Coal in Net Zero era

Year 2020, despite all its nightmarish devastations, provided a vision of a future where there would be much less emission.

- Sumit Maitra

The skies were clearer and distant mountain tops could be seen.

Global carbon emissions fell 7 percent last year due as the economies were shut driving the fall in global energy demand.

While oil and coal consumption dropped, renewables were less affected by the pandemic. Installed renewable energy reached almost 200 gigawatts (GW) globally.

The world is now moving towards the reality of Net Zero by 2050 with countries around the world pledging carbon and climate neutrality.

Developed economies like the US, the European Union, China, Japan, South Korea and also developing countries such as Chile, Brazil, and South Africa have disclosed their Net Zero goal in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) updates.

China targets to become carbon neutral by 2060.

Awareness among political players is growing with more political actors in India now committed to climate actions.

As a signatory to the Paris accord, India is on its way to adopt a low-carbon future, and has set a 450 GW of Renewable Energy (RE) capacity target by 2030.

Hence, in India, incremental power demand is expected to be largely met by addition of RE capacity in the country.

Energy transitions are underway and inevitable, even amid the pandemic.

Current market trends show the energy landscape is in transition towards more flexible energy systems with a rapidly increasing share of renewable energy, declining inflexible baseload generation and wider applications of storage technology.

“The declining costs of renewables have begun to reduce new investments into coal and other inflexible baseload technologies; a transition which will eventually cause renewables to become the new baseload,” says a recent report by Wartsila, a technology company that works with energy transition.