Despite being "a dismal year for coal power" in much of Asia, China is moving ahead with plans to build "an insane number of new coal plants," despite being the No. 1 producer of renewable energy materials, Reuters and other international news outlets have reported.
Last year China put into operation 38.4 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity, Reuters reported earlier this week, citing "new international research." This is more than three times what was built in the rest of the world and could undermine China's own short-term climate goals, according to the Reuters Feb. 2 news story.
China has ties to a two proposed wind farms in Texas. The Chinese Communist Party is linked to the Blue Hills Wind Development near Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Lone Star Standard previously reported. GH America Investment Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Xinjiang-based Guanghui Industry Investment Group, owns 130,000 acres of land in Val Verde County.
In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged his country would be "carbon neutral" by 2060. That pledge came after the Chinese National Energy Administration's announcement the previous February that it would loosen restrictions on new coal power plant approvals.
The nation's coal-fired capacity rose by a net of 29.8 gigawatts last year while the rest of the work cut its own capacity by 17.2 gigawatts, according to the Reuters news story, which cited Global Energy Monitor and Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) research.
Boosting its use of renewable energy, rather than relying so much on coal, would decrease China's reliance on foreign energy sources. However, the expansion of coal-fired plants in China isn't something the nation actually needs or can be controlled by the central government in Beijing.
"The runaway expansion of coal-fired power is driven by electricity companies' and local governments' interest in maximizing investment spending, more than a real need for new capacity," Lauri Myllyvirta, CREA's lead analyst, said in the Reuters story.
The expansion comes despite China's position as the world's leading producer of renewable energy materials and the county's abundance of other fuel sources. More than 80% of the global supply chain of rare earth elements used in electric vehicles and wind turbine components are controlled by China, according to the U.S. State Department's Energy Resource Governance Initiative.
China controls more than half of the worlds chemical lithium, 62% of chemical cobalt and all of Earth's spherical graphite, the latter being a major components of lithium-ion batteries, according to a Utility Drive report about a year ago. China controls 50 to 70% of the world's lithium, cobalt and polysilicon and is aggressively acquiring other mined materials to make batteries, turbines and solar panels, The Hill reported last month.
Meanwhile, coal remains the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel and accounted for 57.7% of China’s energy use in 2019. Growth of global emissions in 2019 was almost entirely due to China's CO2 output while the rest of the world reduced its emissions.
China was the odd nation out in 2020, which China Dialogue, an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes common understanding of China’s environmental challenges, called "a dismal year for coal power." Major coal financiers in South Korea and Japan have announced restrictions on coal power investments beyond their nation's borders and South and Southeast Asia are at risk of overcapacity, China Dialogue reported last month.
In November, China Dialogue suggested that China's plans for more coal-fired power plants this decade isn't necessarily at odds with reaching carbon neutrality by 2060, noting "the former enfant terrible of the global climate regime is increasingly asserting itself as a leader." Other industry news outlets, however have been more alarmed. In November 2019, Wired called the number of China's planned coal-fired power plants "insane," and in October Reuters published a more hopeful story that China's pledge of carbon neutrality by midcentury could reshape its five-year plan for more coal-fired power plants.
In a Reuters story earlier this week, Global Energy Monitor coal program director Christine Shearer said that China needs to be sure its short-term development plans are in line with long-term climate goals.
"Hopefully, as the Chinese government determines its coal power capacity targets for the next five-year plan [ 2021-2025], it will severely restrict if not end new coal plant builds and accelerate retirements," Shearer said.
