The collapse in Spanish coal-fired generation this year has made the country’s planned coal phaseout program look academic, data from the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, or ENTSO-E, shows.
Spanish coal-fired generation is likely to have its lowest share of the generating mix ever in 2019, having covered just 6% of it up until the end of August as the impact of CO2 costs, competitive gas prices and increasing renewables force it out.
Spain has around 10 GW of operational coal plants left. Much of this looks set to close mid-2020 under the EU’s industrial emissions directive, while the remainder should be gone by 2025.
As in the U.K., however, the technology is already surplus to requirements for large periods of time. Only four coal units generated any electricity in the first half of September, with output averaging around 15 GWh/day — a fraction of the 133 GWh/day a year earlier. Of the four, only the 562-MW Abono 2 unit was in operation for the full two weeks under review, down from nine a year earlier.
From El Pais:
It is not raining, there is less wind and the reservoirs are drying up. Summer is not a good time of year for renewables, and so the chimneys in the coal-fueled power stations of Spain should be belching out smoke right now as usual. And yet the use of this highly contaminating fossil fuel has hit a historic low. Not since the first official records began in 1990 has coal constituted such a small percentage of the electricity mix on mainland Spain.
According to data from the Spanish Electric Network (REE), the use of coal to generate electricity has never been lower than the months of May and June this year. In May, coal-fired power stations contributed just 1.7% to electricity on the Spanish mainland and 2.1% in June.
The coal power station in As Pones in A Coruña is the biggest in Spain but according to its owner, utility company Endesa, it has spent entire weeks idle since April. “This has never happened before,” says a spokesperson.
But a number of factors are contributing to coal-generated electricity’s demise in Spain and in several other European countries too. On the one hand, the price of emitting CO2 in the European coal market is very high and now stands above €26 per ton released into the atmosphere. As coal power stations are the worst culprits, they are the most heavily penalized. Though natural gas power stations also release CO2, the emissions are less than half those of coal.
In fact, natural gas is picking up the slack from the coal industry in Spain, which means the combined systems that have been underused for years are now feeding into the national grid at historic highs.
While the government has moved to close power stations dependent on subsidized national coal, the seven installations that use imported coal were to be kept running. But the administration had not foreseen this drastic drop in imported coal-fired electricity, which is, in theory, profitable.
As far as both the national mines and the power stations using national coal are concerned, the last government drew up a compensation package for workers that did not include employees linked to the imported coal power stations – such as the transport workers who are descending with their vehicles on Madrid in protest and who plan to meet with representatives of the Ministry for Ecological Transition this Tuesday.
The good news is that, if the situation continues, the low levels of carbon dioxide emissions could also hit a milestone. Within the electricity sector, coal is the country’s main culprit for greenhouse gases.
China, India and several other developing countries are still building coal power stations. But in Europe and the USA, coal is being replaced by gas and renewables. Unfortunately, the rise in the use of gas has led to rising methane levels in the atmosphere from leaks ("fugitive emissions") Methane is a much (30-100 times) more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
The good news is that methane decays to CO₂ within 12 years. CO₂ on the other hand takes thousands of years to be removed from the atmosphere by natural processes. Because gas can be ramped up and down more quickly and by larger amounts than coal, it fits better with renewables than coal. As the penetration of renewables increases, and the costs of "near-firm" renewables (i.e., renewables with 4 hours of storage) fall, gas too will be replaced. We can also use renewable electricity to produce synthetic natural gas, or green methane, via the Sabatier process, which because it uses CO₂ to manufacture methane, does not add to atmospheric CO₂ and therefore to global heating.
No comments:
Post a Comment