China’s war on coal continues

23 January 2017

Over the weekend, the Chinese government ordered 13 provinces to cancel 104 coal-fired projects in development, amounting to a whopping 120 gigawatts of capacity in all.

To put that in perspective, the United States has about 305 gigawatts of coal capacity total. The projects that China just ordered halted are equal in size to one-third of the US coal fleet. If the provinces follow through, it’s a very, very big deal for efforts to fight climate change.

This move also shouldn’t come as a big surprise. In recent years, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has been making major efforts to restrain its coal use and shift to cleaner sources of energy. When Donald Trump and other conservatives in the United States complain that China isn’t doing anything about climate change, they simply haven’t been paying attention.

Back in 2013, China was using as much coal as the rest of the world combined, and it looked like coal use would keep growing astronomically forever. Local officials were planning hundreds of new coal plants as demand looked like it would keep soaring for decades.

Except then an odd thing happened. Since 2013, China’s coal consumption has actually fallen — due in part to a major economic slowdown but also in part to sluggish output in heavy industries like steel and cement that have traditionally accounted for half the country’s coal use.

Increasingly, many analysts suspect that this slowdown in coal consumption is a lasting shift — particularly as China transitions away from heavy industry and investment-driven growth and into a modern service-oriented economy that’s far less carbon-intensive. Going forward, China’s economy is expected to be focused more on retail shops and hospitals, less on steel and cement plants. Energy demand will slow.

On top of that, as China’s leaders start to take global warming seriously, the country has been making massive investments in clean energy. As part of the Paris climate deal, China has pledged to get 20 percent of its energy from low-carbon sources by 2030. The government is planning to install an addition 130 gigawatts of wind and solar by 2020 and making big bets on nuclear power. Some analysts suspect this growth in clean energy could be sufficient to satisfy much of the future growth in household electricity demand.

So that brings us to the recent cancellations. China currently has around 920 gigawatts of installed coal capacity — and many of those plants are already running at lower-than-expected capacity because of weak demand. But there are also hundreds of new coal plants in various phases of planning around the country that would bring total coal capacity nationwide up to 1,250 gigawatts.

That seems excessive, given recent trends. So in China’s latest five-year plan, Chinese officials put a hard cap on future coal capacity at 1,100 gigawatts. Then last week, they ordered provinces to cancel 104 coal projects in the works that were worth an estimated $30 billion. Of those, 47 projects were already under construction, according to a Greenpeace analysis.

Source – Vox