In a year and a half, China has increased its coal power capacity by 43 GW — enough to power 31 million homes. And it's just one sign of a much broader trend.
While the Paris Agreement demands that we turn our backs on coal, China is swimming against the tide. As a study by Global Energy Monitor reveals, between the start of 2018 and June 2019 the Asian giant increased its power plant capacity by 43 GW — enough to power 31 million homes. All this while, in the rest of the world, a cut of 8.1 GW was being recorded.
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This revival, which flies in the face of every principle of environmental sustainability, is the product of a political manoeuvre adopted between 2014 and 2016. At the time, the central government had delegated the power to authorise new power plants to provincial authorities, which were strongly incentivised to meet certain economic targets set at a local level.
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In this brief window of time, the green light was given to an enormous number of new projects with a combined capacity of 245 GW, which artificially inflated an already bloated sector. Existing plants, in fact, are already operating for roughly half of their scheduled daily hours. Beijing then reversed course, pledging to break free from dependence on the dirtiest and most polluting source — and partly succeeding, having reduced coal's share from 68 to 59 per cent of total energy in just six years, from 2012 to 2018.
The process of opening new plants, however, was already under way. When you add together the capacity of those under construction and those that could be restarted after a period of suspension, the total comes to as much as 147.7 GW. For a point of comparison, that is just below the combined capacity of all power plants in the European Union. As the BBC points out, the Asian giant also invests beyond its borders: for every four overseas projects — concentrated mainly in South Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh — one is funded by Chinese capital.
If it wants to play its part in keeping the rise in average global temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the researchers stress, China must do exactly the opposite: retire 40 per cent of its coal capacity, bringing it down from today's 1,027 GW to below 600 GW. Even from a purely economic standpoint, the energy transition is already pushing coal out of the market (technically referred to as stranded assets).
The problem is not confined to Asia. A study just published by Unep (the United Nations Environment Programme) together with a consortium of research institutes argues that fossil fuel production is disproportionate.
More specifically, it examines the plans for 2030 of ten strategic countries: China, the USA, Russia, India, Australia, Indonesia, Canada, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom. Taken together, they envisage a level of coal, gas and oil production that would result in 39 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions. That is 53 per cent more than the level that would keep global warming within 2 degrees Celsius. And what happens if the bar is shifted to a limit of 1.5 degrees — a threshold that could make the difference for the survival of entire ecosystems? In that case, production would overshoot the permissible level by 120 per cent.
Once again, the so-called production gap is most vertiginous for coal: by 2030, as much as 5.2 billion tonnes too much could be produced relative to the 2-degree target, and 6.4 billion tonnes too much relative to the 1.5-degree target. But oil must also be cut back, because by 2040 some 36 billion barrels per day more than necessary will be produced to meet the 2-degree Celsius target. The same applies to natural gas, whose surplus production is estimated at 1,800 billion cubic metres, again by 2040.
