Financial firms buying up Asian coal plants to shut them down

COAL plants in Asia are being bought by some of the UK’S biggest financial firms who want to shut them down to hasten the phasing out of fossil fuels.

Businesses including British insurer Prudential, lenders Citi and HSBC and Blackrock Real Assets are currently drawing up the plans which would pave the way for the closure of Asia’s coalfired power plants within 15 years.

The proposal is led by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the consortium plans to create public-private partnerships to buy out the plants.

There have already been “promising” talks with Asian governments and multilateral banks, according to Reuters.

The group hopes to have a model ready for the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in November. The firms aim to secure finance at the summit, when

‘Private sector has great ideas to address climate change bridging the gap with the official sector’

governments will be asked to commit to more ambitious emissions targets and increase financing for countries most vulnerable to climate change.

Donald Kanak, chairman of Prudential’s insurance growth markets, said: “If you can come up with an orderly way to replace those plants sooner and retire them sooner, but not overnight, that opens up a more predictable, massively bigger space for renewables.”

He explained that the idea had been presented to finance ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Commission and European development officials.

Ahmed M Saeed, ADB vice-president, said: “The private sector has great ideas on how to address climate change and we are bridging the gap between them and the official-sector actors.”

“We would like to do the first (coal plant) acquisition in 2022,” he added.