| From a blog- The Business of Green.
Al Gore and the twilight of coal? Posted by James Kanter in General , Energy Business, Alternative Energy Al Gore may have won his Nobel Peace Prize fo raising awareness about the threat of global warming, but he also is being credited with another key Business of Green development: mounting signs of the demise of coal-fired power in countries like Britain and the United States, even as the some developing countries burn ever larger quantities of the fuel. On the same day Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, Greenpeace demonstrators in Britain were winding down a dramatic protest to block attempts by the German power giant E.ON to build new coal facilities at Kingsnorth in southeast England. Their rallying cry? Al Gore's comment earlier this year that he couldn't "understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power stations." It's not the first protest against new coal facilities: In the United States, TXU, a big utility, was stopped from rolling out coal plants earlier this year in Texas after widespread opposition to the plans by investors and environmentalists. It remains to be seen whether the coal industry really is in headlong retreat — and whether Gore will strengthen his calls for an end to coal-fired power. But energy industry experts already see growing demand for wind, solar and other sources of renewable power as coal comes under increasing pressure. "It's becoming impossible to build coal stations," Michael Liebreich, founder and CEO of New Energy Finance, a London-based research company, said during a visit to Paris on Friday. The backlash against coal "is one of the driving forces for the clean energy industry." |