Coal – Fuels & Technologies – IEA

A massive scale up of clean sources of power generation, accompanied by system‐wide improvements in energy efficiency, is key to reducing coal use for power and cutting emissions from existing assets. In the APS, global output from existing unabated coal‐fired plants is reduced by nearly 2 500 terawatt‐hours from 2021 to 2030 to get on track for national climate pledges, and 75% of this is replaced by solar PV and wind.

Many of the transitions away from coal observed so far have been driven by rapid uptake of solar PV and wind; however, these have typically been in countries where electricity demand was flat or in decline. A key challenge ahead is to achieve such transitions in fast‐growing emerging market and developing economies such as India and Indonesia, where demand for electricity causes generation from coal to increase until the early 2030s in the APS even with a speedy deployment of renewables.

Coal in Net Zero Transitionscircle-arrow