Dave Dixon knows something about electricity generation. The charts below show trends in sources of power creation and more specifically who is using coal. By now everyone must realize that countries like China, Russia and similar bad actors fund all kinds of mischief in our country, interfering with policies and politics. They have been caught funding extreme environmentalists. Why do they do this? It is obvious–they know “renewables” are an expensive, unreliable fraud and will bring our economy down. Meanwhile, look at China’s use of coal, and India’s. Think they are worried about CO2 causing global warming? Absolutely not by their actions and China recently made it clear they had no intention of pursuing net zero or anything like it.
Coal is cheap and reliable and it gives China and India a huge economic advantage in generation of electricity. Whatever reductions we have made in the use of coal, China and India are more than making up for and both countries continue to build new coal plants. China alone has increased power production from coal by 10 times since 2000, and has increased it over 25% in the last six years. China has the best scientists in the world now, the absolute best, and if they thought something bad would come from coal use, the country would turn to nuclear or other power sources. They haven’t and won’t and that tells you all you need to know.
Dave’s notes:
We recently discussed Minnesota’s new legislation to generate all of its electricity from carbon free or renewable sources, here: https://healthy-skeptic.com/2023/02/12/minnesotas-new-energy-insanity-part-1/. Despite Minnesota’s, and indeed the entire United State’s, intention to eliminate the use of coal for electrical generation, China and India continue to increase the consumption of coal for generating electricity. If the burning of coal is going to make the earth uninhabitable it appears that Minnesota’s energy policies will have a negligible effect.
The World in Data publishes data on the power sources used to generate electricity, here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source. The data lists global amount of electricity generated from each source annually. Additionally, the data is also broken down by continent and by country.
Fig. 1; Global Annual Electrical Generation by Source: The World in Data has data on electricity generation from coal starting in 1985. There is a significant drop in coal consumption in 2020 due to disruption from Covid policies. However, by 2022 global coal consumption for electrical generation had recovered and reached a new record high of 10,191 TW-hr. Electricity generated from natural gas did not show a decrease in 2020, possibly because natural gas production was not impacted as much as coal production. The highest generation from natural gas was 6,326 TW-hr in 2021, decreasing slightly to 6.310 TW-hr in 2022.
Fig. 2, Annual Electrical Generation from Coal: In this chart we are breaking down the data from Fig. 1 by country. China and the US had approximately equal electrical production from coal in 2005, at about 2,015 TW-hr. Since then, the US has decreased to 830 TW-hr in 2022 while China has increased to 5,421 TW-hr. Effectively, the US outsourced our electrical demand along with much of our manufacturing base.
India and the US had roughly equal production of coal power in 2018. India’s use of electricity from coal has increased steadily every year, although at a much slower rate than China. The rest of the countries of the world have relatively low production of electricity from coal,
The curve labelled “Rest of World” is the world total each year less the generation from China, India, and the US. Consumption by the rest of the world has been fairly constant, with a modest decrease since 2017.
