity that would have the decency to deliver the supply when there is demand for it. China, however, quickly realized this was not going to happen, and as it built huge solar installations after a huge wind park, it also built coal power plants. This is what India is doing right now, too. These two countries will be driving coal demand growth over the near to medium term. That’s because they know that supplying the power that their economies and voters demand is more important than counting CO2 molecules.

Meanwhile, the UK is preparing scenarios for blackouts because its baseload capacity just got decimated with the shutdown of the country’s last coal power plant.

Billions are being slated for investment in things like batteries and flywheels to store energy from wind and solar installations, but the realization that this cannot work without baseload capacity is yet to dawn on the Starmer government—as it is on the European authorities that are still pushing for an end to coal.

If there is a perfect time to learn something important from China and India, that time is right now.