Coal-fired power generation is vulnerable everywhere to increasingly ambitious initiatives to cut carbon emissions.

This is acutely evident today in the Netherlands, where a recent court ruling and a parliamentary motion supporting tougher actions to avert climate change represent a growing trend.

This report assesses the impact of national pressures and beyond on the value of three new coal-fired power plants put into service in 2015 by the German energy companies RWE and Uniper, and the French energy company Engie.

More broadly, we note the implications from these examples for the business case for new-build coal power in Europe and further afield.

A Harvard Medical School study, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, found that the extra health and environmental costs of burning coal in the US costs the country up to $500 billion a year, or 9 to 27 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity.