Wind and Solar Are Crushing Fossil Fuels

[finehoe]

Wind and solar have grown seemingly unstoppable.

While two years of crashing prices for oil, natural gas, and coal triggered dramatic downsizing in those industries, renewables have been thriving. Clean energy investment broke new records in 2015 and is now seeing twice as much global funding as fossil fuels.

One reason is that renewable energy is becoming ever cheaper to produce. Recent solar and wind auctions in Mexico and Morocco ended with winning bids from companies that promised to produce electricity at the cheapest rate, from any source, anywhere in the world, said Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board for Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). 

"We're in a low-cost-of-oil environment for the foreseeable future," Liebreich said during his keynote address at the BNEF Summit in New York on Tuesday. "Did that stop renewable energy investment? Not at all."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/wind-and-solar-are-crushing-fossil-fuels

[spuwho]

The opportunity cost of the alternatives are now cheaper than the cost of risk many fossil fuels carry, specifically oil.

Many coal producing states have cut taxes on their coal to compensate, especially ones that produce high sulphur coal, like Illinois.

Many coal fired plants have significant investments in scrubbers to remove the SOX and NOX, so they cant be converted to natural gas as many others have. So they still have to maintain a coal supply for a period of time.

The ones that have been hurt the most is the Powder River coal from Wyoming. While it was low sulphur and cheap to extract, Natgas prices have fallen so low and the plants that supported them are more flexible to conversion, it is pushing out that market.

Because Chinese and Korean steel is importing cheaper than ever, the domestic demand for metallurgical coal is also declining. And what we do mine, most is exported to China.

The world is a changing. (Slowly)