Power behind the thrown

That black hard rock, the fossil fuel called coal, still seemed to be the darling of the business crowd for new power plants.

Even our motorbiking leader, Duterte Harley, in his first Sona, has thrown in a good word for coal, saying it was still the “cheapest.”

That he was squarely behind coal power plants, could explain the business bandwagon.

There should be other views on this issue, right?

True, reports said that our power rates, as shown in Meralco rates, already went down because of lower cost of fuel that was mainly coal.

Thus we no longer had the third highest electricity rates in Asia, according to one study covering 2012 to 2016, showing that we have improved by one notch.

Great—the slight improvement saved for Meralco customers, for instance, some P30 billion in four years, with the rates going down by 28 percent.

Really, because of the hit we took in power costs in the past 30 years, rates continued to be a nasty political issue.

Thus, we favored the cheapest power plant—i.e. coal.

Based on official records, we have some 17,226 megawatts of power projects in the pipeline, with some 9,000 MW using coal.

In recent years, however, some contrarian views already emerged, challenging coal as the cheapest power.

Environmental groups, such as the anticoal Sierra Club in the United States, thus forced the power sector to “rethink” their plans.

Sierra Club was one of the more organized groups, enjoying the support of an army of lawyers and some high-profile personalities such as Mike Bloomberg.

It launched the famous “Beyond Coal Campaign” to close down coal plants in the US in favor of renewable energy.

Sierra Club reportedly gained support for its advocacy among power companies.

The US used to be host to more than 500 coal-fired power plants, and now it already “retired” more than 240 of them.

The drop meant that the US took out of commission some 108,747 megawatts in coal plant capacity.

Early this month in the Netherlands, the parliament decided to cut by half the carbon emissions in their country by the year 2030, which would force all the coal plants  to close down in 15 years.

Just last month here in Asia, China canceled plans to build 15 coal power plants in several regions, including the progressive provinces of Shanxi, Shandong and Guangdong

Its capital city, Beijing, which acquired the notoriety as having one of the world’s worst air pollution, would close down all of its four coal plants.

That was China—the top emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, being the largest user and producer of coal.

Really, the list of coal plant closures elsewhere in this planet could only be expected to get longer.

In this country, the prospects for coal power plants would seem to remain bright at least in the next six years under Duterte Harley.

Based on the usual practice in governance, the new power plants would automatically get long-term supply agreements.

The contracts would mean that we, the hapless consumers, could end up with the usual “stranded cost,” what we paid for power plant capacity that we did not even use.

The trend overseas has become clear: Other fuel sources were already giving coal plants some tough competition, such as the falling cost of solar power.

In Chile, for instance, solar power sold recently at $29 per megawatt hour, or about P1.50 per kilowatt hour.

In the United States, a group offered P2.50 per kwh of solar power, much lower than the generation cost of coal plants there at P3.50 to P3.80 per kwh.

With the downtrend in cost, renewable energy would almost certainly outstrip the benefit of coal plants.

What if we already tied ourselves up with those supposedly cheap coal plants?