Henan S88 Expressway Photo by Windmemories
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By Jo Nova
Does this look like a country that cares about carbon emissions?
President Xi said he would “strictly control” coal power from 2021 to 2025, and he has strictly controlled… a huge increase in coal power.
President Xi: — Reuters (April 2021) –“We will strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase it down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030),” he said.
But nobody cares either:
China’s 2024 coal power construction hits 10-year high, researchers say
SINGAPORE, Feb 13 (Reuters) – China started construction on 94.5 gigawatts of coal-fired power in 2024, the highest volume of new builds since 2015, hampering the country’s transition away from fossil fuels, researchers said…
The surge came despite a record-breaking increase in renewable capacity last year and could make it harder to connect clean power to the grid, said the report, published by CREA and the Global Energy Monitor (GEM) think tank.
China also promised its emissions will peak in 2030, right when a whole squadron of these new plants will have barely started operation. But it’s OK because the new coal plants are only a “back up for renewable power”:
China has retired more than 100 GW of obsolete coal-fired power in the last decade, according to its energy regulator, and new projects can only be built to provide back-up for renewable energy bases.
So each year China is started building ten times as much coal power as it is retiring.
And all this coal power is needed despite the fact that President Xi China added a phenomenal 356 GW of wind and solar capacity in 2024 alone.
Where was all that wind and solar power when China needed electricity? — it was providing an excuse for all the extra coal plants China wanted to build.
Spot the strict limit on coal development in China…
These graphs cover Comissioning, Contruction, “Permitted”, New Project” and Retired coal plants in the last ten years.
We can all see for ourselves just how much work China has put in to stop “Climate change”.