Coal
There’s a great article over at grist on the state of coal energy.
40% of the world’s energy is generated by coal, even though the advances in alternative energy are rapidly reducing the economic benefits.
A group of activists are trying to get the US to switch away from coal power generation by 2030, and it looks like their efforts are producing results. Serial investor Warren Buffet has canceled plans to develop 9 new coal plants, and across the nation plans for 117 other plants have been stopped. CoalSwarm is a wiki outlining the steps anti-coal activists are taking to cancel the creation of new plants, and it’s a pretty interesting read.
The efforts of these activists may not be neccessary, however. The combined amount of electricity generated by all US coal plants has stagnated around the 330 gigawatt mark for the last 15 years. In 1987, coal accounted for 57% of energy usage. Now, it’s only around 45%. In the meantime, natural gas and alternative energy plants have been going up like wildfire. In the last year alone, new wind farms added 18 gigawatts of energy to the US’s total output.
