The invasion of Ukraine has put the US and Europe on a wartime mission to abandon Russian fossil fuels. This series looks at speeding up zero-carbon alternatives by lowering political and financial barriers. Sign up here to get the next story sent to your inbox. The air is hot, gritty and tastes metallic inside Australia’s largest coal-fired electricity plant, the aging Eraring Power Station that’s into its fourth decade of operations. At the site’s cavernous turbine hall as much as 6 million tons of coal a year is crushed and loaded into furnaces which reach temperatures of 1,480 degrees Celsius (2,696 Fahrenheit) — about enough to melt steel — to heat 24-story high water-filled boilers. The process creates enough steam to spin giant turbines that generate almost 2.9 gigawatts of electricity annually, a quarter of power demand in Australia’s most populous state. […]