Coal may outlive climate change but can’t survive the drought

Asia’s prolonged binge on coal is making the grids that transmit power to a third of the world’s people brittle and prone to failure.
That’s the conclusion of new research in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science.
More than 400 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity in Asia are at risk as climate change dries out water sources necessary to cool those plants, according to the study.
“Coal power development can expect reduced reliability in many locations across Asia,” Edward Byers, one of the report’s authors, said by e-mail. “This is further evidence of coal power’s increasingly recognised incompatibility with current international and national climate and sustainable development policy.”
Summer heatwaves and reduced rainfall have been closing water-cooled power plants across the world as the impact of climate change exacerbates the nexus between water and energy supply. Asian utilities building coal plans could find themselves increasingly competing with industry and consumers for scarce water resources.
“This planned capacity adds 30% more to the existing coal-fired generation capacity, and will engender substantial water requirements and amounts of pollutants that can exacerbate global climate change and regional air pollution,” the researchers wrote.
Thermal power generation could fall as much as 16% globally in the next three decades because of water shortages, they concluded. Researchers used hydrological and climate models as well as data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker to reach their conclusions. Different warming scenarios ranging to as high as 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) were considered. The world is currently on a warming trajectory that may hit 5 degree Celsius by the end of the century.