Why coal is a four-letter word for Twitter and the progressive media

Nothing better highlights the disregard for facts by Twitter and the progressive media than coal.

Nothing better highlights the disregard for facts by Twitter and the progressive media than reporting of coalmining and coal-fired power.

The Fairfax Media papers and local Twitterati were outraged when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told the Liberal National Party state conference in Brisbane the weekend before last that attitudes to coal were “delusional”.

A late convert to the benefits of fossil fuel, Turnbull’s point was self-evident. Coal accounts for at least half of Australia’s annual fossil fuel exports of $80 billion and is the nation’s No 1 commodity export. Australia is more dependent on coal than any other nation.

Even our manufactured exports have high levels of coal-fired energy embedded. Think alumina, aluminium, steel sheeting and fertilisers. This was because we once had cheap power but such exports are now facing electricity price pressures driven by deliberate energy policy changes at state and federal levels.

Nationally coal accounts for 73 per cent of generation, renewables 14 per cent, but 60 per cent of renewable power comes from hydro and only 2 per cent of total power from solar and 4 per cent from wind. Gas accounts for 13 per cent.

The PM was right to out the hypocrisy of Queensland’s Labor government, which is promising the state will be “carbon-neutral” by 2050 and will be 50 per cent powered by renewables by 2030.

Remember this is the state with the biggest coal reserves in the world, and a Labor government dominated by the two unions that cover mining — the AWU and the CFMEU. It also dramatically increased its footprint in gas under former Labor leader Anna Bligh with huge coal-seam gas projects at Curtis Island off Gladstone.

President Trump too talked good sense when he told the G20 meeting in Hamburg last month that developing countries should be encouraged to use their fossil fuel capacity “more cleanly and more efficiently”.

Despite all the hype about the death of coal, as Henry Ergas pointed out in The Weekend Australian two weeks ago, at least 1600 coal-fired power stations are being built or planned around the world right now. These include countries Trump alluded to, such as Egypt, Pakistan and Malawi, that have no coal-fired power but are now investing in large-scale coal projects. You won’t hear about this on your ABC, from Fairfax or on Twitter where the mantra is “Coal is Dead”.

The facts say otherwise, even in the US, where coal is struggling because of cheap gas rather than renewables. More on that later. India, home of IPCC president Rajendra Pachauri, generates 70 per cent of its power from coal. Website Physics.org says India is building 370 new coal-fired generators.

It quotes Associate Professor Steve Davis of the University of California: “India is facing a dilemma of its own making. The country has vowed to curtail its use of fossil fuels in electricity generation, but it has also put itself on a path to building hundreds of new coal burning plants to feed its growing industrial economy.”

The situation is similar in China and Southeast Asia. While China is investing in renewables and has cut back expansion of coal plants by between 85 and 103 projects nationally, its still launches two new coal power projects every week.

That is not coal lobby propaganda, but rather comes from the Energy Desk of Greenpeace. China has 900,000 megawatt hours of coal-fired power but as of late last year it had another 200,000MWh under construction. Greenpeace has identified a further 150,000MWh in planning stages. In reality the central government is banning new construction in 29 highly polluted eastern provinces and moving more of the production burden to the less intensively developed western provinces. Remember, too, that under its deal with president Obama, hailed as some sort of breakthrough at the Brisbane G20 meeting in 2015, China will in fact reach peak emissions in 2030.

Similar patterns are obvious in Southeast Asia, where the Energy Desk website says 400 new plants are in scope and 120 are actually under construction. Even the highly developed countries of the region, Japan and South Korea, are expanding coal power generation.

It is not just in Asia that world leaders are talking renewables but walking coal.

Germany, long the darling of environmentalists, is expanding fossil fuel generation after learning the same lesson South Australia learned last year — the limits of intermittent renewables such as wind and solar in a national grid.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review, Germany and the Limits of Renewables, published in May last year, points to some policy successes.

Renewables accounted for a third of German power by 2015 and the country’s 2014 emissions were 27 per cent lower than in 1990.

But its target of 40 per cent renewables in not likely to be met in 2020. Like Texas, California and South Australia, Germany has found fossil fuel plants essential for base-load power cannot easily be ramped down in response to intermittent rises in wind and solar output. In fact, on windy days power prices have been known to go negative in Germany. That is, generators have had to pay consumers to take their power because of oversupply.

Germany is now abandoning its version of our renewable energy target in favour of an auction system. Rather than subsidise renewables, producers will bid for government contracts to build renewables plants up to a mandated level, effectively pegging the overbuilding of renewables facilities.

Like South Australia and parts of the US, the Germans have learned they need base-load power to even out supply and avoid the network frequency issues that shut down SA’s system after a storm in September last year. SA now has no base-load coal facility and has contracted billionaire Elon Musk’s Tesla to build a large battery facility to store intermittent power. Premier Jay Weatherill got worldwide publicity for his announcement and if the hype is to be believed he is way ahead of Los Angeles, New York and London, all working on battery storage.

The Scientific American says the first US city with a large-scale battery with be Los Angeles. Within five years it expects a west LA gas “peaker” (evening supply at times of high demand) will be able to be replaced by a battery with storage equivalent to 18,000 lithium ion batteries.

SA’s battery, the world’s largest, is expected to offer 100MW of storage compared to a daily summer demand high of 3158MW.

SA power before the battery already costs $62 per MW, compared with $52 and $46 in Victoria. The 2014-15 SA price was $39.

So energy policy has produced more expensive power and less reliable service in some states. Doubtless renewable and battery technology will improve but at this point Australia is giving away its energy comparative advantage to overseas competitors and its domestic prices are hurting the poor.

And the US, where the left says coal is on the ropes? Renewables across the US last year accounted for only 8 per cent of generation. But for the first time gas at 33 per cent passed coal (32 per cent).

Coal accounted for 60 per cent as recently as 1990. That was what was meant to happen here, where gas was seen as the transition fuel while technology renewables caught up with market demands.