By Paul Homewood  

www.powerengineeringint.com/ar…

From PEI:

The transition to renewable power generation is accelerating closures of coal and gas-fired power generation plants at a quicker rate than expected.
That’s the conclusions drawn by investment bank UBS, who have produced a report on the subject.

 
According to UBS, policymakers may have to take measures to prevent widespread bankruptcies in the European electricity market.
According to their data, some 70 GW of coal and gas-fired power generation shut-downs have occurred in the last five years, and the pace is increasing, according to the analysis.
The report also identifies a further 24 GW of thermal plant to be under threat of closure over the next two years.
The data compiled shows that nearly half of the remaining 260 GW of coal- and gas-fired generation in Europe is cash-flow negative, meaning they do not earn enough money to cover basic costs.
UBS says European policy makers may have to agree to offer a subsidy to the fossil fuel generators, in the form of capacity payments, or similar, to ensure that the generators earn enough money to stay on line, but such a move has drawn fierce opposition.
UBS says the cost of this can be relatively small, and may add only 0.2 per cent to prices, or a total cost of just over €1 billion per annum.

It really did not take a genius to see this one coming. A simpleton would have realised that thermal plants were never going to be economic when faced with intermittent working and subsidised renewables.

No doubt some of the older plants will carry on limping along, with most of their depreciation already paid off.  But the real problem is that there is little incentive to build the new gas capacity needed to back up unreliable renewables when most of the coal capacity is shut down.

notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpr…

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My thoughts? They are now having to offer a 'subsidy' of approximately $1Billion per year, to keep the coal-fired power plants running. Plants which provide the largest share of energy of all energy producers. This is being opposed of course: 'greens' would rather the poor and elderly froze to death in the dark, or starved to death due to inflated food prices due to biofuels production.

And subsidies for wind power? They run about $1.2 Billion per year just in the UK ( I shall have to look up the EU numbers).

And wind power is a much smaller fraction of energy usage over there. Tell me again, how wind energy is 'free'?

Blackouts coming, people. If you live in the UK or the EU (and soon, in the US), count on lots of distress as they try to replace fossil fuels with unreliable wind and solar**.

Go Nuclear.

** - As per always, I state for the record that wind and solar are viable at a per-household / farm level, ie, where they work best, which means, not for everyone. Industrial-level? Not hardly.

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And that's it for this morning. Time as always is in short supply lately.