Originally Posted by
43Inches
Nope general business reports, stuff that deals with coal and international commodities.
Here's some basic math, thermal coal runs normally at about $200 USD a ton, the shanghai spot price is just under that presently on old stocks. Working on that a 1000MW generator consumes around 10,000 tons of coal per day to supply roughly 500,000 homes. That's $4 USD per day per household, or roughly, $120 USD per month if you like, that's before adding plant costs, transmission, and retail handling and profit margins. The moment war broke out in Ukraine the trade price rose to over $400 USD per ton, that doubles the houshold cost to around $8 USD per day/$240 USD per month. Assume adding plant/transmission and retail and that number almost doubles and you have our retail rates in Australia. Right now Indonesia has banned coal exports to reserve coal for its own power use, other countries are moving to the same pushing the price further up with Chinas winter demand. China also has large heating plants for cities that run on coal, the goal is to change to gas but that's going to take time, you also have coking coal and other industrial uses, so of course as China grows it needs more coal as a fast method of keeping up with growth.
Point is, it's not generally cheaper than renewables, its just faster to get up and running when you need reliable energy right now and don't have the time to build 50 nuclear plants or more hydro. The real big problem now is that the coal price is skyrocketing making coal plants very costly to the Chinese economy. Once the Ukraine war prices start to filter into actuality in China it's going to be very costly, at the moment they are still burning coal purchased years ago.
The UK tried to stay with coal well beyond it's use by date for transport, hence steam powered trains well into the 50s'. A combination of a huge coal industry and huge workforce of steam specific workers adept at making boilers and engines etc. The government didn't want to face the reality of how much it was costing until it was way beyond a joke. They held onto coal powered trains as they argued coal was available locally and they didn't want to import oil or reduce the coal mining industry. Like in WW2 the UK made ships still with reciprocating steam engines, why, because they still had a huge industry adept at it and they could manufacture the boilers and engines faster than diesel and other forms of power. They worked ok, but cost twice as much to run and had to be overhauled frequently. None of this use of coal was 'cheaper' it was just misguided politics that was trying to win votes by holding onto obsolete jobs, the end result costing the country far more than if they had just rapidly modernised with the rest of Europe.
Hmmm… prices of coal goes up and down, and yet, China plans many years ahead. China and Russia have been working from before the Ukraine war to improve the rail network for coal exports. Over 1300 Km of rail laid to date, and a lot more to come.
It weren’t that many years ago that China tried to buy up a lot of Australia’s coal mines. Obviously something to do with long term planning for building more wind and solar power..
Poor old England. Unions and war stuffed it. Post war/s they had huge debts and no foreign exchange available to buy all them imports of new gadgets so they had to rely upon what they produced at home. Much like when yer blow the credit card limit..
Interestingly, if they stuck to coal and nuclear they would be trillions of dollars ahead right now and with a reliable power system with power available for income earning export to them Euro-numpties stuck with un-reliable wind and solar power..