"Coal phasedown" a year on from COP26
Looking beyond gloomy coal headlines towards the acceleration on clean power shows the progress made on coal phasedown in the last year.
The latest data shows both global coal and gas power generation — and therefore global power sector emissions — are close to setting new records in 2022. How close that might be is hanging in the balance. However, we think it’s unlikely that coal power will rise by 2% this year, as forecast by the IEA.
It’s clear that to have kept global heating to a minimum, the step up in clean power investment should have come much quicker. But because electricity generation is a lagged metric, the step change in clean power investment is only just beginning to be reflected in generation and there is a big shift coming.
With maturing industries like solar, growth would be expected to slow down, but it is in fact speeding up. It took five years from 2010 to 2015 to double the amount of solar installed in a year. And then only four years to double between 2015 to 2019. Now the team at Bloomberg New Energy Finance are forecasting 2022 installations will be double those in 2019 – a doubling in just three years.
Did Russia’s war speed up the transition to clean power? Without a doubt. Fortunately, the answer to the energy crisis is the same answer as to the climate crisis.
The clean power boom could actually mean a faster phasedown of coal than we might have expected a year ago. And, with gas now in the crosshairs, this means there will be a more sustainable transition from coal into clean electricity, rather than wasting time with gas. And perhaps, for the first time ever, the prospect of an approaching phasedown in fossil fuel power across both coal and gas has emerged.
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Lignite-fired power plant in Niederaussem, Germany.
Credit: Markue
Last year at COP26, Alok Sharma pledged to “consign coal to history”, and marshalled all countries in the world to the vague promise of “accelerating efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power”.
So heading into COP27, is the global coal phasedown now underway?
This momentous agreement has paradoxically been followed by a year where coal power may hit another all-time high. At first glance, it seems like the focus on a coal phasedown has slipped off the priority list. Since COP26, there have not been any new substantial national pledges that map out coal phase down. Europe is temporarily returning coal units to service to survive Putin’s gas cuts, and China and India are still building new coal power plants.
But this misses the big picture. To understand coal, you need to look at clean power. China’s wind and solar build-out is staggering. The US and Australia have seen step changes in short-term climate ambition. Europe is now committing to phase down gas, as well as phasing down coal. And most other coal-heavy countries are making positive movements that reveal an energy landscape that has changed for good.
There has been a massive step up in clean power investment — and it is clean power that will replace coal power. With the ongoing gas crisis, it’s also more and more clear that gas will not be the bridge fuel that many feared. Rather, we are in the midst of a genuine coal-to-clean transition.
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