No new coal in Germany, Holland or Spain - ?

[cprise]

A report by energy analysts Poyry for the UK's Department of Energy and Climate change (DECC) has concluded that new coal plants in Germany, Holland and Spain are extremely unlikely.

EDIT

Germany recently built 2.7GW of Lignite capacity and a further 8GW of coal capacity is already under construction - but the report claims these projects started due to very different market conditions in 2007 and 2008, including an assumption that they would be given free carbon credits.

Since 2007 though four Lignite plants have been delayed indefinitely and a further 22 have been cancelled.

Renewables role

The report also found that coal use in Germany is decreasing - due to increased renewables generation.

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/newsdesk/energy/news/poyry-no-new-coal-germany-holland-or-spain

[dipsydoodle]

1. In which case a lot has changed in the last 9 months

Merkel’s Green Shift Forces Germany to Burn More Coal.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government says RWE AG (RWE)’s new power plant that can supply 3.4 million homes aids her plan to exit nuclear energy and switch to cleaner forms of generation. It’s fired with coal.

The startup of the 2,200-megawatt station near Cologne last week shows how Europe’s largest economy is relying more on the most-polluting fuel. Coal consumption has risen 4.9 percent since Merkel announced a plan to start shutting the country’s atomic reactors after last year’s Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Germany’s largest utilities RWE and EON AG (EOAN) are shunning cleaner-burning natural gas because it’s more costly, while the collapsing cost of carbon permits means there’s little penalty for burning coal. Wind and solar projects, central to Germany’s plans to reduce nuclear energy and cut the release of heat- trapping gases, can’t produce electricity around the clock.

“Angela Merkel’s policy has created an incentive structure which has the effect of partially replacing nuclear with coal, the dirtiest fuel that’s responsible for much of the growth in the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions since 1990,” Dieter Helm, an energy policy professor at the University of Oxford, said by phone Aug. 17. Building new coal stations means “locking them in for the next 30 years” as a type of generation, Helm said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-19/merkel-s-green-shift-forces-germany-to-burn-more-coal-energy.html

[FBaggins]

2. There's a difference

between building new capacity and increasing the utilization of existing capacity.

They have been burning more coal (lots of it) at existing plants.

[Yo_Mama]

3. Coal use in Germany is currently increasing

The energy plan always included new coal plants, but some of them were designed to replace old coal plants that are much less efficient and far more polluting. So the net is supposed to rise less than the total of the new plants.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-27/germany-to-add-most-coal-fired-plants-in-two-decades-iwr-says.html

Germany will this year start up more coal-fired power stations than at any time in the past 20 years as the country advances a plan to exit nuclear energy by 2022.

New coal plants with about 5,300 megawatts of capacity will start generating power this year, the Muenster-based IWR renewable energy institute said in an e-mailed statement today, citing data from the German regulator. About 1,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity are expected to come offline, it said.

Unfortunately this is in German, but you can translate it. It is the source link to IWR release:
http://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=23123

IWR does expect brown coal (lignite) use to drop in 2013 in Germany. Brown coal is very polluting:
http://www.renewablesinternational.net/iwr-says-coal-will-shrink-in-germany-in-2013/150/537/60759/

Somewhat okay translation of the IWR links above:
http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iwr.de%2Fnews.php%3Fid%3D23123

The bottom line is that this is basically what was planned, although delays in adding transmission capacity have caused a delay in taking capacity offline. What is failing about the plan is that the role of gas plants has not materialized. Their power is too expensive to incorporate, and unless they are highly subsidized appparently they are not going to be built.

Finally, here is an article that attempts to make sense of what's really happening (a lot of older inefficient plants shutting down):
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21569039-europes-energy-policy-delivers-worst-all-possible-worlds-unwelcome-renaissance

In terms of gas, Germany is paying the operator costs to keep some of the gas plants open so that they can be used in emergencies to stabilize the grid:
http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?p=12977

But the gas plants are not being built because they cannot make a profit.

[NickB79]

4. The carbon credit system has collapsed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/10/global-carbon-trading-system

All of this has combined to bring about a collapse in the price of UN credits, from highs topping $20 (£12.50) before the financial crisis to less than $3 each today. At such rates, many potential projects are not commercially viable. Financiers and project developers have abandoned the market in droves.

Assuming free or nearly free carbon credits apparently isn't that bad of an assumption these days.

[kristopher]

5. Nuclear fan naysaying notwithstanding, this is an excellent report.

It is not reader friendly, but it looks to be a very realistic look at the factors driving investment and policy.

Comments from the Cult of Uranus would lead you to think that it is something on par with a high school book report. Of course, those same posters have been distorting everything about Germany's nuclear phase-out since day one, so they're at least being consistent.

One interesting tidbit that shows why they are working so hard to focus on the early stats. Referring to prior studies commissioned by Germany in 2010, they write: "The results of both studies depended heavily on the assumptions made on the german nuclear plant lifetime, i.e. longer nuclear plant lifetime leads to a quicker and more steady reduction of emissions from the energy sector, while nuclear plant shutdown results in a fast reduction of a higher emission level after 2020" pg 6.

You can download the original report with this link; it is well worth looking over.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/194335/Poyry_Report_-_Coal_fired_power_generation_in_Germany.pdf

DU Rec.