Energy from coal: This love of coal is bad news for the environment

We could not open this 2020 in the worst way by thinking back to the disaster, in environmental terms, of a 2019 where, despite the problems of climate change, they camped out in all newspapers, media, social networks and squares, these did not get a minimum positive result . We can frankly say that at the end of the year conference in Madrid not only did not progress but many steps back .

The United States that wants to get out of the climate agreement , China, India, Brazil, Russia and Poland that are pushing to change the points of the Paris climate agreement in their own way.

If we take China as an example, for which we have spent words of praise in recent years for the commitment it was putting in the environmental field , it seemed to be heading towards a new leadership following numerous and courageous choices made by the government.

The suspension of the import of waste from the world, the construction of solar parks, among the largest ever seen, the start of the production of mega biomass plants, the acceleration of projects for the construction of nuclear fusion plants and projects on the hydrogen, they gave us hope .

China seemed to have become a laboratory engaged in many fields, which had the goal of producing energy from renewable sources, being able to become an example for the world, knowing that it was one of the most polluted countries on earth.

What about coal?

It also seemed destined to be overwhelmed by this new ecological vision of the Beijing government, comforted by the fact that a large part of the environmental problems that throttled the Chinese megacities were given by traffic and the use of coal in industrial production , on which the government he had intervened with a steady hand.

Maybe we were wrong, but it seems that for coal there is a new life , therefore no longer a fragmented use for the production of energy in the individual production units, but large plants that produce electricity for civil and industrial use.

In simple words, delocalize the pollution produced by coal outside the cities.

But unfortunately we know that the Chinese always do things big, in fact, according to the indications of the non-profit organization Global Energy Monitor , new coal-fired plants are under construction for a power equal to 148 GigaWatt , which corresponds to the installed power throughout the European continent.

If we add this new polluting capacity to that coming from the old Chinese plants already in operation, which according to information from the International Energy Agency (IEA) amount to about 1000 GigaWatts, should we worry?

I would say that the production of energy from coal is really a bad environmental choice , since with the same energy efficiency, coal produces twice the greenhouse gases compared to another fossil source such as natural gas.

We are therefore led to think that, although it is entirely legitimate for each country to decide to adapt its energy production with respect to internal demand, the “green” choice of Chinese energy policy is not too “green”, but dictated by purely economic and to find immediate solutions to problems.

The construction of new coal-fired power plants is certainly less demanding, from a technical and economic point of view, than the conversion to biomass of the old ones or the construction of new totally biomass-fired ones, where the supply of urban waste involves an organization upstream very important.

But how much does it cost to convert an old coal-fired power station?

According to the information available and considering the technologies now on the market, it would seem that the cost would be around one billion dollars for each GigaWatt treated.

So, forward with the production of renewable energy, but also with the use of coal to meet the growing demand for energy, without worrying too much about finding a new solution to the problem of global warming.

It is not only China that does not want to leave coal, but also European countries such as Poland, Greece and the Czech Republic that are making the problem a question of funding from the European community, playing in a comfortable and waiting position.

But if money governs environmental choices , despite the widespread protests in the squares , the continuous succession of failures at the top political level on the environment could lead to dangerous resignation in public opinion.

The levels of the oceans that rise making us glimpse, in the near future , the disappearance of large inhabited territories , the loss of natural habitats for many species caused by climate change, the widespread drought in other areas of the continent that trigger poverty and mass migration , the increase in climate-related diseases , the pollution that has entered all levels in our food chain and which speeds up the chronicity of epidemic diseases , are issues on the agenda but it seems that nobody really wants to solve.

All arguments that the world population now seems to see as the inevitable fate of the species, acquiring a distrust of the political and industrial class that does not want to see the evidence of things.

People have realized that environmental associations, the movement of the masses, as had never happened before 2019, fail to open that bottleneck of bureaucrats linked to national interests, when the environmental catastrophe affects the whole world.

If resignation really takes over we will have no escape.

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