European utilities are poised to add more coal-fired power capacity than natural gas in the next four years, boosting emissions just as the era of free carbon permits ends. “The economics for coal are near the best we’ve seen in five years,” Laurent Segalen, a director at ECMF, said yesterday in an interview from London. Buying UN credits for 2013, after they plunged almost 80 percent in the past year, is “an amazing bargain,” he said. Utilities will add as much as 10,600 megawatts of new coal plants in seven central European countries in the next four years, compared with 1,600 megawatts of new natural-gas capacity, Patrick Hummel, a UBS analyst in Zurich, said in the report. –-Matthew Carr, Bloomberg, 21 September 2012
