China’s Coal Power Construction Hits 10-Year High: Report

China’s coal power boom continues despite pledges to phase down, which is ‘not surprising,’ according to energy analysts.

An entrance to the Datai coal mine in Mentougou, China, on Dec. 11, 2019. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

China’s construction of coal-fired power plants has reached its highest in a decade, according to a new report.

Driven by industry interests, China started construction in 2024 on 94.5 gigawatts of coal-fired power, the highest volume of new builds since 2015, according to a report by the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) released on Feb. 13.

“If coal maintains a high share in China’s power system for too long, it will be much harder to achieve a rapid decline in emissions,” CREA researcher Qi Qin said.

“China’s current push for new coal power is primarily driven by industry interests that are advancing coal expansion under the banner of energy security.”

In 2024, more than 75 percent of newly approved coal power capacity was backed by coal mining companies or energy groups with coal mining operations.

The report notes that new coal power agreements limited space for renewables on the grid.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping has pledged that China would start phasing down coal use in 2026 to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

He told the U.S.-led Climate Leaders’ Summit in 2021 that the regime would “strictly limit the increase in coal consumption” in the five-year period from 2021 through 2025 and “phase it down” in the five-year period from 2026 through 2030.

Xi said at the time that China’s coal consumption—by far the highest in the world—would reach a peak in 2025 and start to fall thereafter.

Rapidly Expanding

China is the most polluting country in the world and has been the world’s largest annual greenhouse gas emitter since 2006.

China’s total emissions are twice that of the United States and nearly one-third of all emissions globally.

According to the International Energy Agency, the vast majority of carbon dioxide emissions in the energy sector—79 percent—come from coal.

A 2020 China Environmental Abuses Fact Sheet from the U.S. government stated that Beijing is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases; the biggest source of marine debris; the leading perpetrator of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; and the world’s largest consumer of trafficked wildlife and timber products.

Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was quoted in the report as saying: “Too much of the Chinese Communist Party’s economy is built on willful disregard for air, land, and water quality. The Chinese people—and the world—deserve better.”

Energy expert David Turver told The Epoch Times that the news of China’s increasing coal consumption is “not surprising.”

“You just need to look at the trend in China’s energy mix to see that they’re still rapidly expanding their use of coal,” he wrote in an email.

Turver said that China is not alone and that data for 2023 show that coal, oil, and gas consumption “were at record highs in 2023.”

“This data for China just shows that coal usage is going to expand further,” he said.

Turver said China’s actions “more than negate what [the UK is] doing to cut emissions.”

In his Substack, he previously explained that total global emissions rose in 2023 by more than the UK’s total emissions, which are now “lower than at any time since the General Strike of 1926.”

Net-Zero

Kathryn Porter, energy consultant at Watt-Logic, told The Epoch Times that if China needs the capacity, it will build and use what it can, and that includes coal.

“Ironically, net-zero policies in Europe are pushing industries to relocate to China,” she wrote in an email.

Porter said this increases global emissions in two ways: China has dirtier energy, and goods must be shipped to Europe.

“So yes, this not only negates Western net-zero efforts, those efforts are causing emissions to be higher by causing industries to move to China where energy is cheaper because it has weaker net-zero policies,” she said.

Reuters contributed to this report.