CEO of  World Coal Association Promotes Coal for India

I am aghast at how people will talk their book irrespective of the negative consequences that it would have on the society at large. World Coal Association CEO Benjamin Sporton wants India to install more coal powered capacity to meet the growing demands of its population. Sporton thinks that the renewable energy cost is too high because of the investments required in upgrading grid infrastructure in terms of storage and smart grid investments. He also cites the fact that the PLF for coal based power plants is nearly four times higher than renewable energy.

This guy forgets to mention the millions of deaths that ocrur due to thermal power generation every year. Thousands of miners are killed every year because of coal mining in unsafe conditions in countries like China and India. The effects of pollution cause huge issues to society health having an indirect effect of billions of dollars in lost productivity. The guy also forgets to mention that solar prices have dropped by almost 80% in the last 5 years and that makes it almost equal to coal based power if not cheaper. Wind power prices have also seen a similar decline in prices and are now competitive with fossil fuels in most places in the world.

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He thinks that new supercritical coal power plants are the solution as they do not emit greenhouse emissions and harmful pollutants in the same quantum as the older inefficient coal based plants. What he forgets to again mention is that these plants are still polluting and still contribute highly to global warming and climate change that is expected to affect the lives of billions of people in the plant in a negative way. Even without Sporton’s encouragement, India is set to build a gargantuan 290 GW of coal capacity by 2030, as per IEA estimates (however, I think it will be much smaller).

As prices of solar and wind decline at a much faster pace, I think new greenfield plants using coal power will pretty much stop as it has in many of the developed countries. Canada recently said that it will completely stop thermal based coal power by 2030. Sporton needs emerging and poor countries such as India to keep consuming coal in high quantities as otherwise he would remain the CEO of an obsolete organization.