This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The amount of new coal power being built around the world fell by nearly two-thirds last year, prompting campaigners to claim the polluting fossil fuel was in free fall.
The dramatic decline in new coal-fired units was overwhelmingly due to policy shifts in China and India and subsequent declining investment prospects, according to a report by Greenpeace, the U.S.-based Sierra Club, and research network CoalSwarm.
The report said the amount of new capacity starting construction was down 62 percent in 2016 on the year before, and work was frozen at more than a hundred sites in China and India. In January, China’s energy regulator halted work on a further 100 new coal-fired projects, suggesting the trend was not going away.
Researchers for the groups said a record amount of coal power station capacity was also retired globally last year, mostly in the U.S. and E.U., including Scotland closing its last one.
One of the reasons for the fall in new plants was that too much capacity had been built in recent years, particularly ... Read more
