China’s Clean Energy Pivot Could Be The Death Knell For Coal
By Haley Zaremba | OilPrice.com
The coal industry is hurting. While the emissions heavy fossil fuel has been falling out of favor for quite a while now, this year has been particularly brutal. In no small part thanks to the spread of the novel coronavirus and the ensuing drop in energy demand, the nuclear sector is in big trouble. For just a taste of the kind of summer coal has had, here is just a small selection of the nearly uniform doom-and-gloom headlines on offer: “Renewables surpass coal in US energy generation for first time in 130 years” from the Guardian, “Coal’s Decline Continues with 13 Plant Closures Announced in 2020” from Scientific American’s E&E Energy News platform, and “The U.S. Coal Industry Is Declining Irreversibly” from us here at Oil Price. But this disaster has been decades in the making. Between the years of 2009 and 2019, coal demand plummeted 43 percent by an energy-equivalent metric, as reported by BP Plc’s most recent statistical energy review. In Europe, coal demand dropped 23 percent. The UK experienced a stunning 79 percent decline and the few active coal-fired plants it has left are growing less active all the time…Full Story