Last September, grist reported that “peak coal” had come to Appalachia. There’s a reason that the industry is relying on destructive practices like mountain-top removal mining: coal is harder to come by. Mines have increasingly small seams of coal to extract.
Now it seems that the marketplace is catching up. The AP reports:
The share of U.S. electricity that comes from coal is forecast to fall below 40 percent for the year – the lowest level since the government began collecting this data in 1949. Four years ago, it was 50 percent. By the end of this decade, it is likely to be near 30 percent.
“The peak has passed,” says Jone-Lin Wang, head of Global Power for the energy research firm IHS CERA.
Read on by Philip Bump at Gristhttp://grist.org/news/why-the-power-industry-is-running-away-from-coal/
