Despite the increase in projects being canceled, coal capacity has still grown nearly 50 percent in the last 10 years, according to the report. Boom and Bust: Tracking The Global Coal Plant Pipeline looks at every proposed coal plant since 2010, and analyzes data between geographic regions. The data will continue to be updated and available at the Global Coal Plant Tracker website.
Coal is the largest contributor to human-caused climate change. According to the report, coal produced more emissions than any other fossil fuel source from 2004 to 2013. Worldwide, coal is responsible for 44 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions.
But even though capacity has grown, coal is still going bust, said Ted Nace, founder of CoalSwarm, an open-source reference on coal and an Earth Island Institute project. Nace says this is because the failure rate of proposed projects is so much higher than it has been in the past.
Although the death of a power plant project is usually a “death by a thousand cuts,” Nace says, there are two primary groups driving the decline in coal. Globally, divestment has made coal projects less attractive, and locally, community activism has prohibited some projects going forward.
“The international community has very much been a factor in the slowdown, through finance,” he told ThinkProgress. “The divestment movement has been a large part of what’s created a negative business climate for coal investment.”
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“Even if the trend of two coal plant proposals halted for every one plant built continues,” the report warns, “the remaining one-third will use up nearly all of the available carbon budget for avoiding the internationally recognized 2°C warming threshold.”
Read more at Report: Developers Are Canceling More Coal Plants Than They Build
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