Accelerating the coal transition

Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian, Fellow Brad Handler, Deb Chattopadhyay, and Chandrasekhar Govindarajalu write about how the cost of wind, solar, and most recently battery storage has fallen dramatically over the last decade, providing the economic rationale for their widespread adoption to help mitigate climate change. This, coupled with the low cost of natural gas, has provided a key challenge in the power sector: how to economically and equitably decommission ∼2000 GW of installed coal capacity? Although a significant part of the existing coal capacity is older, inefficient, and unprofitable, there are complex technical, social and economic challenges that remain.  December 25, 2020.