Typhoon Haikui helped create history when it blew through this massive wind turbine
off the coast of Fujian, China – this September.
In just one day, the turbine created enough power for 170,000 homes.
This is the crux of the story of China’s energy transition this decade – that sees
record after record being broken.
Almost half the world’s operating wind power capacity is in China.
It even has more solar capacity than the US, EU and – actually – the rest of the world
combined.
China is building renewable capacity to a scale literally off the charts.
And yet, China has a terrible reputation.
“China’s carbon emissions are nearly twice what the US has”
So, is China a climate hero, or a climate villain?
Or is there more to the story?
There are two main commitments that China has made
One is to hit a peak in carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 – which means they need to lower
carbon emissions after.
And to be Carbon neutral by 2060 – where they balance emissions out by absorbing the
same amount of carbon from the atmosphere as they emit – like with trees or technology.
It’s carbon peak by 2050, I think this could actually be moved ahead.
It already looks like it very much achieves what it set out for carbon peak much earlier.
Many other analysts believe this too.
China is also leading the world.
when you look at the consumption of coal.
So half of the consumption of coal of the entire world is consumed in China.
This is the big contradiction.
Over 80% of China’s primary energy comes from coal, oil or gas – which ends up making
it is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouses gases.
Post-Pandemic, China announced a “phase down” in fossil fuels.
But it didn’t last long.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China began ramping up its fossil fuel investments.
It is now building six times as many coal-fired power plants as the rest of the world combined.
That's two new coal plants every week.
Beijing says its developing population needs "energy security”.
China has repeatedly had energy blackouts.
So in the years 21 and 22 certain regions had suddenly no electricity.
And I mean, if it's in the winter and it's cold and, you know, hospitals or family with
elderly people don't have a warm heating system, that's quite dramatic.
Heatwaves across the country drove up demand for energy in these years.
Think air-conditioning.
The Guangdong province, for example, required almost 5% more energy in 2022 than the previous
year.
Its capital had a blackout.
From China's point of view, this energy security is very much linked to its staying in power
because if people are not doing well, that could be a political risk.
The new plants do not necessarily mean that coal-related-emissions will go up significantly
– but they do extend its reliance on coal.
And the more coal we have in the system, the higher the impact on global warming.
Coal makes sense for China right now because of its abundant supplies – it's got the
fourth largest reserves in the world – and the country has a long history and knowledge
of how to tap into it: cheaply and at scale.
Replacing coal is not easy, particularly when you don't have a viable alternative for high
quality heat you know you need.
You (kind of) need to combust something, typically to use it for industrial processes like steel
and cement manufacturing.
China has a huge industrial footprint, meaning that you need a high base load power capacity
at all times.
And it's not impossible, but it's very difficult to achieve that in a very large electricity
system purely with renewables.
One reason China is not using its vast resources renewable yet is because they are not well
integrated into the country’s grid.
Another reason is that itÄs battery storage isn’t at the point where solar can be preserved
on dark days or wind can be preserved on non-windy ones - at scale.
Analysts say the cleaner way forward for China would be to focus on improving the technological
infrastructure of the grid to make it more sustainable and efficient, not build new dirty
generators.
But China cannot afford to take the political risk of blackouts, nor the economic one for
now.
It is extremely politically sensitive, particularly when it comes to employment and tax revenue.
But it's also the case that jobs in the coal mining industry in particular are already
being lost at a very rapid rate.
Coal is embedded into the system.
But as we saw before, renewable investments are still huge.
The country attracted more than half a trillion dollars in investments in 2022 into solar,
wind energy, electric vehicles and batteries.
That is nearly four times the amount the U.S. did.
Wind, solar, energy storage, electric vehicles.
These are really (kind of) the emerging stars in our domestic economy.
And I think increasingly54 policymakers realise the important contributions they can provide.
To not just our decarbonisation agenda, but to our economic growth.
It’s forging ahead in many ways.
“These include very favourable state policies.
It includes China's ability to build the supply chains of those key technologies in a very
short period of time.”
The country also issues approvals for renewable energy very quickly, as opposed to say, the
US, where one county met for 19 nights to debate a single wind farm.
This is paying off for China which now dominates the solar manufacturing sector worldwide - and
produces as much as 80% of all solar panels.
And it is also paying off for the rest of the world.
Cheap solar PV cells have significantly pulled down costs of solar energy globally, making
it the cheapest renewable energy in many countries.
India and Pakistan, for example, have been able to significantly decarbonise their OWN
economies.
But all of this does come at a significant cost too.
The domestic cost of that in terms of you know, polluted water, air?
The human cost has been enormous.
The Three Gorges Dam, for example, was an environmental disaster and the impacts of
lithium mining for batteries are huge parts of the flipside of China’s climate trajectory
that cannot be ignored.
Within the climate justice movement, I kind of find myself saying sometimes, well, you
know, if you want a world that's going to consume this amount of energy per year, it's
going to come at an environmental cost.
And the question is what is the acceptable level of environmental cost?
Though there’s another sticking point China puts forward.
While it is true that China is the world’s top polluter, and only growing, counting the
emissions over time tells a very different story.
The USA has been the biggest historical emitter.
That means the US is responsible for 17% of the emissions that have contributed to the
climate crisis since 1850, with China at 12%.
Leaders of both countries met earlier this month – and agreed to do more.
They even pledged to triple their renewable capacity by 2030.
And everybody is watching out for the moves of these two big players at the climate conference
taking place in Dubai.
Because what both countries do really matters.
China is now very clearly in the driving seat of the world's climate outcomes and unless
trying to decarbonise as, we might as well just give up and go home so.
You.
All of what I've said may be true, but it's also important to be smart in keeping the
pressure up on China to decarbonise as quickly as it possibly can.
China must cut its reliance on coal but it’s hard to ignore the fact that without China’s
bold renewables strategies, the world would probably have no hope of cutting greenhouse
gas emissions fast enough to avoid a catastrophic global warming scenario without it.