Another Year, Another Dismal Prognosis for Coal
BloombergNEF’s 2020 New Energy Outlook predicts that coal use has already peaked—a finding that would have sounded farfetched just five years ago.
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BloombergNEF’s latest New Energy Outlook—or NEO, as we call it—is our annual examination of the energy economy’s changes. We define them in thousands of gigawatts of generation capacity, millions of barrels of oil per day, billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, and trillions of dollars of investment capital. Just as importantly, we capture the significant changes that have already happened and analyze those that are coming.
Here’s what has already happened. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fuels burned for power, transportation, industry, and building-related applications probably peaked in 2019. Power sector emissions—the largest single component of fuel combustion emissions today—probably peaked in 2018. Emissions from coal-fired power, still the single largest component of global power generation, also peaked in 2018. Power emissions from natural gas probably peaked in 2019.