China ramps up coal power despite carbon neutral pledges

Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents.

The approvals, analysed by Greenpeace, reveal that between January and March this year, at least 20.45 gigawatts of coal power was approved, up from 8.63GW in the same period in 2022. In the whole of 2021, 18GW of coal was approved.

A Chinese Communist party (CCP) five-year plan from 2016 had placed a heavy emphasis on reducing the use of coal and developing clean energy sources. In 2020 Xi Jinping, China’s leader, pledged that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060.

This prompted an era of reduced coal power approvals as local governments sought to keep their local economies in check with Beijing’s priorities. A rise in coal power approvals came in 2020 when the five-year plan came to an end, as local governments anticipated even tighter restrictions on coal expansion in the next round.

But in 2021, China suffered huge power outages, leading to a dramatic shift in the CCP’s energy priorities. In September the price of electricity soared as factories reopened to service global demand as the rest of the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. But the government had capped prices, so many power plants reduced output rather than operated at a loss.

China relies on coal for more than half of its energy consumption. As homes in the colder north of the country faced the prospect of a gruelling winter without heat, the government’s rhetoric shifted from reducing coal to prioritising energy security. That resulted in a “myth that if you build more power plants, that will bring more energy security,” said Xie Wenwen, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace.

The war in Ukraine, which sent global energy prices soaring, was “another huge event that fuelled the energy security narrative”.

Campaigners argue that in order to meet China’s growing energy needs, it is not more coal that is needed, but a more flexible grid. A report published this month by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, noted that technologies for storing clean energy “are not yet mature enough to be deployed at the scale considered essential” for China’s plans to expand the use of renewable energy.

More than 75% of China’s coal, wind, solar and hydro resources are in the west of the country, while more than 70% of power consumption happens in central and eastern China. Five provinces on the east coast account for nearly two-fifths of China’s total consumption. Policymakers have yet to find a solution for efficiently rebalancing this problem.

Still, in the 14th five-year plan, which covers the period until 2025, the government said that more than half of increased energy demands in that period should be covered by renewables. Between 2010 and 2021, renewable generation increased by an average annual rate of 19.2%, primarily from wind and solar power.

But last year Xi said that coal would remain a mainstay of China’s energy mix that “would be hard to change in the short term”.

cover photo: Chimneys of a coal-fired power plant behind a gate in Shanghai, China. Photograph: Aly Song/Reuters