LITTLE ROCK — Despite warnings from climate scientists about the effects of coal-fired generating stations on global warming, there are plans for at least 1,199 coal plants around the globe, according to a new report from the World Resources Institute.
Many of these proposed new plants are in China and India, which account for 76 percent of proposed capacity. Turkey and Russia also have big plans. And a growing number of coal plants are being proposed for developing countries such as Cambodia, Guatemala and Uzbekistan — nations that are looking to cut-rate sources of energy to fuel economic growth.
However, it’s unclear how many of these proposed plants will actually get built. In the United States, for instance, plans for 36 coal plants are now looking unlikely, given new pollution rules and the availability of cheap natural gas. But in Europe and Japan, once-moribund coal-plant proposals are being revived after nuclear reactors were shut down in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
“We wanted to identify all proposed plants rather than try to assess the likelihood that they’ll get built,” says Ailun Yang, a co-author of the report. Whether these plants get built will largely depend on the policy choices that governments make, as well as market forces like the availability of natural gas.
The institute, based in Washington, D.C., advocates for economic policies that protect the environment and minimize the risk of climate change.
Coal burning already accounts for about 44 percent of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions. If even just 25 percent of the 1,199 proposed plants were built, that would be the same thing as doubling the coal-fired generating capacity of the United States.
Whether plants get built will depend on how governments think about coal in the years ahead.
Take China, which now has at least 363 large plants in the pipeline.
The country has likely passed its peak in terms of coal expansion, said Yang; it’s no longer building two new plants a week the way it was back in the early 2000s. And some analysts have suggested that China’s gargantuan coal appetite could wane in the years ahead, as economic growth slows and pollution concerns become more pressing.
That means it’s quite possible that a big share of those 363 proposed plants won’t ever get built. A lot rests on whether the Chinese government decides to tighten its current voluntary cap on coal consumption or pursue new climate policies.
In India, meanwhile, the coal question is more agonizing. There are still more than 300 million Indians without electricity, and poverty remains widespread.
The country isn’t quite as far along the development path as China. Only in the past few years have proposals for coal plants really exploded, Yang said, and there’s a lot more room for growth. Coal offers a potentially low-cost source of electricity, but also brings some major downsides — from water use and air pollution to potentially influencing climate change. These are factors that make it harder to predict how many of India’s 455 proposed coal plants will eventually get built.
“Both of these countries have made noises that they’d like to take a different development path,” said Yang—one that doesn’t rely so heavily on fossil fuels. “But they’d have to put in place policies that are strong enough to discourage coal use.” And whether that actually happens is one of the biggest uncertainties in trying to make climate predictions.
Business, Pages 62 on 12/02/2012