Foundation News

The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and CoalSwarm recently released Boom and Bust 2016: Tracking The Global Coal Plant Pipeline, the second of this series of annual reports. The report reveals that the amount of capital potentially wasted globally on new coal capacity in construction or in various stages of planning amounts to $981 billion, or nearly $1 trillion. This number is more than 1.5 times the amount the International Energy Agency estimates is needed to end energy poverty for 1.2 billion people currently living without reliable energy access. The report also found that the additional proposed coal capacity would result in over 130,000 more premature deaths worldwide each year from air pollution; existing coal-fired power plants are responsible for a total of nearly one million premature deaths each year.

While the coal industry continues to push for the construction of more coal-fired power plants, coal plants are increasingly sitting idle in the world’s four largest markets and global coal consumption is declining drastically. In China, the government took the first step to curb excessive coal plant investment after coal use plunged by 6.4 percent in two years by reportedly suspending new permits and new construction in about half of the country’s provinces. The report’s detailed mapping of new coal-fired power plants indicates the suspension could affect 60 percent of the 460 new coal-fired units that have been permitted or are in the permitting process.

“The era of Big Coal is clearly coming to an end, and it’s long past time to move beyond dangerous, outdated, and polluting energy sources toward an economy powered by clean, renewable sources of energy like solar and wind,” said Nicole Ghio, senior campaigner for the Sierra Club’s International Climate and Energy Campaign. The Sierra Club Foundation is a funder of the International Climate and Energy Campaign and has provided support for Global Coal Plant Tracker website.