Dark clouds gather over coal’s future

It just doesn't add up. A recent Harvard University study finds that electricity costs could double for first-generation CCS plants. At the same time, innovation continues to lower the cost of renewables at an estimated 10 per cent a decade, and increasing scale of plants is also moving that cost curve down.

China says it is more interested in spending resources on energy efficiency and building renewable energy capacity than adding CCS to coal power stations. It plans a national feed-in tariff for large-scale solar plants by the end of 2009, paying up to half of the price of solar power systems of more than 500 megawatts, with support rising to 70 per cent in remote regions.

“The idea that carbon capture has to happen in China is a western idea”, says Stanford University researcher Richard Morse.

Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, now his state's trade commissioner in Los Angeles, says time is running out for coal: "the traditional markets for its product will start slowly shutting down as green energy becomes more price-competitive and public policy continues to demand greener outcomes." The result in the United States is that plans for 100 coal-fired power plants have been stopped in the last 18 months.

The writing is on the wall. Robin Batterham of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences says that if within three years from now "we don't see some of these large-scale plants actually happening, then people are going to say, 'This is not a real alternative'."

Large scale CCS plants in three years is a pipe dream, a bad bet.

Clean coal has become a cargo cult, but what may descend from the skies is less likely to be salvation than the recognition that the dirty, big cloud overhead is killing our planet’s wonderful diversity of life and habitat.

That fence around Hazelwood is locking in a disaster, but it will not keep its critics at bay.