‘A rather beautiful concept’: Plan aims to replace Asia’s coal plants with renewable energy

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Dennis Normile, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: ...developing countries in Asia have been on a coal plant building spree. On Wednesday, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) will unveil an initiative intended to reverse that trend. A new fund, to be launched at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, U.K., will help retire coal plants in the region and replace them with solar and wind power installations. ...ADB is initially targeting Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. All three countries have increased reliance on coal-fired power in recent years and have additional plants in the pipeline. Indonesia, for example, commissioned 2.4 gigawatts of new coal-fired power in 2019 and 1.3 GW in 2020, and has another 22 GW of capacity in planning, according to an April report by the Global Energy Monitor. Replacing those coal plants with renewables sooner rather than later would not only be good for the environment, but economical as well, says Christoph Nedopil, a development economist at Fudan University. But one obstacle, he says, will be finding the capital to buy out coal plant operators and invest in solar and wind power capacity.…

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