Coal trends down, slowly

I alternate between optimism and pessimism about global warming and environmental degradation. 

Sometimes I am optimistic; when I see how renewables are getting ever cheaper; when I see how EV sales are booming; when I see the way so many people (the vast majority, in fact) know that there is a problem and express their willingness to do something to stop global warming.

Sometimes I am pessimistic.  When I get into arguments with denialists who appear to me to be either stupid or dishonest; when I see how slowly the transition is happening (even though I am very certain that it will accelerate over the next decade); when I see incontrovertible and mounting evidence that the climate is shifting in a very not benign direction; when I talk to people who still maintain that switching to renewables will cause the economy to crash.

So here's a piece of good news.  The amount of electricity produced from burning coal appears to have levelled off and this year may have started declining.

In the chart below, the change in electricity production from coal is represented by blue (of course!  why wouldn't you?), gas by black and wind/solar by pink (leftists everywhere!)  The years 1998 and 1999 which were years of deep global recession and 2010 was when the global economy especially China rebounded strongly.  So these are aberrations in the longer-term trends.  What is clear over the last 20 years is that for most of that period, the increase in the global demand for electricity was mostly supplied from coal and some gas.  There's a lot of blue.  Equally, there's hardly any pink.  But from 2010 onwards, there's more and more pink, and from 2014 onwards, the blue starts to disappear.  But wait a minute, what about 2017?  The blue bar gets larger, though so does the pink.  That's explained by China.  Hydro electricity production (light grey) was down, because of drought, so their coal power stations were run at slightly higher capacity.  In 2018, the pink bar will expand again, and the blue bar will narrow.  If China gets rain this northern hemisphere summer, the blue bar will be tiny.  In 2019, the pink bar will expand again, and the chances are very high that the blue bar will be negative.  Each year after that it will be more negative, because by then new wind and solar farms will be cheaper than the operating costs of coal mines nearly everywhere in the world.

(Source: IEEFA)