Not dying: Global approvals of coal plants back up to 2015 high

By Jo Nova

According to expert reporters, and smug academics, Coal is dead, a stranded asset, and a dying investment all around the globe.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has just published a graph of global approvals of coal-fired plants over the last ten years. For some inexplicable reason, the original graph was various shades of blue and green, by crikey. (Almost like the IEA hoped that no one would notice the contribution from China?).

But obviously, the CCP is always Communist Red, so I fixed the graph for them. We can see how badly China wants to achieve Net Zero right here in the graph We can also see how good President Xi is at sticking to his words — look at the ramp up from 2021.

These are just approvals for coal plants, of course, but the IEA says “China started construction of nearly 100GW of new coal fired plants”. No one is planning a coal plant in 2025 that they want to shut down in 2035.

 

Australia’s total coal fired capacity (built over the last fifty years) is 18GW. China approved five times as many new coal plants in a single year as we currently run.

In 2021, China promised the UN that they would “strictly limit” coal growth and their emissions would peak before 2030.

Reuters, 2021:  China will start phasing down coal use from 2026 as part of its efforts to slash greenhouse gas emissions, President Xi Jinping said at a summit of global leaders on Thursday…

“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.

 

Xi’s comments mean that China’s coal consumption, by far the highest in the world, will reach a peak in 2025 and start to fall thereafter. Xi already pledged last year to bring China’s emissions to a peak before 2030 and make the country “carbon neutral” by 2060. “China has committed to move from carbon peak to carbon neutrality in a much shorter timespan than what many developed countries might take, and that requires hard efforts from China,” Xi told the summit.

As we all know, the media is one giant gas-lighting propaganda cartel. Tell the children.