Coal Power Becoming 'Uninsurable' As Firms Refuse Cover (theguardian.com) 270
AmiMoJo quotes a report from The Guardian: The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time U.S. companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd's of London and Asian insurers as the "last resort" for fossil fuels, according to a new report. The report, which rates the world's 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal -- the biggest single contributor to climate change -- "is on the way to becoming uninsurable" as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance.
Ten firms moved to restrict the insurance cover they offer to companies that build or operate coal power plants in 2019, taking the global total to 17, said the Unfriend Coal campaign, which includes 13 environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Client Earth and Urgewald, a German NGO. The report will be launched at an insurance and climate risk conference in London on Monday, as the UN climate summit gets underway in Madrid. The first insurers to exit coal policies were all European, but since March, two U.S. insurers -- Chubb and Axis Capital -- and the Australian firms QBE and Suncorp have pledged to stop or restrict insurance for coal projects. At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9 trillion, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry's global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6 trillion in assets were divesting from fossil fuels.
Ten firms moved to restrict the insurance cover they offer to companies that build or operate coal power plants in 2019, taking the global total to 17, said the Unfriend Coal campaign, which includes 13 environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Client Earth and Urgewald, a German NGO. The report will be launched at an insurance and climate risk conference in London on Monday, as the UN climate summit gets underway in Madrid. The first insurers to exit coal policies were all European, but since March, two U.S. insurers -- Chubb and Axis Capital -- and the Australian firms QBE and Suncorp have pledged to stop or restrict insurance for coal projects. At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9 trillion, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry's global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6 trillion in assets were divesting from fossil fuels.
With 12k+ people dying of it per year.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's probably not very profitable.
It's almost like insuring people actively fighting in a big war.
Re:With 12k+ people dying of it per year.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is all far more corrupt than that. Basically they are resource flipping. They know coal is fucked, they know it and so what do they do with existing unmined coal assets, develop them as fast as possible so as to dump the underground coal asset as a productive mine on targeted institutional investors, corrupt ones. They know full well the mine well be shut down before the end of it's productive life but it is the only way to cash in on the undeveloped coal asset, no one would buy it otherwise. So the typical modern in your face big corporate con often backed by corrupt governments, that special moment for the incompetent psychopaths to cash via corruption.
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Re:With 12k+ people dying of it per year.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't make coal burn clean. The physics just don't support it. You have C + O2 -> CO2 + power
It takes power to capture the CO2 and try to do something with it, quite a lot of power. If you do a good job of capturing the CO2 then you will have very little power. There is just no way around this.
Some of the ideas are to pump all the CO2 into the ground under high pressure. The problem is that CO2 is more dense than regular air and also not visible. If you have a leak it flows downhill and suffocates everything in the path and it takes quite a while to disperse.
Re:With 12k+ people dying of it per year.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not impossible from a physics standpoint. Some rocks will bind with CO2; here in Iceland the Hellisheiði geothermal plant (the big one right outside Reykjavík) does CO2 reinjection (geothermal is low CO2, sometimes very low, but not CO2-free). The high concentration of CO2 makes the water acidic, which helps dissolve divalent cations from the basalt, which bind to form carbonates (magnesite, siderite, ankerite, calcite), and it's worked surprisingly well.** Pumping energy != combustion energy.
That said, economically, it's a lot easier for Hellisheiði. The quantity of CO2 is far lower, and they've already got wells to inject it in. And the local geology happens to be conducive.
** Not all rocks are in their lowest-possible potential energy state. When our last big eruption (Bárðarbunga) happened, for example, there was so much lava rising to the surface at Baugur that not only were the levels of toxic gases too high to support human life, but the rate of fresh lava being oxidized by the air was so high that a gas mask wasn't enough to approach it - you had to have bottled oxygen, as the oxygen levels in the area were too depleted. Over time as you visited the new lava field you could watch it slowly evolve as the surface slowly reacted with oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water to form new compounds.
But for every dike that makes it to the surface, there's an order of magnitude more which never do, and just cool underground. So all of that potential for reaction with atmospheric gases (including carbon dioxide) is still there.
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It's almost like insuring people actively fighting in a big war.
and so? you just ask for a bigger premium and promise a smaller payout - basic insurance business. just flat out refusing cover, instead of just giving more expensive cover, is 100% politics it's not business.
and look it's not like they were insuring for the possibly coal pollution related deaths anyways. the whole thing sounds sketchy in that regard - were the companies insuring them anyways? and the european companies sure as f are still insuring people working on coal projects/plants too for the law requ
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You have a shockingly positive view of insurance companies to think they're leaving giant piles of money on the table just to make a political statement about climate change. That's facially absurd.
thats what makes this announcement absurd and probably not factual, like I said, they sure as f are insuring a lot of coal related things, like the employees and their pensions and such.
insurance companies are networked just as much as any other big businesses are though, so the bigger players could just funnel them into some other arm of their company - but what I find more strange is that if they were indeed insuring the investment projects to make them essentially zero risk investments in the first place
Re:With 12k+ people dying of it per year.. (Score:4, Insightful)
You can be absolutely 100% sure that they did an actuarial analysis that showed this to be the proper business decision.
You have to be either stupid or shockingly naive not to understand that about the insurance industry.
And no, you can't just "broker the whole things forwards to Lloyds anyways." This isn't a cheeseburger, or a highly rated insurance product. It is higher risk than the "high risk" category. The idea that they won't eventually get sued is speculative. If they have insurance, then there is somebody who has to pay up, somebody who isn't protected by things like bankruptcy. Each client is going to need special approval. Building a power plant is a big enough capital project that you're not going to buy high-priced insurance from Lloyds and then also pay an extra premium to a local agent, who doesn't do shit and won't even be in the loop.
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And the thing is, last time I checked Lloyd's wasn't a corporation. Your deal would be with a consortium of individuals who were willing to risk going broke for the intermediate gain. Not with Lloyd's, but with people working out of Lloyd's. https://www.thebalancesmb.com/... [thebalancesmb.com]
Re: With 12k+ people dying of it per year.. (Score:2)
A more plausible explanation is that the big international financial groups expect carbon cap & trade - and similar measures to financialize the natural environment - to be immensely profitable. Therefore they have instructed their insurance subsidiaries to give it a little push.
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I would mod this up if I had points. This is more about profit than political.
Re:With 12k+ people dying of it per year.. (Score:5, Interesting)
...flat out refusing cover, instead of just giving more expensive cover, is 100% politics it's not business.
It's also what insurance does when the liabilities are likely huge but hard to quantify just how huge. Essentially they have determined that the risk assessment is either beyond their statistical ability or that the process has such a strong butterfly effect that it's more like gambling in an illegal casino than it is like insurance.
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find insurance for the investment that was cheap enough that it was worthwhile to take it. you can not find such for most investments - you haven't been able to find it for nuclear projects that would cover years of delays and crap like that anyways
SEC. 638 of The U.S Atomic Energy Act [house.gov] as the primary act of law controlling funding policy decisions for Nuclear Power provides for $500M per proposed reactor in support for where construction is delayed for NRC approved designs.
To dispel any further assumptions, liability for Nuclear accidents was initially set at $10bn in the Atomic Energy Act 1954 Sec. 170.(2)(B) and pegged to inflation by the Price Anderson act (encapsulated in the first section of "Nuclear Matters" in the US Energy Policy Act) which
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And yet, no reactor with a negative void coefficient has ever irradiated a large land surface area.
Here is a map of the Fukushima exclusion zone [safecast.org].
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The exclusion zone is politically-based, not science-based. The actual contaminated area is not much larger than the plant, including the groundwater.
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The insurance companies are looking at the potential liabilities if they get held responsible for all the externalized costs (pollution, damage to health, climate change) and decided that no amount of money can protect them against it.
It's the same reason that nuclear needs governments to covers its insurance needs - the liabilities are too large for any commercial insurer to take on.
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Mod parent down (Score:2, Informative)
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Wow, you've gotten your own stalker, too! ;)
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Donald Trump is a president, not a king.
He's there to talk shit, get his party reelected and act like a target for all the criticism, while the people that are actually in power can do the shit they do with impunity.
Imagine if for a moment people started to aim at specific congressman for their decisions, that would be very "bad".
Or just exposiure to climate change liability? (Score:2)
Although at this moment, the possibility of someone winning a lawsuit for damage due to climate change is unlikely, as real problems keep mounting, that is going to change. At this time, governments could pass laws indemnifying coal companies, but that also becomes less likely; and what indemnity legislation gives, legislation can take away, especially in the face of ever stronger evidence.
Insurers could be dropping coal projects simply because the risk is becoming too great.
the article blurb is misleading. (Score:3)
most countries using coal are running them as state companies anyhow.
most of the insurers weren't dealing in this kind of insurance anyways as insurers. any normal company will do the normal insurances for the coal using power companies anyways, like for worker safety and other legal requirement insurances.
the risk hasn't changed at all and for free market insurances the risk is just directly proportional to the price of the insurance - and most of them would have been brokering the insurance deals to the l
Good - move to nuclear (Score:2, Informative)
Why not Solar (Score:3)
These troubles with nuclear as far as I know haven't been solved, while wind and solar, while not perfect (discarding old wind turbines is harder than you think) seem safer and the installations seem to have more consistent costs.
Re:Why not Solar (Score:4, Informative)
Why wind? It's not reliable. Nuclear pre-pays all its decommissioning costs [nrc.gov]
(unlike wind or solar). Including waste disposal - that the Obama Administration stopped because who knows... As far as accidents, nuclear is the safest of them all [forbes.com]. And it's incredibly reliable - a single nuclear power plant [wikipedia.org] provides a 90% uptime (3-4 times that of wind), and provides 9% of California's entire electrical energy needs, with just 12 acres of land.
While it might "seem" safer and consistent, the actual facts show that wind is deadlier, costlier [forbes.com] (once you do a full analysis and include the mandatory costs for backup generation) and not nearly as reliable.
Let's join with Canada and build a modern nuclear electrical grid for low cost, reliable power.
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Not even close. Citing a piece from NRC is like citing a piece from the NRA that guns aren't involved with accidental deaths. You also "forgot" the costs of storing nuclear waste for the next 100,000+ years.
Laughable, as the number of deaths from wind and solar generation are ZERO. No, if an iron worker slips and falls off a wind tower, that is not caused by wind power generation, any more than an iron work
Parent is abrasive (Score:2)
I don't know about reliability, but I find it hard to believe a plant would go down 100% for any serious length of time. But the point about deaths I think is valid. Nuclear is still better than coal by a country mile, but it's not without risks.
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Why wind? It's not reliable.
That's why it is combined with hydro, solar and long range high voltage power lines to place where the wind is blowing at the moment.
Nuclear pre-pays all its decommissioning costs [nrc.gov]
Nuclear also has a LCOE that is multiple times higher than that of wind + solar, the insurance costs on Nuclear are so high nobody will touch it which necessitates government guarantees and the decommissioning costs of wind+solar are a moon cast shadow of what it costs to decommission Nuclear and process it's waste.
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"Why wind? It's not reliable. Nuclear pre-pays all its decommissioning costs"
That's the idea, but it never really works out that way, and the taxpayers always wind up holding the bag.
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and provides 9% of California's entire electrical energy needs, with just 12 acres of land.
By the way, you could build wind turbines on that 12 acres to go along with the nuclear plant. And some solar. You'll find those to have a negligible contribution at that size, though.
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You missed one. (Score:2)
All of your "base load" solutions assume the power has to be generated when it's used.
That completely misses grid-scale energy storage. There are a number of solutions for that.
For instance: hydroelectric: Pump water from a low reservoir to a high one when there's extra power, run it back down through the pumps/generators when there's a shortfall. We have a number of such sites in the US. (One of my favorite campgrounds is behind the high reservoir of the one at Pacheko Pass in California.)
My favorite
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To be fair, he really didn't miss out on either storage in general or hydro in particular -- his post discusses both. He just doesn't agree with you that storage is a viable means to replace baseload.
Base Load BS (Score:2)
Nuclear plants regularly go down for weeks, months or even years for maintenance, a problem wind and solar does not have.
Can we have nuclear fission power now? (Score:2, Informative)
There will come a point where we will have to turn to more nuclear fission power, or the lights will go out.
There is not much to debate here any more. We are running out of options. If we want to keep the lights on, and not burn coal, then we need nuclear fission power.
You want to claim that solar power with batteries is cheaper than nuclear power? That's fine. Go build those solar collectors and batteries. Here's what will happen, people will find out that batteries don't care if the electricity comes
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Pumped water is being proven as a viable grid-scale battery technology, with promising candidate sights having been across most of the world. Stacked stone also seems promising, though I haven't heard of anyone actually using it on a large scale.
Fission likely has its place as well - but I think we need to ensure that the projected cleanup costs are placed in escrow at the time of construction, that waste sequestering and/or reprocessing must be pre-paid when the fuel is purchased, and that corruption and
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Fission likely has its place as well - but I think we need to ensure that the projected cleanup costs are placed in escrow at the time of construction
I don't have a problem with that, but it should be done across the board, for all generation facilities of all types and, really, for any other sort of construction project that is expected to have a limited life span (i.e., pretty much all of them). And the cleanup cost projections should use consistent assumptions across all projects.
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Fission likely has its place as well....
A decade ago that was my rallying cry. Now? Not a fucking chance.
Wind and solar plus storage is already undercutting nuclear power, and there are far, far less NIMBY problems with it. (Not 0, thanks fucking Ted Kennedy et., at.)
I'm in the midwest and I can guarantee that there will be no new nuclear power plants dropped around here without a couple of decades of fighting. But wind turbines? Farmers are already renting out spots in their fields for them. Solar? We're already creating fields of panels, puttin
I don't think we have the tech (Score:2)
Wind and Solar aren't so much cheaper as they are more predictable. Westinghouse just went tits up because they underestimated the costs of building a reactor.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I'm just not seeing it. I'm not seeing new
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1. How do we build reactors for a predictable cost?
Practice and experience.
We won't know how to do this right until we've done it wrong a few times. I can hear it now, "OMG! You want another Chernobyl after another until we figure out how to do it right?!?!?!?"
Building another nuclear power plant "wrong" does not mean another Chernobyl. We've built enough nuclear power plants that we won't do that again. It's more like we'll be over budget, late, and under performing. More like a bad movie that doesn't make it's money back or a car that doesn't sell.
Problem solved (Re:I don't think we have the tech) (Score:3)
It appears that you agree with me that we've solved the problem of global warming from CO2 produced by human activity. That's all I want, an agreement that the problem is solved. Once we get to that point I don't much care on the details, on if the solution is solar power or nuclear fission.
We need to stop scaring our children that the world might end in 12 years. We need to stop causing people to panic over what is now a solved problem. We should all be able to agree that the problem is solved, and all
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Are fission power plants insurable?
It doesn't matter. It's nuclear fission power or the lights go out. If private industry won't insure them then the government will have to.
It is just that simple, it's nuclear power or the lights go out.
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In the last 10 years, Germany reduce nuclear power from 148 TWh per year to 76 TWh while increasing renewables from 94 TWh to 226 TWh. At the same time coal reduced from 125 TWh to 83 TWh and lignite from 150 TWh to 146 TWh (almost stable). At the same time, consumption was reduced from 619 TWh to 596 TWh and exports increase from 23 TWh to 51 TWh. The increased scale of the market for renewables helped to reduce prices of solar and wind substantially. Of course, it was stupid to shut off running nuclea
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German carbon emissions are higher than China's and nearly twice as high as comparable countries like France [economicshelp.org]. If you actually care about carbon emissions, that's a gigantic failure, not a success.
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I've been using 100% renewable electricity for years now and the lights never went out.
It's a shame there isn't an option for people to choose to subsidise nuclear power. You could opt to pay say £0.50/kWh for nuclear and I could take my chances paying £0.15/kWh for renewables.
This will not affect coal power plants (Score:4, Insightful)
If a utility cannot insure the plants, the cost of any settlement will be passed on to consumers, since right now, there is no practical alternative. They can't just shut down.
They've finally gone and done it... (Score:2, Insightful)
We have reached the point where I have to rhetorically defend *coal mines.*
I really don't like the fact that insurance companies have become a de facto world government. I feel like several science fiction authors have written how that's going to turn out for us.
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The insurance companies are not becoming the world government -- they are only creating a quantified measure of the real risks of running an operation or project. If a project can't get insurance on the open market then it means that the potential losses from that project are more than it is worth. The coal industry is huge -- it could self-insure if it thought the risk/reward was worth it. And if it were only political pressure knocking out insurance for the coal projects then there would be some big in
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We're at 400 ppm CO2 globally. According to the latest climate science, we can either change how much CO2 / capita we emit or nature will change the number of people.
Finally. Its about time (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, we need to get Chinese government to quit funding building of new coal plants.
Not a problem for most plants (Score:2)
Insurance might be an issue for private companies. But most coal power plants are built in China or India; Vietnam is also building a lot (see below); when built and run by the government, no private insurance company is needed.
Historically, Vietnam, like Switzerland, used mostly Hydropower. But climate change makes Hydropower in Vietnam increasingly unreliable; to avoid that problem, the Vietnamese government is shifting to coal (and a bit of solar and wind) instead. Lots of new coal plants have been built
Who cares?! China is the one using all the coal... (Score:3)
The useful idiots in the west don't realize that their first world fantasy problem of Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate Emergency/Climate Bullshit has no effect other than making China more competitive at the expense of their own countries. And a more powerful China comes with a few other real problems.
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Coal is pretty horrid, and basically killed a lot more people than any other form of power.
But the probably most viable solution until we have fusion, that certain N-word, well. they don't want that either.
Re:This is fascism at its finest (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal is pretty horrid, and basically killed a lot more people than any other form of power.
You know what kills more people than coal power? Not having power.
As "horrid" as coal power is to the environment and human health it was with coal power that humans have been able to clothe and feed themselves in numbers far higher than before. Burning coal is a "First World problem". In nations that lack alternatives, like natural gas and nuclear fission, their choice is living with coal power or dying in the dark and cold.
In the USA we've been able to lower our CO2 emissions because of the ample access we have to natural gas, hydro, onshore wind, and nuclear power. If we are to continue to lower our CO2 emissions then we will need more of the same. This will become even more apparent as we are forced to shutdown nuclear power plants as they reach their end of life.
There are still idiots that oppose nuclear power in the USA. Here's an idea, if you don't want nuclear power then move to states that want to ban it, like California. The rest of us will build more nuclear power. Here's how that will end up. Those with nuclear power will enjoy reliable and cheap electricity, and those without will see sky high energy costs and rolling blackouts. We know this to be true because of places like Germany that tried this.
Coal is better than nothing, and nuclear fission is better than coal. If any of you don't want coal or nuclear fission power then I'm guessing your future will be cold and dark.
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Oh rly?
https://ourworldindata.org/co2... [ourworldindata.org]
https://www.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
https://www.epa.gov/climate-in... [epa.gov]
The US isn't doing much, but its CO2 emissions are currently reducing.
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One-year trends are pretty meaningless, and can vary by all sorts of factors (including economic health (more energy consumption) and how harsh the winter is). The decadal trend, however, is pretty obvious.
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Re:This is fascism at its finest (Score:5, Informative)
Total US GHG emissions per year [oecd.org]
1990: 6 371 000.54
1991: 6 315 615.19
1992: 6 424 934.36
1993: 6 532 069.60
1994: 6 624 835.79
1995: 6 710 067.30
1996: 6 907 699.05
1997: 6 968 461.97
1998: 7 032 526.01
1999: 7 071 461.46
2000: 7 232 010.77
2001: 7 116 810.08
2002: 7 156 652.87
2003: 7 199 262.66
2004: 7 333 052.05
2005: 7 339 039.87
2006: 7 270 326.95
2007: 7 369 967.71
2008: 7 160 600.81
2009: 6 709 369.15
2010: 6 938 591.68
2011: 6 787 419.03
2012: 6 545 969.33
2013: 6 710 218.18
2014: 6 759 995.63
2015: 6 623 775.48
2016: 6 492 267.43
2017: 6 456 718.19
You really can't see the decadal trends? A one-year reversal is meaningless, as many factors (as previously mentioned) add noise to the trends. Here's the per-capita numbers - even starker:
1990: 25.03
1991: 24.58
1992: 24.76
1993: 24.91
1994: 24.98
1995: 25.01
1996: 25.42
1997: 25.32
1998: 25.25
1999: 25.10
2000: 25.41
2001: 24.77
2002: 24.69
2003: 24.63
2004: 24.86
2005: 24.65
2006: 24.19
2007: 24.28
2008: 23.38
2009: 21.71
2010: 22.27
2011: 21.61
2012: 20.69
2013: 21.06
2014: 21.07
2015: 20.51
2016: 19.97
2017: 19.74
77,6% of the peak in 1996. That's a pretty significant change. There's still a long way to go, but it's definite progress. Lastly: Slashdot is complaining that I have too few characters per line, so: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
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Coal is pretty horrid, and basically killed a lot more people than any other form of power.
You know what kills more people than coal power? Not having power.
As "horrid" as coal power is to the environment and human health it was with coal power that humans have been able to clothe and feed themselves in numbers far higher than before. Burning coal is a "First World problem". In nations that lack alternatives, like natural gas and nuclear fission, their choice is living with coal power or dying in the dark and cold.
In the USA we've been able to lower our CO2 emissions because of the ample access we have to natural gas, hydro, onshore wind, and nuclear power. If we are to continue to lower our CO2 emissions then we will need more of the same. This will become even more apparent as we are forced to shutdown nuclear power plants as they reach their end of life.
There are still idiots that oppose nuclear power in the USA. Here's an idea, if you don't want nuclear power then move to states that want to ban it, like California. The rest of us will build more nuclear power. Here's how that will end up. Those with nuclear power will enjoy reliable and cheap electricity, and those without will see sky high energy costs and rolling blackouts. We know this to be true because of places like Germany that tried this.
Coal is better than nothing, and nuclear fission is better than coal. If any of you don't want coal or nuclear fission power then I'm guessing your future will be cold and dark.
Yes but it is still horrid so let's stop defending coal and concentrate on wiping it out. Lets pour development aid into phasing out coal plants instead of using it to covertly subsidise our own failing industries by attaching conditions to it about how the money must be spent on failing technologies like Coal plants. Oh, and here we go again about nuclear. Go ahead, build more nuclear, however, since the LCOE of nuclear is three times that of anything else not he market except coal you'll either be paying
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isn't cutting it, you get to either buy energy at massive premiums (like Germany buying nuclear and coal/gas from France and Russia respectively)
Close to 50% of Germans Electricity production is from renewables.
Germany exports 1/3rd of its power production.
Imports are done when prices suggest it. What is actually wrong with that?
Gas from Russia is not really imported. It is payment for our deliveries to Russia ... you know that, or don't you? Germany provided the pipeline network in east Europe. The gas is
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Germans also pay some of the highest prices for electricity in the western world. $0.29-0.45kWh, when there is absolutely no need for it. It's a resource rich country with access to good sites for nuclear and hydro-electric. And those prices are in spite of generating nearly 70% of all their power via fossil fuels.
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If you talk about electricity, in 2018 Germany produces 48% from fossil fuels. 35% of this are coal down from 45% coal five years ago (2015). In the same time renewables increased from 24% to 45%. In 2019, there is also a substantial reduction of coal and increase of renewables. Numbers can be found here: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen... [ag-energiebilanzen.de]
Germany has a very high electricity price for house holds (there are different prices depending on what market you are looking). The renewables levy is only a small part
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Correction: five years ago == 2013
Re:This is fascism at its finest (Score:4, Informative)
Power generation in Germany according to their own stats you linked: 60% peak generation by fossil fuels, with an addition 10% used as spin-up generation when renewable fall short. 70% of power generation is fossil fuels, especially since over the last 3 years that extra 10% of extra generation capacity has been required 60% of the year.
The average price for electricity in the US is around 0.099kWh, most states it's far less. In Florida I pay 0.04558kWh. In Ontario(Canada), I pay 0.125 to peak@0.1855. Remind me again how the burden of cost isn't higher again when you're paying triple the price.
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Their domestic energy costs are sky-high, but industry in Germany enjoys relatively cheap energy. In most countries it's not unusual for commercial rates to be significantly cheaper than domestic but the disparity there is huge.
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Germans also pay some of the highest prices for electricity in the western world. $0.29-0.45kWh, when there is absolutely no need for it. It's a resource rich country with access to good sites for nuclear and hydro-electric. And those prices are in spite of generating nearly 70% of all their power via fossil fuels.
I won't argue with energy prices being high in Germany, but they they are completely re-building their entire energy grid and that tends to be expensive. On the other hand Germany and China who have been the most energetic at switching to new generation technologies also stand to reap the benefits by being pioneers int he market. However, 'generating nearly 70% of thier power via fossil fuels' ?? The German energy production in 2018 was, and this is percentage of gross power production in TWh:
0,8% Minera
Re:This is fascism at its finest (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear is one of the cheapest besides hydroelectric. It has a huge initial cost outlay but lasts far longer then coal, NG, or oil power plants in terms of up time, maintenance, and reliability. This isn't exactly difficult for you to research on your own.
Nuclear power generation is cheap in principle but (Score:2)
This is mostly due to that "huge initial cost outlay" (which you mention).
link: https://thebulletin.org/2019/0... [thebulletin.org]
Re:Nuclear power generation is cheap in principle (Score:5, Informative)
Your article forgets to mention that a signifigant amount of that outlay cost is also in court fees, being tied up for decades in the courts, repeated environmental reassessments every time a new government comes into power. The Chalk River replacement reactor here in Canada is effectively dead in the water and was supposed to come online over a decade ago. It was a planned replacement going all the way back to the 1980's. It was purely a medical research reactor and produced 90% of all medical isotopes for the world.
Know where they come from now? The rest of the world had to pick up the slack, and modify their own nuclear reactors to produce them locally. Here in Canada, they're now produced at Bruce Nuclear(2nd largest generating plant in the world), and Darlington Nuclear.
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I knew things were bad in Europe; just didn't know they were so bad that you had to resort to a barter system at international scale. Whether the gas is "payment for the pipes" or you got paid in actual money for building the pipes and then used that money to pay for the gas import, it doesn't change the fact that it's imported.
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Germany exports power when there is excess wind/solar. It imports power when there is no wind/solar. There will always be periods with no wind/solar.
Germany is in effect parasitically relying on the stable supply of other European countries (notably France) to make up for inherent deficiencies in its renewable supply. This is a model which does not scale to other countries.
And despite being parasites, German customers pay through the nose for electricity.
Re:This is fascism at its finest (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the freedom of an insurance business to refuse to insure a bad risk?
Your definition of freedom appears to be result-driven, and thus lacking in "free"-ness.
Re: (Score:3)
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Are you sure about that? Utilities, including electrical utilities are largely regulated in the USA.
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The planning and operation is regulated, but even where they check on the financial health of the project before approving it, they don't care if you're using the banks money or your own money. They don't directly require insurance, they merely require the demonstrable ability to take financial responsibility.
Coal kills [Re:This is fascism at its finest] (Score:5, Interesting)
This is NOT good behavior. Oh I can hear all the cheering from the peanut gallery - ooo, we're saving the planet now. But this is right up there with Chinese social control.By starving out LEGITIMATE BUSINESSES from operating because of socio-political norms du jour using deplatforming techniques you seriously destroy any concept of lawful order or freedom of business.
Wrong: this is a rational decision by insurance companies. Understanding risk is their business.
Coal kills people [scientificamerican.com].
This has been well known-- and well documented [newscientist.com]-- for literally a hundred years, but until recently coal has been untouchable; building (coal fired )power plants has been considered a public good, and the dead are not acknowledged or talked about, considered an unavoidable consequence of generating power. But that political invulnerability is gone. Coal plants are open to be sued, and the aura that they are a public good is not going to be a protection any more.
So, no, if I were an insurance company I'd stay far far away from insuring coal, you'd be likely to lose your shirt on that bet.
Forbes magazine is in no way anti-business, but even they noticed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
or https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]
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Coal kills people
So does freezing to death in a Chicago apartment in winter.
This is what engineers call a ""trade off." Most things have benefits and downsides. The benefit of coal is that you can make energy from it. It is, however, not the only thing you can make energy from. The engineering trade-off is "considering the advantages and disadvantages, which solution makes the most sense?"
But in fact, no, hardly anybody heats with coal any more-- that went out by the '20s.
Re:This is fascism at its finest (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a very odd idea what democracy is. And capitalism and fascism, for that matter.
I suppose you'd force insurance companies to insure coal plants, for... democracy and the free market?
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The summary doesn't say anything about stopping due to risk. It seems to say that some have quit, presumably due to pressure from some activists/campaigns, and is spinning this to give a feeling of momentum toward others also quitting. I didn't RTFA (this is Slashdot after all), but the summary itself seems to mostly be wishful thinking.
Re: Good idea (Score:3)
But wouldn't such just go bankrupt from the first lawsuit due to the outcomes of the corner cutting? Thus preventing additional damages from said corner cutting?
OR, they self-insure, pile on more safety measures because it is no longer a shared risk and make things better for the workers. But I would think this raises costs and accelerates the natural decline of coal against lpg.
OR, the fewer remaining insurance companies raise rates and again this accelerates the decline of coal against lpg.
All these resu
Re: Good idea (Score:4, Informative)
Bankruptcy doesn't work that way. Contracts that impose obligations are usually discarded by the buyers in a bankruptcy auction.
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No, this is simply about US and European companies demonstrating their unreliability under specific kind of domestic political pressure.
That means that Asians will pick up the slack, and all industry worldwide will have to take note that European insurance companies are utterly slaved to domestic political pressure groups, and American companies are only marginally better.
Overall, this is very good news for Asian competitors of these companies. They don't have to care about this kind of pressure, which mean
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It is more basic than that. Without insurance, they don't even have significant credit. They would have to use their own cash flow for operations, with no safety net unless they have a corporate "war chest." But these aren't the sort of public corps that would have that, these projects are small corps where they extract all the profits right away, they don't leave piles of cash sitting around for a rainy day. Without credit these investors will flee because the operations won't survive a single business cyc
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I think there may be an opportunity...
No, you dumb fuck. There was an opportunity, and a lot of companies took it. Now there are only 2 remaining companies in the world willing to take a shot at that opportunity.
You've just read a news article about the Titanic sinking, and you've gone, "You know....I bet there's a market for an unsinkable ship!"
Good luck buddy! You're going to need it!
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Your actual point is a good point, but your metaphor is awful; the adjective has nothing to do with the ship, the adjective continues to be used in marketing today, and the feature of being more difficult to sink continues to be desirable and to advance.
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I think there may be an opportunity for a big insurer to set itself up as the go to company for this and other fossil fuel projects. Probably can make a spin off insurer which could be called something like black insurance, or CCRUS (pronounced circus) Climate Change R Us. Anyway joking aside I imagine this is to avoid law suits and crap rather than because they are climate conscious I mean we are talking about Insurance companies!
That big insurer is called the State. The Government can always end up as an insurer of last resort. So a coal supporting government will either do that or will legislate to make the withdrawal of insurance illegal.
Re:Business Oppertunity (Score:4, Informative)
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Aaaah, yes. Youtube citations. When I submit to the PNAS, Nature, and GRL they all commend me for my youtube citations. That's fresh and modern. Hip.
Re: Want real trouble? (Score:2)
lol your citations have all the credibility of an anti vaxxer citing shit from naturalnews.com
Wait, you're probably an anti vaxxer given how much of an appetite you have for wallowing in fringe idiot territory.
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