Global energy demand grew at the fastest pace this decade in 2018, leading to record coal plant emissions
FILE PHOTO: A worker walks past coal piles at a coal coking plant in Yuncheng, Shanxi province, China January 31, 2018. Picture taken January 31, 2018. REUTERS/William Hong/File Photo By Chris Mooney and Chris Mooney Reporter covering climate change, energy and the environment.
In particular, a fleet of relatively young coal plants located in Asia, with decades to go on their lifetimes, led the way towards a new record for emissions from coal fired power plants -- exceeding 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide “for the first time," the agency said. In Asia, “average plants are only 12 years old, decades younger than their average economic lifetime of around 40 years,” the agency found.
“Very worrisome" is how Michael Mehling, deputy director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described Monday’s findings. “This will require overcoming the persistent barriers that have prevented greater progress in the past,” Mehling said.China, for instance, satisfied a demand for more energy last year with some new generation from renewables. But it relied far more on natural gas, coal, and oil. In India, around half of all new demand was similarly met by coal-fired power plants.
Yet the fact that it’s still growing strongly contradicts what scientists have said about what’s needed to curb climate warming. In a major report last year the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that global emissions would have to be cut nearly in half, by 2030, in order to preserve a chance of holding the planet’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius .
Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University, said the substantial growth of wind and solar energy detailed in Monday’s report was overshadowed by the world’s ongoing reliance on fossil fuels.
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