If you’ve been watching the deployment of renewable energy around the world, you probably know that China is described as “the undisputed leader in renewable energy, currently installing nearly twice as much wind and solar as every other country put together.” But China is also where you will find “roughly half of all coal power plants, it is the world’s biggest emitter, last year generating roughly twice as much carbon dioxide as the United States and European Union combined” (though of course it must be said that China’s population of 1.4 billion is ~1.8 times that of the US and EU combined).
This contradiction has been maintained by the country continuing to invest heavily in both renewable energy and fossil fuels. But now the country is at a crossroads, according to this Yale E360 article, “because, as of last year, wind and solar aren’t just supplementing coal power generation, but replacing it. Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland, recently found that China’s transition to clean energy is, for the first time, driving a decline in emissions, raising the prospect that the country has finally reached ‘peak CO2.’”
According to Myllyvirta, China is now going to have to make consequential decisions about “reforming the grid — China’s grid management is still quite outdated and rigid, and that will have to change if the country is to keep adding vast amounts of solar and wind.” Policy makers will also have to wrestle with what to do with relatively new coal-fired power plants (built in the last 5 years) that were constructed to address electricity shortages experienced from 2020 to 2022. Should these plants be connected to the grid when it is likely that demand can be met through renewables?
If the plants are not connected then it would seem reasonable to start closing some of them down but the government could also “put brakes on the clean energy expansion to give the coal industry some breathing room. And that is, of course, a hugely consequential choice.”
Myllyvirta says he has no inclination about which way the government will go saying “the stakes are so high on both sides now. On the one hand, you have these powerful, influential companies on the coal industry side. On the other hand, the clean energy boom has been a major driver of China’s economy in the past few years.”
Since emissions don’t heed political boundaries, what this country of 1.4 billion people ends up doing will have an effect on us all.
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