Europe coal plants to bleed more cash in next 10 years

Bloomberg

Almost all coal plants in the European Union will be outspending their income by the end of the next decade, relying on subsidies to stay open to back up wind and solar generation. About 54 percent of the region’s plants already fail to break even, according to a report by London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative. The facilities are kept online by government handouts running into millions of euros for some stations just to be available in case they are needed to meet spikes in demand.
As nations from the UK to Austria plan to exit the dirtiest power plant fuel and investors such as Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s biggest, pull money out of coal-hungry utilities, the fuel’s future has never looked so bleak. Power producers from Britain’s Drax Group Plc to Steag GmbH and Uniper SE in Germany are already closing or converting stations away from coal at a record pace. By 2030, 97 percent of plants will have negative cash flow as the European Commission plans to end so-called capacity payments for coal by the middle of the next decade and battery storage technology improves to provide more of the power needed at peak times, according to Carbon Tracker.
“Coal is going to be put into a death spiral and there’s not much that asset owners can do about that other than to lobby and hope that the state will bail them out,” Matthew Gray, senior analyst at Carbon Tracker in London, said by phone.