In Europe, four out of five coal power plants are in the red. Over the course of this year, they risk losing a combined total of €6.6 billion. This is according to the think tank Carbon Tracker, which has published a new report entitled Apocoalypse Now (a wordplay that inserts the word coal into the title of Francis Ford Coppola's celebrated film).

"European coal power plants are burning money because they cannot compete with increasingly cheap renewables and gas. And things will only get worse in the future. Governments and investors should prepare to say goodbye to coal by 2030 at the latest," warns Matt Gray, co-author of the report. Unless it is heavily subsidised with taxpayers' money, the industry is destined to succumb.

All the figures proving the coal crisis

Carbon Tracker has developed an economic model that has crunched public data on 542 power plants (virtually all those present in Europe), taking into account operating costs, emissions allowance prices and the costs required to comply with regulations — for example, by installing new filters.

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The results are unambiguous. Some 84 per cent of lignite plants and 76 per cent of hard coal plants are running at a loss. To be precise, they are set to burn through €3.54 billion and €3.03 billion respectively over the course of 2019 alone. The nation most at risk is Germany, which could single-handedly run up a shortfall of €1.97 billion, followed by Spain (€992 million) and the Czech Republic (€899 million). The utility most at risk of losing money is Germany's Rwe, which could lose €975 million in 2019 — equivalent to 6 per cent of its market capitalisation. But Czech Eph and Greek Ppc also risk losing over half a billion euros each.

The rare cases of power plants in profit are found in Poland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Slovenia; with the exception of the Netherlands and Holland, these countries benefit from retail energy prices that are still relatively high.

The decline of coal is now inexorable

This is not the first time Carbon Tracker has drawn attention to the inexorable decline of coal, notes Euractiv. Back in 2015, the British think tank had already revealed that this business had cost the five largest European energy giants a full 100 billion dollars in the five-year period between 2008 and 2013. Another report from 2017 had revealed that 54 per cent of coal-related projects were generating a negative cash flow, a percentage set to rise to 97 per cent by 2030.

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In short, the only way out is to close the door once and for all on the dirtiest energy source of all. Something which, despite the resistance of lobbying groups, is already partly happening. Between March and August of this year, the researchers report, hard coal production fell by 39 per cent compared with the same period in 2018. For lignite, the decrease stood at 20 per cent.

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