Why Is China Building So Many Coal Plants Despite Its Solar and Wind Boom? (apnews.com) 71
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from the Associated Press:
Even as China's expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world's largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enough to limit climate change.
More than 50 large coal units — individual boiler and turbine sets with generating capacity of 1 gigawatt or more — were commissioned in 2025, up from fewer than 20 a year over the previous decade, a research report released Tuesday said. Depending on energy use, 1 gigawatt can power from several hundred thousand to more than 2 million homes. Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which studies air pollution and its impacts, and Global Energy Monitor, which develops databases tracking energy trends. "The scale of the buildout is staggering," said report co-author Christine Shearer of Global Energy Monitor. "In 2025 alone, China commissioned more coal power capacity than India did over the entire past decade."
At the same time, even larger additions of wind and solar capacity nudged down the share of coal in total power generation last year. Power from coal fell about 1% as growth in cleaner energy sources covered all the increase in electricity demand last year. China added 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind in 2025, according to statistics from the government's National Energy Administration...
The government position is that coal provides a stable backup to sources such as wind and solar, which are affected by weather and the time of day. The shortages in 2022 resulted partly from a drought that hit hydropower, a major energy source in western China... The risk of building so much coal-fired capacity is it could delay the transition to cleaner energy sources [said Qi Qin, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and another co-author of the report]... Political and financial pressure may keep plants operating, leaving less room for other sources of power, she said. The report urged China to accelerate retirement of aging and inefficient coal plants and commit in its next five-year plan, which will be approved in March, to ensuring that power-sector emissions do not increase between 2025 and 2030.
More than 50 large coal units — individual boiler and turbine sets with generating capacity of 1 gigawatt or more — were commissioned in 2025, up from fewer than 20 a year over the previous decade, a research report released Tuesday said. Depending on energy use, 1 gigawatt can power from several hundred thousand to more than 2 million homes. Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which studies air pollution and its impacts, and Global Energy Monitor, which develops databases tracking energy trends. "The scale of the buildout is staggering," said report co-author Christine Shearer of Global Energy Monitor. "In 2025 alone, China commissioned more coal power capacity than India did over the entire past decade."
At the same time, even larger additions of wind and solar capacity nudged down the share of coal in total power generation last year. Power from coal fell about 1% as growth in cleaner energy sources covered all the increase in electricity demand last year. China added 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind in 2025, according to statistics from the government's National Energy Administration...
The government position is that coal provides a stable backup to sources such as wind and solar, which are affected by weather and the time of day. The shortages in 2022 resulted partly from a drought that hit hydropower, a major energy source in western China... The risk of building so much coal-fired capacity is it could delay the transition to cleaner energy sources [said Qi Qin, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and another co-author of the report]... Political and financial pressure may keep plants operating, leaving less room for other sources of power, she said. The report urged China to accelerate retirement of aging and inefficient coal plants and commit in its next five-year plan, which will be approved in March, to ensuring that power-sector emissions do not increase between 2025 and 2030.
Ob: hank green (coal is extremely dumb) (Score:4, Interesting)
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I got mixed up for a second and I was hoping for Hank Hill to explain why coal is a bad idea when we have clean efficient propane.
Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
...industrial countries need reliable power.
Re:Because... (Score:4, Insightful)
China is already the third-largest producer of nuclear power. I presume coal plants take much less time to build.
Re:Because... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's basically the "fast to build" thing with fuel also being cheap and available.
While there are some things the same, such as concrete, between coal, nuclear, wind, and even solar, they all require different manufacturing facilities. I remember reading somewhere that at least some of the coal plants China is building are designed to be easy to convert to nuclear if that comes up.
So until those manufacturing capabilities catch up with China's demand, coal will continue to be built. I also remember that at least in part, they're building more efficient coal plants to replace aging inefficient and highly polluting ones. So if a new coal plant gets a 50 year old one shut down, it's still a net positive.
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Also b'cos they don't give a rat's hiney about climate change. They simply build whatever power plants they need to for any project
Re: Because... (Score:2)
Well, that's clearly bollocks.
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+100 points for CEC-P!
While covering a country in solar panels and wind turbine towers work _when conditions are right_, it's not the complete solution... you've gotta have something at night (unless they shut down ChatGPT at night... call it local night for them), that can backup those panels and turbines when needed.
That's where coal/nuclear comes in. Not to mention the little fact that PRC doesn't have to answer to the US EPA, so they'll build whichever has the fastest turnaround so they can set up the
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Sounds great... where does the power to charge them come from? Excess solar (or wind)? Except that was gobbled up by the data centers and manufacturing. If they were charged from the grid, what's the point?
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The question was not why China was building power plants. The question is why they were building so many coal fired power plants. China does need more power, but the main issue is why it did not use other sources. China is building many wind and solar plants as well so we can assume that those plants will not provide enough anticipated capacity. I can only surmise that coal is being used because China has a lot of it, and it does not have not have a lot of natural gas which would be a better fuel source.
O
AI needs power (Score:4, Insightful)
Very simple. AI needs power, and they want to win global supremacy in that space. Their communist government can and will do anything they want regardless of things like the environment, human rights, etc.
Sometimes we need to remember on a global scale this is what we compete against, whenever we hobble ourselves a bit too much thinking that the rest of the world will play along.
Re:AI needs power (Score:5, Interesting)
1) You are correct that China is building coal for the AI boom.
2) You are incorrect in thinking the US hobbles itself. Having more expensive electricity but cleaner air is not a hobble, it is a competitive advantage. Long term cleaner air = smarter people and lower health costs. Coal pollution in particular is known to settle to the ground, rather than to spread throughout the world.
3) Communism leads to quicker action but also less innovation and singular action. This is really good when following the lead of more advanced cultures but prevents you from ever really taking the lead. You end up as second fiddle. When you try to take the lead, you do stupid crap like, say, killing all the swallows (Four Pests Campaign) because they eat grain, seeds, and fruit. Major problem if they also eat insects, specifically locusts. Locusts that ate ALL the grain, seeds, and fruit rather than merely 10%.
Re:AI needs power (Score:4, Insightful)
Coal is a short term benefit, cleaner air a longer term one.
If you lose in the short term, you might not be around to reap the long term benefits.
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Except per capita Americans are much more polluting than Chinese...
An American pollutes more from oil than a Chinese person does from coal.
Why aren't they building nuclear? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear seems to me like the logical choice for a country like China to be building. Doesn't pollute the way coal does, they have a well established nuclear power industry, they don't have all the red tape and anti-nuclear BS that western countries do (anyone who complains can be thrown in the Chinese version of a Gulag or whatever it is the Chinese government does to people they don't like these days) and they have plenty of places they could put the nukes that are away from populated areas and big cities.
Re:Why aren't they building nuclear? (Score:5, Interesting)
China IS building nuclear power plants, typically six new starts each year. They're also building lots of solar farms and wind farms and developing more hydro-generation dams. They need the electricity.
The new coal-fired plants are mostly replacing older less efficient and more polluting coal-fired plants. I think the Central Planning Committee is aiming for coal to be about 50% of China's expanded generating capacity in the next couple of decades. Security of energy supply is a large part of that decision, no global hegemon can restrict their coal supplies via sanctions or military action since they are almost all derived from mines within their own borders.
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This.
Primarily the energy security aspect. I'm not certain what China's domestic nuclear fuel supply looks like. But even if they have 100% of the needed resource within their borders, there's always the political (proliferation) aspects to be considered. It's still easier to deal with the AGW loonies for coal than the NPT authorities and entrenched nuclear fuel producers.
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China has plenty of thorium, it is a by-product of their rare earths production, so it is probably almost cheaper for them to use it for electricity production than to dispose of it.
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Thorium cycles have been demonstrated. But I suspect that there's still some R&D to be done at scale. To figure out the economics. China is undoubtedly working the problem, but not making press releases.
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Probably because it isn't a 100% stable thing, with 100% uptime yet. Not to mention, they're not exactly cheap to build, the supply chain doesn't exactly exist yet.
A nuclear plant takes 2-5 years, depending on the severity, to reopen it after an accident.
Then, there's the fact that fusion probably won't be ready for regular installation until like 2050.
Coal plants require a fire department and inspection and probably some repairs (replace pipes, order a new turbine from GE), and it's ready to go... not to
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The Chinese government changed the way that energy is managed by devolving it to be the responsibility of provincial governments. Those governments approved more coal, often to replace older plants, but a lot of it ended up getting mothballed or running at low capacity because there were cheaper sources coming online (renewables and storage).
That lead to a shift towards coal plants designed for demand following, so as well as being a bit cleaner than the old ones, they don't run at constant output. It's sti
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Ideally, in China or anywhere else, the policy would be to build for stable energy provision (across a variety of sources) taking into account the negative effects of each source.
And without, and I can't stress this enough, without illogical or idealogical bias.
I'm a bit suspicious that the negative effects of a dirty source like coal have been properly taken into account by China.
I'm also suspicious by the "drill baby drill" attitude to energy among some politicians in the US. I understand the motivation,
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I'm a bit suspicious that the negative effects of a dirty source like coal have been properly taken into account by China.
https://dialogue.earth/en/poll... [dialogue.earth]
In 2013, faced with worsening air pollution, China published an action plan to mobilise 1.7 trillion yuan (about $277 billion) in relevant investment. The aim was to reduce PM10 pollution in cities of prefecture-level or higher by 10% or more on 2012 levels by 2017; and to reduce PM2.5 levels in the populous Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze Delta and Pearl River Delta areas by 25%, 20% and 15% respectively. PM2.5 pollution in Beijing was to be kept to around 60 g/m3. By 2017, these goals had been achieved.
I think the Chinese are well aware of the impact of coal power plants on air pollution.
To hit those targets, the Chinese government set about saving energy and reducing emissions in the coal power sector by upgrading and refitting power plants; and sped up efforts to get polluting vehicles off the country’s roads
And we're also now seeing the results of their efforts to replace ICE vehicles with BEVs - exports of these vehicles are growing significantly.
Because they can (Score:2, Insightful)
They can over supply electricity, have excess capacity for building stuff, can reallocate resources as they deem fit. If one part fails or falls short, some other part will offer redundancy.
This article will end up having a long thread about whether China is more Communist, Socialist or Capitalist and nobody will admit that the effectiveness of their planned economy is more relevant that such distinctions.
Re: Because they can (Score:3)
Indeed. I was trying to avoid rehashing that debate because most people miss the basis for debating it anyway.
This is about state led capitalist economies versus individual capitalist economies. Both have pros and cons in certain circumstances. The state can get it very wrong. But the state can also be very right and then work as a force multiplier.
China had evolved its economy to incorporate individual companies to lead the way in some areas, and then multiply successful ideas by central mandate.
The USA se
Um ... (Score:2)
... because they want reliable power, and they aren't idiots?
Oh, why yes, that is why:
The government position is that coal provides a stable backup to sources such as wind and solar, which are affected by weather and the time of day.
Solar and wind are intermittent (Score:1)
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Which is why they're building a lot of it, but it's also not reliable and cannot be the sole power source. They need things like coal for backup when wind/solar fail due to a lack of wind and sun.
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Solar only works for half the day or less. Covering the other half reliably gets expensive fast.
solar plants can earn money even when not producing power through grid services, specifically by providing reactive power through their smart inverters
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Perhaps they're just lying about green energy (Score:2)
Or they're building more generating capacity to charge up all those advanced sodium battery EVs and city buses I keep reading about. Which would still be a lie about green energy, just a more elaborate one.
Kind of like when California mandated electrage drayage trucks at its ports...so the port operators promptly complied and ordered up industrial diesel generators to charge up their trucks overnight since they couldn't get enough power from the utility for the purpose.
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Re: Perhaps they're just lying about green energy (Score:2)
You underestimate the size of the ignorance reservoir and also its generating capacity.
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Kind of like when California mandated electrage drayage trucks at its ports...so the port operators promptly complied and ordered up industrial diesel generators to charge up their trucks overnight since they couldn't get enough power from the utility for the purpose.
that was 6 years ago and a temporary measure until more fast chargers could be built. at the time the state had about 3000 large diesel gensets for emergencies.
CA has plenty of reserve utility power. apart from the 52GW summer peak of 2022, the grid max hasn't usually exceeded 46GW since 1998.
https://www.caiso.com/document... [caiso.com]
their stats right now at 4:45 pm PST are:
48,505 MW
Current capacity
23,020 MW
Current demand
24,518 MW
Forecasted peak
18,694 MW
Current renewables
81%
so not even at 50% load. granted it's a Su
Still not enough to meet energy demand (Score:1)
Answered on "Volts.wtf" last year (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-... [volts.wtf]
David Roberts of the Volts podcast asked full-time, full-career China expert Lauri Myllyvirta in April 2024, this exact question and got a clear answer: they're building them because they are forced. To get local permission for other projects, from the local regional boss (think "Duke") whom Xi needs to keep power. They can defy the national direction to some extent.
To build your solar/wind farm in China, you often have to build a coal plant, and buy coal, since the local Duke sells the stuff and hates the whole solar thing. So you get a lot of coal plants. What you don't get is more coal sales than they can get away from. The plants are often at very low capacity factor, sometimes under 20%.
Volts.wtf is strongly recommended for anybody wanting to keep up on the transition, the bad news as well as the good.
Where are the protests in China? (Score:2)
Why isn't Greenpeace and the other green groups not protesting outside of all of the new Chinese coal plants?
Re: Where are the protests in China? (Score:2, Redundant)
Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of speech: just as you can stand on the Mall in DC and shout "Down with Trump" you can stand in the middle of Tienanmen Square and shout "Down with Trump."
Chinese constitution and American constitution both guarantee freedom of speech. Only slight difference is the American constition also guarantees freedom after the speech.
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Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of speech: just as you can stand on the Mall in DC and shout "Down with Trump" you can stand in the middle of Tienanmen Square and shout "Down with Trump."
Chinese constitution and American constitution both guarantee freedom of speech. Only slight difference is the American constition also guarantees freedom after the speech.
Yes - You would need to be brave to stand in Tiananmen Square and shout anti-government slogans.
And America does indeed have free speech built into her constitution.
Having said that, and while I still think speech in the US is much more protected that in China, I think the principle has become a little frayed at the edges recently.
Re: Where are the protests in China? (Score:2)
Your value of "recently" may vary depending on circumstances. I went to college 20 years ago and did a round in grad school 10 years ago. Comparable places in near enough parts of the country.
The boundaries of allowable discourse narrowed noticeably during that ten year gap, and I understand they've narrowed some more since.
It wasn't no knuckle-dragging rethuglicans that imposed that from on high. It was very much sui generis.
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Your value of "recently" may vary depending on circumstances. I went to college 20 years ago and did a round in grad school 10 years ago. Comparable places in near enough parts of the country.
The boundaries of allowable discourse narrowed noticeably during that ten year gap, and I understand they've narrowed some more since.
It wasn't no knuckle-dragging rethuglicans that imposed that from on high. It was very much sui generis.
Right.
Although with that all said, I don't want to downplay the overall state of free speech in the US. It is oviously a principle held dear, and while it isn't always upheld flawlessly the base is pretty sound.
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Greenpeace do campaign in China [greenpeace.org.uk].
Although I expect their activities are more limited in China due to the laws there, and harsh response to any "disturbances of the peace".
Coal Tech Can Quickly Rebuild After Nuclear War (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really because (Score:2)
China imports 80% of their oil, when that gets blocked when they start a geopolitical conflict they will need to rely on what they have. Coal is easy to store, you can pile it on the ground, and have years with it backup energy in a few acres. That's the real value of coal, oil is much harder to store. Nuclear is also easy to store, but much more expensive
Simple Redundancy (Score:1)
One sided statistics. (Score:5, Interesting)
China may have built more than 70GW of new coal capacity online, and may have installed more than 50 new turbines, but if I go out and buy a new car that doesn't mean I have more cars standing in the garage. The other side of the equation is, what is shut down?
China's coal construction program has been largely replacement, and in doing so improved efficiency. China built new coal capacity in 2025? Sounds, bad. Except China's coal consumption and coal energy generation *DROPPED IN 2025* by 1.6%.
Yeah it sucks that they don't have perfect replacement programs that all old generation is replaced with green generation, but the reality is China's coal energy production largely peaked. A massive rise in the 90s and 00s and early 2010s has given way to a plateau over the past 10 or so years where China's coal consumption has remained largely unchanged and while the numbers sound bad for new capacity, the total capacity of coal on the grid has barely increased (it's not new, it's replacement capacity) and the share of coal is on a decline on the grid overall.
Why is this a question? (Score:1)
They need them. They are building anything they can. They can still shut the coal plants later.
Coas makes no sense (Score:1)
Coal makes no sense as "backup" power. It is capital-intensive, and slower to start up. It's only rational utilisation is as 'baseload' generation. Gas would make far more sense -- cheaper to build per GW, and faster to spin up.
Re:Coal makes no sense (Score:1)
Seems like China has coal resources, but not gas eh?
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because (Score:2)
China has ample deposits of coal. China is dependent mainly on the Middle East for oil and gas, and that has to flow through sea lane choke points easily controlled by the US. Meanwhile, solar and wind are not reliable. I don't know whether China has ample supplies of uranium, but building and operating a nuclear plant is far more challenging than a coal powered plant.