Coal Phase-out Research Articles

The Challenges of Coal Phaseout: Coal Plant Development and Foreign Finance in Indonesia and Vietnam

AbstractGlobal coal use must be phased out if we are to minimize temperature increases associated with climate change. Most new coal plants are being built in the Asia Pacific and rely on overseas finance, with Indonesia and Vietnam the leading recipients. However, the politics of coal plant finance are changing, with many projects cancelled in recent years. This article explores the factors that led to coal plant cancellations in Vietnam and Indonesia. Based on new data of coal plant finance and elite interviews, we find fuel switching, public opposition, and national planning were the dominant reasons for cancellations in Vietnam, while Indonesia’s reasons were more diverse. Vietnam also had a larger number of cancellations than Indonesia, which has a more entrenched domestic coal mining sector. These findings suggest that Vietnam is farther along the coal phaseout agenda than Indonesia. We further provide provisional explanations for these patterns.

Exploring the effects of energy transition on the industrial value chains and alternative resources: A case study from the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW)

Defossilizing the energy and industrial systems and transformation towards a circular economy have versatile impacts on the availability and demand of alternative resources. However, systematic analyses on these interrelations are very sparse. Thus, this paper investigates the interlinkages between the energy transition and the transformation towards a circular economy in Germany. The study is based on material flow analysis models of the steel and cement industries as well as the coal and lignite power plants in order to depict a comprehensive description of the material, energy and emission flows of these sectors and their interdependencies.The analyses prove the inherent interrelation between energy transition and circular economy. On the one hand, energy transition does not only bear various techno-economic challenges and have substantial effects on the production costs, but it also affects the availability of secondary materials. For instance, the coal phase-out and the introduction of green steel imply that the current supplies of blast furnace slag, fly ash and FGD gypsum cannot be maintained.On the other hand, circularity approaches can also influence the energy transition. For example, banning single-use plastics and increasing recycling rates of plastics can deprive the cement industry from significant amounts of energy resources with low-carbon footprint. Contrariwise, CO2 recycling can promote the energy transition by means of mitigating CO2 emissions via carbonation. Therefore, the study can help policymakers to understand the indirect effects of existing and future policies. Also, it can help to develop future strategies to handle associated impacts and avoid material shortages.

Accelerating the energy transition to achieve carbon neutrality

Shifting from fossil-fuel (FF) to renewable energy systems, a process known as energy transition (ET), is crucial for developing countries as the ET brings new opportunities to accomplish leapfrog development for achieving carbon neutrality. Parallel to climate change, developing countries face energy security and independence issues with extra pressures such as the Covid-19 pandemic and increasing inequality. Taking Mexico as a case, four ET scenarios under “gradual” or “rapid” narratives are developed with the Kaya Identity. Gradual Transition Scenarios (GTS) present a business-as-usual scenario with natural gas as the most significant fuel in the supply mix due to economic and social concerns. Rapid Transition Scenarios (RTS) propose a combination of FF and renewables or a full deployment of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). The results show that GTS reach 491∼ 501 Mt CO2 emissions in 2050, risking a carbon lock-in, stranded assets and economic losses. RTS reach 87∼103 Mt CO2 in 2050 with RES prioritization, energy efficiency improvements and coal phase-out. In particular, following GTS would mean failing to join global efforts to limit warming temperature to 1.5 °C. Alternatively, following RTS brings Mexico closer to achieve carbon neutrality. Several strategies are proposed, including reducing the carbon intensity of the energy supply mix, increasing energy efficiency, prioritizing environmental protection, improving actions based on science, and promoting environmental education and awareness. This paper presents a consistent methodology to encourage ET in developing countries where the role of science is still not fully exploited under the goal of carbon neutrality.

Beliefs and Networks: Mapping the Indian Climate Policy Discourse Surrounding the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015

ABSTRACT The media represents a discursive site with actors trying to influence the discourse on a particular subject. The paper delves into an exploratory analysis of the policy discourse around climate change in India during the 2015 Paris Agreement by tapping into the data from the print media. Employing Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) and drawing theoretical insights from the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), the paper aims to highlight the dominant policy beliefs and the prominent actors in the Indian climate policy sphere. The findings exhibit a firm agreement on the scientific reality of climate change, along with a continued emphasis on the historical responsibility of the developed countries. The transition to renewable energy is widely accepted, but coal phase-out and sustenance of nuclear power is a contentious issue. The study uncovers a consistent belief system underlying the climate change discourse in India and the challenges in the path towards future energy transition.

Strengthening Gender Justice in a Just Transition: A Research Agenda Based on a Systematic Map of Gender in Coal Transitions

For climate change mitigation, a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels such as coal is necessary. This has far-reaching gender-specific consequences. This paper presents a systematic map of the literature that examines the impact of historical coal phase-out processes on women and their role in these processes. The search process consisted of screening over 3100 abstracts and reading 247 full-text studies. The analysis of the 73 publications ultimately included in the systematic map shows that past coal phase-outs meant both opportunities (e.g., increased labour market participation) as well as burdens for women (e.g., double burden of job and household). It becomes clear that agency within coal transitions was also gendered. For example, it was difficult for women to gain access to union structures, which led them to organise themselves into grassroots movements. Our research shows that policies aiming for a just sustainability transition should always be explicitly gender-responsive. However, the impact of sustainability transitions on women’s lives remains largely under-researched. Therefore, we propose a research agenda based on our findings containing six key issues that need to be addressed scientifically.

Analyzing transitions through the lens of discourse networks: Coal phase-out in Germany

Discourse analysis is gaining attention in transition studies. This paper uses discourse network analysis (DNA) to study how discourse coalitions, and the storylines they mobilize, change over time. Drawing from archival data of two daily newspapers, we analyze the struggle over coal phase-out in Germany (2000–2020). We identify an anti-coal discourse coalition, which was stable and ideationally congruent over time. It used climate change as the dominant storyline to delegitimize coal. The phase-out policy decision in 2020 can be interpreted as the success of this coalition. The pro-coal coalition, in contrast, was more dispersed and less consistent in their arguments. Nonetheless, it was able to institutionalize some of its key storylines in the final policies. We argue that DNA is a powerful tool we can mobilize in sustainability transitions research for the study of politics and beyond.

Unilateral Phase-Out of Coal to Power in an Emissions Trading Scheme

We investigate the displacement effects of unilateral phase-out-of-coal policies in a stylized two-country model with coal- and gas-fired electricity generation in an international emissions trading scheme. In the basic policy scenario, electricity markets are national and one country bans coal while the emissions cap remains unchanged. The allocative displacement effects are strongly asymmetric: the coal-banning country suffers a welfare loss, the other country is better off, and aggregate welfare declines. Furthermore, the permit price decreases, while the electricity price rises in the unilaterally acting country and declines in the other country. If all countries would phase out coal, the effects would be symmetric and all countries would lose. We then extend the analysis to the cases (i) when the unilateral coal ban is combined with a moderate cut of the emissions cap (as recently suggested in an EU Directive) and (ii) when we allow for international trade in electricity. Compared to the basic unilateral policy, in these cases, the total welfare costs tend to be smaller and some tend to be shifted from the unilaterally acting country to the other one.

Three stages in the co-transformation of the energy and mobility sectors

Renewable electricity sources such as wind and solar power have shown a remarkable development in terms of efficiency, costs and availability, but system integration still remains a challenge. Realizing a fully renewable electricity supply will require large scale storage technologies and flexible users to overcome long periods of low power generation. At the same time, other sectors such as mobility and industry must be electrified to replace fossil fuels. Power-to-methane is a promising technology as it enables large-scale energy storage and sector coupling using existing infrastructures. In this work, we analyze the co-transformation of the German electricity, mobility and industry sectors, taking into account the recent decision to phase out coal by 2038. We evaluate the necessary capacities of renewables and sizes for storage options, as well as system costs and associated emissions using a techno-economic optimization model with a high technological and temporal resolution in the open-source framework OSeMOSYS. We find three rather different stages of the transformation driven by the decreasing emissions cap and the coal phase-out. Solar power is expanded vastly up to 2030, whilst coal is replaced mainly by fossil natural gas by 2040. Emissions caps become very challenging after 2040 to the extent that all flexibility options are greatly expanded: storage, curtailment and flexible power-to-methane.

Challenges and Opportunities of Coal Phase-Out in Western Macedonia

As part of the European Green Deal, the EU aims to become climate-neutral and reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Ιn this context, EU member states are required to develop a national strategy to achieve the required emissions reductions under the Paris Agreement and EU climate goals. Western Macedonia is a region in North-western Greece with its economy largely dominated by lignite mining, lignite-fired power plants and district heating systems. In 2019, the Greek Government set the goal of withdrawing all lignite plants by 2028, with most units being withdrawn already by 2023. This decision has had an immense socio-economic impact on the region of Western Macedonia. This research work reflects the current situation at the socio-economic and socio-political level in Western Macedonia and discusses the policies implemented in the context of the lignite phase-out process to ensure a just transition for households and businesses of the region. Although there is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ blueprint for successful low-carbon transitions of high-carbon intensive regional economies, the main target of our paper is understanding the impacts, challenges and opportunities of decarbonizing Western Macedonia.

Effects of decarbonization on the energy system and related employment effects in South Africa

This paper assesses the impact of decarbonization on the energy system and related employment in South Africa. The cost-minimizing, global energy system model (GENeSYS-MOD) is utilized to project two energy mix scenarios and their associated employment implications at provincial level. While the business as usual (BAU) scenario shows a continuous use of coal capacity in the South African power sector until 2050, the 2 °C scenario exhibits a phase-out of coal by 2040 and a higher diversification of power generation dominated by solar and wind capacity.The increase in renewable energy sources (RES) generates employment in the energy sector which can partially substitute the decline in coal related jobs in affected regions. However, it is not certain that the employment created by RES will directly benefit those negatively impacted by the transition. The results of a sensitivity of the 2 °C scenario provide a near cost-optimal energy system in line with a just transition towards a 2 °C world that limits the employment impacts for former coal regions. Thus, a technological transition from a coal- to a RES-based system needs comprehensive plans for job-transfers, policy formulations, support mechanisms and structural transformation.

The future of coal investment, trade, and stranded assets

The future of coal investment, trade, and stranded assets

Evaluating available solar photovoltaic business opportunities in coal phase-out regions – An energy transition case of Steve Tshwete local municipality in South Africa

The global energy transition may have unintended consequences for businesses that provide services to the coal sector. Businesses operating in coal regions like Steve Tshwete Local Municipality (STLM) might be left stranded due to the coal phase-out. However, solar photovoltaic (PV) business opportunities can support a just energy transition. The diffusion of solar PV owing to the available grid infrastructure and solar energy resource (5.61 kW/m2/day) in STLM, South Africa positions this region as a potential solar development area. Therefore, leveraging solar PV commercial benefits for local enterprises is just. This study deployed a structured survey to understand solar business involvement and opportunities in STLM. The study found that 57.1% of businesses operating in STLM offer services to either coal mines or coal power stations. Only 14.3% of businesses were found to have offered services in the solar PV sector, signalling low participation. However, this does not mean that STLM businesses cannot increase their participation in the solar PV sector thus mitigate against potential coal phase-out socio-economic impacts. The exploratory factor analysis deployed for data analysis showed two factors (solar opportunities and regional participation) that were found to be reliable and valid on the Cronbach's Alpha test.

Explaining the slow progress of coal phase-out: The case of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Region

Prompted by the urgency of climate change, this paper analyses the impediments for coal phase-out, by using the Greater Bay Region in China as a case study. Rather than factors specific to coal production, transport and consumption (e.g., subsidies, and vested interests), as suggested by existing literature, the analysis of this paper demonstrates that coal phase-out in the region has encountered a range of market (e.g., high gas price), infrastructure (such as, inadequate network), and regulatory (e.g., prolonged project approval) impediments; these impediments have hindered the effective deployment of alternative energy sources, raising concern about coal phase-out and its crippling impacts on the security of energy supply. Redressing these impediments is therefore a key priority for promoting a smooth coal phase-out in the region. This requires a mix of policies addressing two dimensions: 1) those aimed at squeezing out coal from the energy-mix to create room for alternative low-carbon energy sources; and 2) those aimed at supporting the uptake of these sources. Implementing these policies is however a challenging task as it relies on close-centre-local, and inter- and intra-regional cooperation, especially in a resource-poor region with a disperse energy endowment. Achieving this is difficult because the energy policy process of the country has long been characterised by fragmented authority and territorial administrative divisions with a proclivity for local governments to work in isolation from each other.

A plant-by-plant strategy for high-ambition coal power phaseout in China

More than half of current coal power capacity is in China. A key strategy for meeting China’s 2060 carbon neutrality goal and the global 1.5 °C climate goal is to rapidly shift away from unabated coal use. Here we detail how to structure a high-ambition coal phaseout in China while balancing multiple national needs. We evaluate the 1037 currently operating coal plants based on comprehensive technical, economic and environmental criteria and develop a metric for prioritizing plants for early retirement. We find that 18% of plants consistently score poorly across all three criteria and are thus low-hanging fruits for rapid retirement. We develop plant-by-plant phaseout strategies for each province by combining our retirement algorithm with an integrated assessment model. With rapid retirement of the low-hanging fruits, other existing plants can operate with a 20- or 30-year minimum lifetime and gradually reduced utilization to achieve the 1.5 °C or well-below 2 °C climate goals, respectively, with complete phaseout by 2045 and 2055.

Coal, climate and change: The narrative drivers of Australia’s coal economy

Coal phase-out poses significant challenges for resource intensive economies with substantial coal sectors. Narratives are a key strategy for managing these challenges. As a resource intensive nation, the contributions of the coal sector to Australia’s economy are central to explaining the country’s on-going political commitment to coal. But the country’s socio-cultural context – social, cultural and geographic - is also critically important, since it amplifies the economic impact. Additionally these socio-cultural elements are increasingly utilised narratively by energy regime incumbents in strategic efforts to maintain business-as-usual. This is particularly so at a time when climate awareness is growing and renewables have established themselves as both popular and viable. The paper focuses both on the key narratives employed by Australian federal Coalition governments from 2013 to early 2020, and also how they change over time in response to changing societal contexts. Since narrative analysis helps reveal an issue’s power relations, telling Australia’s coal story through the conduit of these narratives helps to disclose both the characteristics and strategies of its contemporary coal politics. We focus on the state of Queensland, one of Australia’s largest coal mining states. Many of this study's findings can inform understanding of similar contexts across Australia and other coal-rich democracies worldwide.

Education for Sustainable Development in Structural Change Processes Using the Example of the Coal Phase-out in Lusatia

Within socio-economic transformation processes, the task of education is often reduced to short-term economic factors, that is, a suitable qualification profile of the local population. Transformative education should, however, be based on the broader claim that education contributes to successful transformation processes in the sense of facilitating a high and sustainable quality of life within a democratic society. In this article, we look at the transformation process in the German region of Lusatia. Coal, the region’s predominant industry, will be phased out by 2038. We examine what types of programme content might enable learners to participate in the transformation process, and discuss how different educational concepts (education for sustainable development and related approaches including transformative learning, socio-economic and civic education) could be used to develop an educational approach towards the transformation process. We derive competences that students should possess in two areas and provide recommendations for educational processes and policy.

The EU ETS to 2030 and beyond: adjusting the cap in light of the 1.5°C target and current energy policies

ABSTRACT The Paris Agreement calls on countries to pursue efforts to limit global average temperature rise to 1.5°C. We derive a 2016–2050 emission budget for the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) based on cost-effectiveness criteria aimed at achieving the 1.5°C target with a 50%–66% probability, and translate it into a cap reduction path. We show that, under current ETS parameters, the vast majority of this budget will be consumed by 2030. Meeting the budget under current 2030 EU ETS parameters would require drastic – and probably unrealistic – additional efforts after 2030. We derive a cost-effective scenario delivering a smoother and more credible emission pathway. We show that recently increased EU targets for renewable energy and energy efficiency, along with national coal phase-out policies up to 2030 provide cap adjustment potential. If the cap is adjusted to reflect these policies and if phased-out coal capacities are fully substituted through renewable energy, emissions in ETS sectors could decline by 57% through to 2030. This approximates our cost-effective scenario and translates into a linear reduction factor (LRF) for the cap of 3.6% for the period 2021–2030. Key policy insights Paris Agreement-compatible emission budgets can serve as a guideline to define the minimum requirement for emission reductions in the EU ETS. The globally cost-effective emissions budget for EU ETS sectors in line with limiting global warming to 1.5°C is about 30 Gt CO2e for 2016–2050. During the next decade the annual emissions cap must decrease much faster than currently planned to meet the cost-effective budget. Achieving a globally cost-effective emissions path requires that the linear reduction factor (LRF) of the EU ETS cap for 2021–2030 is raised from currently 2.2% to at least 4%. Incorporating EU targets for renewable energy and energy efficiency, as well as national coal phase-outs, enables an increase of the LRF for 2021–2030 to 3.6% without an additional abatement burden on EU ETS installations.

Who cares about coal? Analyzing 70 years of German parliamentary debates on coal with dynamic topic modeling

Despite Germany’s Paris Agreement pledge and coal exit legislation, the political debate around carbon-intensive coal remains heated. Coal power and mining have played an important, yet changing role in the history of German politics. In this paper, we analyze the entire parliamentary debate on coal in the German parliament (Bundestag) from its inception in 1949 to 2019. For this purpose we extract the more than 870,000 parliamentary speeches from all protocols in the history of the Bundestag. We identify the 9167 speeches mentioning coal and apply dynamic topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique that reveals the changing thematic structure of large document collections over time – to analyze changes in parliamentary debates on coal over the past 70 years. The trends in topics and their varying internal structure reflect how energy policy was discussed and legitimized over time: Initially, coal was framed as a driver of economic prosperity and guarantee of energy security. In recent years, the debate evolved towards energy transition, coal phase-out and renewable energy expansion. Germany’s smaller and younger parties, the Greens and the Left Party, debate coal more often in the context of the energy transition and climate protection than other parties. Our results reflect trends in other countries and other fields of energy policy. Methodologically, our study illustrates the potential of and need for computational methods to analyze vast corpora of text and to complement traditional social science methods.

Low carbon generation expansion planning with carbon capture technology and coal phase-out under renewable integration

In this paper, a multi-period low carbon Generation Expansion Planning (LC-GEP) model is proposed to determine the optimal type, capacity, and installation time of conventional and renewable generation technologies under low carbon policy. Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) is utilized as a carbon reduction technology for existing coal units. Also, the coal phase-out option is included as a low carbon strategy. Different candidate technologies including Coal-fired Steam, Natural Gas Open Cycle (NGOC), Natural Gas Combined Cycle (NGCC), Nuclear and renewable resources are considered. The lead time for conversion of NGOC units to NGCC units is considered as an efficiency improvement tool to reduce the carbon emission. The efficacy of the proposed LC-GEP model in realizing carbon emission targets is investigated under Carbon Cap and Tax policy. A clustering method is utilized to extract some representative days to capture the daily variations of renewable and load scenarios in each year of the planning horizon. Technical constraints including reserve requirement, power balance, and tunnel limits are considered. A new test system is developed for verifying the performance of the model. The proposed multi-year LC-GEP model is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and is solved using CPLEX algorithm.

The potential co-benefits for health, economy and climate by substituting raw coal with waste cooking oil as a winter heating fuel in rural households of northern China

The toxic emissions from coal combustion associated with domestic winter heating requirements are an important public health issue. Waste cooking oil (WCO) holds promise as a means of reducing pollutant emissions thereby improving human health with the co-benefit of decreasing climate-forcing gas emissions by avoiding the combustion of mineral coal. With an annual production of ~2.17 Mt of WCO in Northern China, it could be used to meet the winter heating demand of ~3.25 million rural households, offsetting ~9.83 Mt of raw coal consumption. Through the adoption of coal-to-WCO shift in rural regions of 15 provinces, approximately 15.0%, 15.6%, 15.9% and 13.7%, respectively of CO, PM2.5, SO2 and NOX emissions would be eliminated. It is estimated that such a change would remove the respective contributions of these pollutants to the premature deaths of respectively, 63,400, 29,300, 173,00 and 31,300 rural residents. Such a positive health impact on the labor cohort would reduce the loss of labor supply and work time, as well as producing billions of RMB in economic benefits. WCO-based heating technology has the same effect on the reduction of GWC100 value as other modern energy carriers while also being cheaper and sustainable, long term. Reducing household emissions by substituting raw coal with green energy is a vital strategy to support pathways for sustainable environment design. The results of this work for the coal-to-WCO shift can reinforce the support for coal phase-out in China.