Speaking on Monday at an old London coal power plant-turned-shopping centre, IEA head Fatih Birol said he would be “very happy” to see new NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) that “include no new unabated coal and also early retirements of existing coal”.

In 2021, the Glasgow Climate Pact, agreed at the COP26 UN climate summit, called on countries for the first time to accelerate efforts “towards the phase-down of unabated coal power”. “Unabated” means power produced using coal without any technology to capture, store or use the planet-heating carbon dioxide emitted during the process.

Birol, a Turkish energy analyst, said that stopping coal-plant construction was “as our North American colleagues would say, a no-brainer”. Yet, he added, while “the appetite to build new coal plants is in a dying process, some countries still do it”. He singled out China’s plans to build 50 gigawatts (GW) of new coal plants.

Shutting down existing coal plants, particularly young ones in Asia, is more difficult because the companies that have built and operate them would lose money, Birol noted. There is almost $1 trillion of capital to be recovered from existing coal plants, “so who is going to pay for this?” he asked, calling it “a key issue”.

Birol praised the Just Energy Transition Partnerships that have been set up between wealthy countries and several coal-reliant emerging economies like South Africa and Indonesia to help address the problem. He added that “there are some countries in Asia who can, in my view, afford to retire their coal plants earlier”, without mentioning which.

Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Fadillah Yusof announced at the event organised by the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which includes 60 countries, that Malaysia aims to reduce its coal-fired power plants by half by 2035 and retire all of them by 2044. It will also tackle social and economic challenges through reskilling programmes for workers and promoting renewable energy adoption, he added.

Speaking later at London’s defunct Battersea power station, Indonesia’s deputy minister for maritime affairs and investment, Rachmat Kaimuddin, explained some of the challenges his country faces in phasing out coal.

Kaimuddin (right) speaks alongside Germany’s climate envoy Jennifer Morgan (centre) in London on June 24, 2024. (Photo: Powering Past Coal Alliance)

After China and India, Indonesia has the world’s biggest pipeline of new coal power plants under construction. Kaimuddin said the state energy company would not build any more but added that cancelling existing contracts is “very, very difficult” unless the company constructing the plant wants to pull out – which none have yet.

In addition, shutting down existing power power plants is expensive, he said, because many coal power plants have “take or pay” contracts signed in the 1990s under which the government pays them whether their electricity is required or not.

Another concern is that the Southeast Asian nation does not want to lose its energy security in the switch to renewables, Kaimuddin noted. Indonesia currently mines domestically most of the coal it uses. “We’re trying to partner with other people to try to build [a] renewable supply chain in the country,” he said.

Millions of people in Indonesia work in the coal industry, he added, so a shift towards clean energy will need to include new jobs for them. “It doesn’t have to be green jobs – it has to be jobs, right?” he said.

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Singapore’s climate ambassador Ravi Menon told the same event that the economies of China, India and Indonesia are growing and so are their energy needs, meaning that renewables have to be rolled out rapidly to meet demand.

Energy storage is also required to smooth intermittent supply from solar and wind, while electricity transmission infrastructure, including power lines, is needed to transport power from solar and wind farms to cities that account for a large share of consumption.

Both Kaimuddin and Menon said carbon credits should be used to offset losses for the owners of coal plants that are shut down early. “Retiring [plants] definitely will destroy financial value and… and we also need a better way to compensate them,” said Kaimuddin.

The event’s focus on coal raised concerns among some campaigners. Avantika Goswami, climate lead at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, told Climate Home that “singling out coal” in the NDCs, rather than including fossil fuels more broadly, “equates to giving a free pass to oil and gas-dependent countries, many of whom are wealthy”.

It could penalise many developing countries, where coal is a cheap source of fuel and energy needs are still growing, she warned.

“A global climate policy that allows unfettered use of oil and gas – which together account for 55% of fossil fuel emissions – is incomplete and inequitable,” she added.

Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead at advocacy group Oil Change International, said the IEA’s head should know that “the time to focus only on coal as a climate culprit is over”. He pointed to a subsequent agreement at COP28 last year where governments agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels in their energy systems, without setting a deadline.

“We need a full, fast, fair, funded phase-out of all fossil fuels. Setting such a low bar for ambition is out of touch and inequitable, keeping the door wide open for major oil and gas producers,” Ioualalen added in a statement.

He called on rich countries that are “most responsible” for the climate crisis to foot the bill for a just transition. “We know they have more than enough money. It’s just going to the wrong things like fossil fuel handouts,” he said.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

This story was updated after publication to include comments from Avantika Goswami at the CSE and Romain Ioualalen at Oil Change International,.

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Japan and the US have no formal coal phase-out plans, while Germany plans to continue burning coal until 2038.

Guterres made the comments at the first global summit of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) on Tuesday, a joint UK-Canada initiative that brings governments, local authorities and the private sector together to accelerate the end of unabated coal burning.

“Cancel all global coal projects in the pipeline and end the deadly addiction to coal,” Guterres told the meeting of ministers, local governments, financial institutions and companies.

Only by ending coal, will the world “have a fighting chance to succeed” in meeting the Paris Agreement goals to keeping global heating “well below 2C” and strive for 1.5C, he said.

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Citing scientific analysis on the 1.5C limit, Guterres urged the 37 developed and middle-income country members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to commit to exiting coal by 2030 and for developing nations to do so by 2040.

“Main emitters and coal users should announce their phase-out plans well before the Glasgow Conference. G7 members should take the lead and commit to this phase-out at the G7 June summit at the latest, “ he told the high-level panel of ministers.

His comments came days after a UN Climate Change report warned governments had hardly made a dent in the emissions reductions needed to achieve the Paris goals, with updated climate plans projected to cut emissions by just 0.5% by 2030 compared with 2010 levels.

Data released by the International Energy Agency on Tuesday shows global carbon emissions are bouncing back above 2019 levels, driven by a carbon-intensive recovery to Covid-19.

The two day summit co-hosted by the UK and Canada aimed to accelerate the pace of the transition from coal to clean energy ahead of the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK, in November.

Hungary, which relies on imported oil and gas, and Uruguay, which generates nearly all of its electricity from hydropower, wind and solar, joined 34 governments in pledging to phase out coal during the meeting.

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All G7 countries except Japan and the US have set an end date for coal and joined the PPCA.

In Europe, foreign ministers have called for a global phase-out of unabated coal in energy productions but remain sharply divided on the timeline. France and Italy, which have less coal in their power sector, have committed to phase out coal by 2022 and 2025 respectively – putting Germany’s 2038 coal exit date into the spotlight.

Meanwhile, the UK and Canada, which are leading the global coal phase out initiative, have been accused of hypocrisy. The UK government has been slammed by its own climate advisors and NGOs for refusing to call in a decision on whether a coking coal mine should be built in the North of England.

The local authority is reviewing the decision in light of what it said is “new evidence” from the UK’s Climate Change Committee on how to align the UK’s policies with its 2050 net zero goal.

“The UK is supposed to be leading this alliance, but far from Powering Past Coal – we’re scaling back up,” said Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist.

He warned that “unless plans for the mine are completely and immediately scrapped,” prime minister Boris Johnson risked “damag[ing] the credibility and moral authority needed to demand action from world leaders” at Cop26.

While Canada has committed to phase out coal-fired electricity by 2030, there are plans for new and expanded coal mining in Western Canada.

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Leo Roberts, of think tank E3G’s coal transition team, told Climate Home News Guterres was “completely right” to highlight the urgency of coal phase-out among G7 nations.

“While rapid progress has been made across much of the group…  countries like Japan and the US must drastically speed up the pace of retirements. In Japan’s case this also means cancelling their remaining project pipeline and immediately ending support to coal projects overseas,” he said.

Japan’s prime minister Yoshihide Suga has said his government would address the country’s coal dependence with a “fundamental shift” in policy, but no exit date has been agreed so far.

As of 2020, 7.3GW of new coal capacity were under construction in Japan and a further 1.3GW had been approved, according to the Global Energy Monitor. A recent analysis by NGOs shows Japanese banks remain the world’s top global coal lenders.

In the US, Joe Biden’s administration has reversed Donald Trump’s support for the declining US coal industry but has yet to announce an end date for the fuel.

Between 2016 and 2020, the share of electricity generated from coal is forecast to drop 40%, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The agency is anticipating renewables to produce more electricity than coal for 2020 as a whole – a milestone it didn’t anticipate coming until 2031 as recently as 2019.

In his climate platform, Biden promised to end overseas coal financing and seek commitments from the G20 to end all export finance for high-carbon projects. In an executive order signed in January, he promised to align the US financial flows with the Paris goal “including with respect to coal financing”.

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