Comment by jillesvangurp
6 hours ago
They are building more plants but starting to burn less coal. Both can be true at the same time. They are expected to hit peak coal as early as this year. So, far coal generation is slightly down relative to last year.
What's happening is part just bureaucratic inertia. They raised funding and are building the plants even though strictly they aren't needed anymore. And part of it is them replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones. They close plants regularly as well. Instead of operating plants 24x7, they keep a few around for when wind/solar fall short. It seems even the Chinese have a hard time predicting how fast the energy transition is going. They've hit their own targets years ahead of time repeatedly in the recent past.
Apparently China coal imports could drop by about 18-19% this year. That seems to be part of a bigger five year plan. They might be hitting the targets for that early as well.
I think you're relating coal as a percentage of all energy rather than relative to itself year on year.
The data here shows that coal consumption is simply increasing in China. Therefore, I believe it is inaccurate to say "they are building more plants but starting to burn less coal." It is more accurate to say "they are building more plants and burning more coal, but they are not increasing their coal use at the same rate they increase their use of other energy sources."
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-coal?tab=line&...
Our World In Data gets that information from https://globalcarbonbudget.org/. I believe that the next update will include 2024 data, and should be available next month.
My reason for challenging the phrasing is just to be precise. This is a complex topic, and the distinction between a falling percentage of energy mix versus a rising absolute amount of consumption is a key detail that's often missed.
This is 2025 data. Absolute coal usage is declining since the beginning of 2025.
I had read the coal plants are also political safety nets for the local governments. Some populace is worried the switch to renewables will go wrong and they will freeze over winter, so the coal plants are built as a perceived backup option.
As another comment pointed out, China isn’t afraid to let infrastructure sit idle. That if these coal plants sit unused or demolished in the end - it would be better than the political risk mentioned above.
[1] shows that they their coal plants have not been sitting idle i 2025 and are producing close to what they did in 2024. [2] shows that coal based electricity produced is still increasing, but their overall CO2 emissions / kWh is lowering [3]
[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?dat...
[3] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?dat...
China gets most of its thermal coal locally, it imports specialty coking coal from Australia (to make metal), as well as some thermal coal. It also gets thermal coal from indonesia. It mines 10X what it imports, but really needs to import coking coal to keep making metals (it could probably survive on its own thermal coal reserves).
Coal is still used for making steel (and other stuff as well I guess), but that use is slowly getting replaced by hydrogen.