China’s addiction to building new coal-fired power plants is becoming increasingly entrenched, even as the country is on track to reach peak CO2 emissions before its 2030 target. As climate officials from around the world prepare to meet in the United Arab Emirates for Cop28, many are hoping that the recent joint climate agreement between the US and China, released days before Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met in California, can lay the groundwork for positive commitments at the UN’s climate conference. The last major breakthrough involving China at Cop was at Cop26 in Glasgow, in 2021. At that conference, China pledged CO2 emissions would peak by 2030. Xi said that China would “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects”. But 2021 was also the year in which severe power outages blighted many parts of China, leading to rationing, closed factories and cold homes as local authorities struggled to cope with sudden shortages of energy.

In 2022, further energy crunches in south-west China underlined the importance of stable energy supplies to Chinese officials. That has put the commitment to reduce reliance on coal-fired energy in direct tension with the new emphasis on energy security. “Chinese officials view coal as the primary guarantee of energy security,” said Anders Hove, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “For this reason, it is now considered sensitive to criticise the country’s present investments in coal.” Local governments in China approved 50.4GW of new coal power in the first half of 2023. And in 2022, construction started on 50GW of coal capacity, an amount six times as large as the rest of the world combined. Despite growing demand for energy, China still has far more coal power capacity than it needs. Last year the average utilisation rate for coal power plants was just over 50%. Experts say that the way to ensure China’s energy security is to improve the technological infrastructure of the grid to make it more stable and efficient, not build new dirty generators. Getting the energy to the right place at the right time is one of the biggest challenges facing China’s energy transition. Local government officials, who are more concerned with keeping the lights on than with green targets, see coal as a safety net.“Energy storage is the key for China’s energy transition,” said Gao Yuhe, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia. Energy storage can enable “renewable energy to take a leading role in the whole energy transition”.    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/27/china-coal-addiction-spotlight-climate-ambitions-cop