China’s coal power boom is more complex than it seems

BLOOMBERG

Last year, although it built few new coal power plants, China permitted more than it had since 2015: 106 gigawatts’ worth. That’s more than six times the amount of coal power permitted in 2022 across the rest of the world.
Those are big numbers. But the findings from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finland-based research organisation, and Global Energy Monitor are far more nuanced than the initial figures might suggest. That complexity shows the interaction of policy, planning and climate change in the world’s biggest power system.
In 2022 China commissioned, started construction on and permitted more coal-fired power plants than all other nations combined, in each category. And although more than 30 gigawatts of coal projects were taken offline globally, few of them were in China. Yet as the Crea researchers state, “The massive additions of new coal-fired capacity don’t necessarily mean that coal use or CO2 emissions from the power sector will increase in China.”
Squaring these apparent contradictions requires some data, beginning with overall scale. China’s planned additional capacity would significantly expand what is already the world’s biggest coal fleet. No other country is even remotely close to China in coal capacity, and all other countries on earth combined have less coal-fired power than China. At the end of 2021, China accounted for more than 53% of the global fleet. The amount of capacity it intends to add is more than double Japan’s total, and almost 50% of India’s fleet.
In fact, China’s coal-fired power fleet would be the world’s largest power generation system in its own right. In 2021, China coal plants generated about 23% more power than all the power generated, from all sources, in the United States. Fifteen years ago, the US was the world’s biggest power generator; China passed it in 2010, and for most of the past 10 years, China’s coal fleet has produced more power than the entire US.
It is true that China’s coal-fired power buildout today is nothing like it was 15 or 10 years ago. Last year, China added 26.8 gigawatts of coal-fired power, the least since 2003. But as Crea researchers note and as the data make clear, plant construction follows several years behind permitting, resulting in waves of new construction based on plans laid out years earlier. According to CREA, 40 gigawatts of projects began construction in 2020, and 86 gigawatts began construction in 2021. So the recent decline in commissioned plants will surely reverse.
As Dan Murtaugh noted in Bloomberg’s Elements newsletter, there must be a good reason for a country to permit a new fleet bigger than the entire UK power system. And there is: Last summer’s drought and heat wave drove China’s peak power demand up 230 gigawatts, more than 20% above its previous peak. The extra power it needed was as much as every single plant in Germany could generate if operating at maximum capacity at once. China is adding coal plants not so much to meet regular demand but rather to ensure reliability in special circumstances.
However, those circumstances are set to become more ordinary because of climate change. Beyond the market reasons for China’s buildout, there are important climate-related drivers at work.
More coal-fired power can perhaps solve reliability issues in the world’s biggest grid. It cannot solve the planet-sized climate challenges that coal itself generates.