A coal-fired power plant constructed last year in in Bijie, China.<\/span>Tao Liang\/Xinhua\/Zuma<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This story was originally published by<\/em> Yale e360<\/a> and\u00a0is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0<\/em>Climate Desk<\/a>\u00a0collaboration.<\/em><\/p>\n In 2021, <\/span>China\u2019s leader Xi Jinping made two important promises intended to signal China\u2018s commitment to fighting climate change. At the\u00a0Leaders Climate Summit<\/a>\u00a0in that April, he announced that China would \u201cstrictly control<\/a>\u201d coal generation until 2025 when it would start to gradually phase it out. He also pledged that year that China would reduce the energy intensity of its economy\u2014the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP\u2014to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.\u00a0<\/p>\n This month, as China unveiled its plans for the next five years, both promises appeared to be in trouble.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n The annual meeting of the National People\u2019s Congress, held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and attended by some 3,000 delegates, is the occasion for China\u2019s Communist Party leaders to make important policy announcements to China and the world. This year\u2019s meeting was keenly watched: Running from March 5 to March 12, it marked the launch of China\u2019s 15th Five-Year Plan, a set of national policies and targets that will determine the shape and ambitions of China\u2019s economy up to 2030.\u00a0<\/p>\n China is the biggest installer of renewable energy, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest user of coal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n 2030 is also the date by which China\u00a0promised<\/a>, in 2015, that the country will have peaked its greenhouse gas emissions, a milestone on the way to becoming carbon neutral by 2060. Since first making that commitment a decade ago, China\u2019s leadership has further promised to bring the peaking date forward. What happens in the next five years will determine if those promises can be kept. But analysts fear that the continuing growth in the numbers of China\u2019s coal-fired power stations and the lack of any clear commitment in the new five-year plan to call a halt to coal expansion,\u00a0may make both\u00a0promises<\/a>\u00a0impossible to reach.<\/p>\n China\u2019s government can point to\u00a0some progress<\/a>\u00a0in the long battle against coal: In 2015 coal generated 69 percent of China\u2019s primary energy, and by 2024 it was down to\u00a056\u00a0percent<\/a>\u00a0(still much higher than the United States at\u00a08\u00a0percent<\/a>). But the actual volume of coal consumed was greater than ever, simply because China\u2019s electricity demand continues to grow. Despite its efforts to reduce coal use, four years after Xi Jinping\u2019s pledges, China was consuming\u00a040 percent<\/a>\u00a0more coal than the rest of the world combined.\u00a0<\/p>\n That total might have been greater still if not for China\u2019s impressive growth in renewable energy. China installed a record 300 gigawatts of solar power and 100 gigawatts of wind power last year, which meant that the continuing increase in China\u2019s electricity demand was\u00a0largely met<\/a>\u00a0by clean energy. But although China\u2019s decades-long investment in the manufacture of renewable technologies has been a hugely successful industrial policy, its attachment to coal means that this success has not translated into a correspondingly large reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Paradoxically, China is at the same time the biggest installer of renewable energy, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest user of coal. One explanation for this conundrum is a national concern over energy security: Coal is the only fossil fuel that China is not obliged to import, either through vulnerable pipelines or along sea routes that pass through precarious choke points like the Straits of Hormuz. <\/p>\n China has an abundant supply of coal, boasting about\u00a013 percent<\/a>\u00a0of the world\u2019s recoverable coal reserves, and, importantly, it is the one fossil fuel that Chinese planners know will remain abundantly available, regardless of any tensions in China\u2019s East Asia region or military action in the Middle East, the region that supplies China with nearly half its oil. This means that despite China\u2019s role as a renewable energy superpower, coal has continued to play a leading role in its energy system.\u00a0<\/p>\n Until recently, China has argued that its claim to be a developing country meant it did not need to set emissions limits.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The importance to China of a steady coal market was reinforced in 2021, the same year that Xi Jinping made his coal pledge, when China suffered\u00a0power shortages<\/a>\u00a0that affected 20 provinces and impacted both industry and consumers. The problem arose as China emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic: Industrial production recovered, electricity demand soared, and that in turn sent coal prices spiralling upward. Coal-fired power stations were locked into regulated prices for the sale of their electricity, but the price of coal was not controlled. When the coal price became too high, the generators began to cut output to limit their losses, pleading supply shortages or technical problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n In October that year, the then Premier Li Keqiang reacted to the crisis, signaling an adjustment to China\u2019s approach to climate policy.\u00a0Economic growth,\u00a0he said<\/a>, was the key to lowering emissions in the long term and \u201cenergy security should be the premise on which a modern energy system is built.\u201d China soon\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0a new\u00a0lending facility to support the \u201cclean and efficient use of coal.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n The following year there was a new energy crisis:\u00a0A severe\u00a0drought<\/a>\u00a0in Sichuan caused output to drop from the province\u2019s hydroelectric plants, normally the source of\u00a080 percent of its electricity. Factories were ordered to close or reduce their output to save households from power cuts, and\u00a0applications<\/a>\u00a0for permission to\u00a0build new coal-fired power plants reached record levels as provincial authorities worried about having the energy to meet their economic growth targets. The equivalent of\u00a0two new coal plants<\/a>\u00a0per week\u00a0were approved in 2022, and by 2023, permitting reached a 10-year high of\u00a0almost 113 gigawatts.\u00a0 The\u00a0pace of construction<\/a>\u00a0continued in 2024, when China started building \u00a094.5 gigawatts\u00a0of new coal-fired capacity\u2014roughly\u00a093 percent of all new global coal construction\u00a0that year.<\/p>\n By 2023, analysts were warning that, in addition to putting its climate goals out of reach,\u00a0 the\u00a0surge<\/a>\u00a0in new coal meant that China risked building coal-fired power stations that would never recover their investment and were likely to become stranded assets. Most of the new projects,\u00a0according to a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0from the energy think tank\u00a0CREA<\/a>, did not meet the central government\u2019s criteria for new plants since they were located in provinces that had sufficient generating capacity to meet their needs.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n With a further 243 gigawatts of new coal power permitted or under construction and 149 gigawatts more announced, CREA\u2019s analysts predicted that there were two possible results, both negative: a massive increase in coal power generation and emissions, or the coal plants would have to run well below their capacity. There would be no reduction in coal use, the report concluded, unless new projects were\u00a0canceled or existing plants retired early.\u00a0<\/p>\n Not only have none been canceled, but the rush to build new plants has continued, and as predicted, the utilization rate of the new plants has dropped.\u00a0<\/p>\n China\u2019s energy demand has continued to rise, and so despite greater efficiency, its emissions have increased.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The 15th Five-Year Plan offered a chance to correct these negative trends and get China\u2019s climate ambitions back on track, but it is an opportunity the government appears to have missed. The plan does promise a continuing effort to produce and install renewable energy, and China did install more renewable\u00a0solar and wind<\/a>\u00a0power last year than the whole of the rest of the world, but other signals were less encouraging.<\/p>\n Until recently, China argued that its continuing claim to be a developing country meant it did not need to set emissions limits, focusing instead on the energy density (also known as energy intensity) targets highlighted by Xi Jinping. In measuring the energy required to produce a unit of GDP, they are essentially measures of efficiency: As long as energy consumption grows more slowly than GDP, energy intensity is reduced.\u00a0<\/p>\n China set its first energy density target in the 11th Five-Year Plan in 2006, and it has been an important target in every subsequent plan, steadily improving the efficiency of China\u2019s energy use. But greater efficiency does not necessarily mean that emissions fall. China\u2019s energy demand has continued to rise, and so despite its greater efficiency, its emissions have increased. In the last 18 months, emissions have\u00a0been down<\/a>\u00a0slightly, but if energy density improvements slacken off, that trend is expected to reverse.<\/p>\n Over the last five years, China\u2019s continuing dramatic growth in demand seemed largely to\u00a0have been met by the equally rapidly expanding supply of renewable energy. But on the negative side, China has missed its energy density target, for the first time. Aiming at a 17 percent improvement over those five years, it achieved only 12.4 percent. Given its GDP growth, that would imply that its emissions increased by 13 percent over the same period.\u00a0<\/p>\n That would put the country\u2019s hopes of meeting its Paris commitments and Xi Jinping\u2019s promise to reduce China\u2019s carbon intensity by 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 severely off track. Planners could have compensated with renewed ambition in the 15th Five-Year Plan.\u00a0Instead, they\u00a0changed<\/a>\u00a0the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi\u2019s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n If one aspect of China\u2019s reluctance to abandon coal is related to energy security, another major obstacle is the vested interests within the system: Coal-producing provinces want to preserve jobs and local economies, and for provincial governments, a steady supply of electricity is more important than controlling emissions. These concerns can be in\u00a0competition<\/a>\u00a0with national climate goals.\u00a0<\/p>\n The government claims coal is necessary to balance the grid, filling the gaps in supply when demand is at its peak.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In China, which has the largest electricity system in the world, power generation is under the control of provincial governments, while the generating companies and the grid operators who distribute the energy are dominated by state-owned companies. When China started to build large-scale wind and solar projects more than 10 years ago, the energy system was dominated by coal-fired power stations with annual contracts to supply the grid with electricity. Because the grid operator paid for that output regardless of how much it used, the operator ensured that coal output had preferential access. That meant that when wind farms were producing high levels of electricity, they frequently found that they were unable to sell onto the grid, and it was wasted.<\/p>\n There have been\u00a0successive\u00a0attempts<\/a>\u00a0to reform the system to favor renewable energy, and in the 15th Five-Year Plan, the government points to its continuing commitment to expanding the renewables sector as the key to its climate policy. But this industrial policy, however successful, will not in itself reduce emissions if coal continues to play a substantial role in the power sector.\u00a0<\/p>\n The government continues to claim that coal is\u00a0necessary<\/a>\u00a0to balance the grid,\u00a0filling the gaps<\/a>\u00a0in supply when demand is at its peak or when renewable output falls. But as the analysts at CREA point out, that is not the best or most efficient use of a coal-fired power station that has been designed for steady rather than sporadic operation. It can take several hours to get a coal-fired station into operation and, once operating at its maximum, it cannot easily be turned down when demand drops. To get around this problem, it appears that many operators are keeping plants in a state known as \u201cspinning reserve<\/a>,\u201d running in the background and ready to dispatch energy at short notice. But this is inefficient both in energy use and in carbon emissions since the plant just keeps ticking, using fuel and emitting CO2.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n There has also been a remarkable\u00a0expansion<\/a>\u00a0of various forms of energy storage in China, including battery and pumped hydro, precisely to address the challenge of intermittent renewable power. Battery storage alone has increased by a factor of 20 in just four years. These forms of storage are cheaper, more efficient, and more climate friendly than keeping a coal fleet on standby and, as they grow, the case for the continued use of coal, let alone its expansion, seems sure to grow even weaker.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of concern for investors, the cost of China\u2019s recent coal build-out in\u00a0long-term\u00a0stranded assets<\/a>\u00a0could run into trillions. The cost to the climate is of concern to everybody.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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