Coal-0! Cooooooaaallllllll-O!

Coal-0!  Cooooooaaallllllll-O!
Daylight come but no collier be here,
Coal, me say coal, me say coal, me say coal,
Me say coal, me say coal-O.
Daylight come but no collier be here.

Robot mine while I sit on bum,
Chinese collier for coal no come,
Stack de carbon till de collier come,
Bear chase coal price watch him run.

Come Mister collier, carry way me carbon,
Daylight come but no collier be here.
Coal so old no more oxidation, 
Coal get cold while sitting in de sun.

Fifty mega, hundred mega, two fifty megatonne fall!
Chinese coal consumption he hit wall,
Balance sheet he looking appalled,
Collier no come no coal get hauled.

A beautiful bunch of fossilised tree,
Morning come but no collier for me,
Hide the deadly climate change!
Daylight come and de world look strange.


A little background:  World coal consumption peaked in 2013.  Seabourne coal prices are now two fifths what they were at their height in early 2011.  In 2015 total Chinese coal consumption may be down 250 million tonnes from its peak.  A collier is a bulk transport ship for carrying coal.

The World Has Passed Peak CO2 Emissions

Chinese coal imports from August to September are down 23% from the same period last year.  Imports are also down in India, Japan, and other countries.  World thermal coal demand appears to have peaked in 2013:  

http://ieefa.org/fact-checking-the-iea-the-worlds-three-largest-coal-importers-are-importing-less/

This means we are likely to now be past peak anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and we should now see decreasing emissions year on year from this point on. 

Unfortunately this doesn't mean we have past peak atmospheric CO2 concentration.  I'm afraid that will continue to rise until we have cut our emissions by roughly 80%. 

Number of US Coal Mines Down 26% From Peak, Production Down 17%

 American Coal Pie

So bye bye American coal mine,
If you don't close down soon I'll lose more than my mind,
And them good ole boys still feed us the same line,
Saying this'll be the way that we die,
This'll be the way the world dies.

Did you love that mountain top?
Pity that they blew it right up,
To get to the coal below.
Do you believe Harper and Abbott?
Is it too late to stop the rot?
And manage to make the warming slow?

Well I know that you're in love with cash,
But what good is it standing in the ash?
To our chagrin we learned,
Some men just wanna watch the world burn.

And the natural world it comes unstuck.
From burning coal and filling air with muck,
But do they even give a fuck,
On how the world dies.

Arise Carbonetta, Queen of the Prime Minister's Heart!

Solar and Efficiency Gradually Eliminating Coal Power in Australia

I just read that because of reduced demand due to rooftop solar and improved efficiency, Queensland’s Tarong power station is mothballing half of its 1,400 megawatt capacity. So coal power capacity that has been shut down and not replaced in the last two or three years in Australia include half of Tarong (700 megawatts), Playford B (250 megawatts), Swanbank B (125 megawatts), and Munmorrah (600 megawatts), for a total of 1,675 megawatts. And if you want to throw in half of Northern power station’s capacity as it now only operates 6 months a year, that brings it to 1,935 megawatts, or almost two gigawatts of coal power.  That's fairly impressive.

Decent weather and increased grid electricity prices have also contributed to this, but rooftop solar obviously bears a lot of responsibility, as by the end of the year we will be approaching two gigawatts of installed solar capacity.  This means that on a sunny day, Australia's PV could generate as many megawatts as as the shutdown coal plants.  

Update:  Well, not quite as much as the shutdown coal power stations as our solar tends to be a bit higgledy piggledy and generally not optimally aligned, but it it can still generate a heck of a lot of electricity. 

Those Eyes! Those Horrible Eyes!

Letter to John Williams, Former Executive Manager of Pacific Power

Dear John Williams, former Executive General Manager of Pacific Power,

Just thought I'd write a letter to you to let you know that you missed a couple of points in the letter you wrote that I found lying on a seat in Sydney Airport. The first and probably most important thing is that the vast majority of solar power in Australia is point of use. That is, it saves the people with solar panels the retail cost of electricity rather than the wholesale cost, and the retail cost is often five or more times the wholesale cost. This is why solar panels with lower installation costs are now around grid parity in Australia. And since you don't mention this in your letter I'll just point out that solar panels have minimal maintenance costs and zero fuel costs. A lot of people regard these two points as major features of solar power.

I'm kind of surprised you didn't know about the point of use stuff already, what with working in the power industry so long, but I guess executing might have kept you too busy to keep up with everything. Anyway, I'm just glad to be able to fill you in on this.

But then you start to get weird, John.

You state the efficiency of the best coal and gas plants at converting heat into electricity and then you compare this to the efficiency of a solar panel at converting light into electricity. You declare that solar panels have to be more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than an advanced coal plant is at turning heat into electricity in order to be competitive.

Are you pooping me? Are you seriously ignorant enough to believe this, or are you just pooping everyone? Did you delegate your thinking to an idiot? Are you really comparing the efficiency of converting sunlight into electricity to the efficiency of converting the heat of burning fossil fuels into electricity and saying that comparison determines competitiveness? If I developed a method for turning sewage into petrol at no cost would you say it wasn't competitive if it was only 15% efficient? You state that gas can be more efficient than coal, so how come we generate most of our electricity from coal if efficiency determines competitiveness? Or could it be that something other than raw efficiency measures determine where we get our electricity from? I'm sure you must have known this at some point. If you cast your mind back to when you were Executive General Manager of Pacific Power you might remember.

Anyway, I hope you found this helpful. And don't feel too bad. Age gets to us all. Why just the other day I could not for the life of me remember the name of the green Teletubby. Took me hours before I remembered its name was Dipsy. But I swear I'll never forget the name of that bastard Laa-Laa.

MUST BURN COAL! 24/7!

I've been in communication with someone who appears very convinced that solar power won't reduce greenhouse gas emissions because coal power plants HAVE TO run at full capacity 24/7. I explained that, according to my admittedly limited knowledge of combustion, if you stop putting coal inside a coal power plant it will shut down, but he still seemed rather insistent that this wasn't possible. I'm afraid that he might have stumbled upon the horrible truth:

PLANT MANAGER: Terrible news! During the night someone installed 20 gigawatts of solar panels! It's an absolute disaster ! Fifteen minute spot prices are now below our marginal operating costs!

CHIEF ENGINEER: What? You mean electricity prices are now less than what the coal we're burning is worth? I guess we have no choice but to power down.

PLANT MANAGER: Power down? What do you mean, power down? Are you crazy! It's not one of his appointed holy days of maintenance!

CHIEF ENGINEER: What are you talking about?

PLANT MANAGER: You know exactly what I'm talking about!

CHIEF ENGINEER: You don't mean the stories the night shift workers whisper in the dark are true do you?

PLANT MANAGER: Every word!

CHIEF ENGINEER: So, if we don't... He...

PLANT MANAGER: Yes! If we don't keep the turbines operating at near maximum capacity, Gilgamax will arise and feast upon the carbon of the living! We have no choice but to keep this plant operating at full capacity and dump the surplus electricity into the grid and use it as a huge resistor! It will blow out every mains connected electrical device within ten klicks, but if we don't do it, those poor fools out there will loose a lot more than just TV and refrigeration!

CHIEF ENGINEER: Okay, I'm with you. I'll do it. I just pray to god it works. And I pray that he'll forgive those damn fools and their solar power! When will they ever learn!