Cheaper Solar Energy Causes World’s Biggest Coal Business to Close 37 Mines
(The AEGIS Alliance) – A week ago; TheAntiMedia.org made a report about a recent forecast for the economy by Bloomberg. The report predicts that the coal power capacity in the United States will drop to around half of what it is currently by the year 2040.
“This year’s report suggests that the greening of the world’s electricity system is unstoppable,” the annual forecast reads, “thanks to rapidly falling costs for solar and wind power, and a growing role for batteries, including those in electric vehicles, in balancing supply and demand.”
Furthermore; the report predicted that even countries such as China and India, which have heavy investments in coal, will discover that by the early 2020s, renewable energy is far more cost-effective and a more efficient path to take.
Bloomberg may be very accurate about this it seems; since it had been reported last Wednesday that the planet’s largest coal business is shutting down three dozen mines and will not create any new plants after the year 2022.
Included in an article from The Independent:
“The largest coal mining company in the world has announced it will close 37 mines because they are no longer economically viable.”
“Coal India, which produces around 82 percent of India’s coal, said the mines would be decommissioned by March 2018.”
The government of India states that renewable energy will power 57 percent of their country by 2027. Also; a report from February by the Energy and Resources Institute discovered that if clean energy prices continue to fall at their current pace, that India will be able to completely phase out coal by 2050.
The director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis; Tim Buckley, said that the magnitude of these shifts will be felt around the globe:
“For the first time, solar is cheaper than coal in India and the implications this has for transforming global energy markets are profound.”
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
