FWIW, your calculation seems still optimistic to me, still, e.g. assuming quite a high elasticity (cost of coal is not such an important part of the cost of producing electricity with coal) and, if I understand your reasoning correctly, a fairly high chance of additionality (by default, coal is in structural decline globally).
Makes sense; thanks for flagging. I’m tempted to conclude “robustly a bad idea”.
Maybe the parameter that I can most imagine someone pushing on to make it look better is that I’m assuming 5% of mineable coal will stay in the ground on default trajectories, and you might think it would be significantly less than that. I don’t think this would make it look better than generic clean energy R&D, but it’s not impossible (my cost-effectiveness estimate is >1000x below where I’d put the threshold for interventions I’m excited about, so it seems pretty much impossible for it to reach that if my calc is currently skewing optimistic in places).
FWIW, your calculation seems still optimistic to me, still, e.g. assuming quite a high elasticity (cost of coal is not such an important part of the cost of producing electricity with coal) and, if I understand your reasoning correctly, a fairly high chance of additionality (by default, coal is in structural decline globally).
Makes sense; thanks for flagging. I’m tempted to conclude “robustly a bad idea”.
Maybe the parameter that I can most imagine someone pushing on to make it look better is that I’m assuming 5% of mineable coal will stay in the ground on default trajectories, and you might think it would be significantly less than that. I don’t think this would make it look better than generic clean energy R&D, but it’s not impossible (my cost-effectiveness estimate is >1000x below where I’d put the threshold for interventions I’m excited about, so it seems pretty much impossible for it to reach that if my calc is currently skewing optimistic in places).