kublikhan wrote:Sometimes China says they will do one thing and actually does another thing. For example, they said they would stop building coal plants, yet they continued to build new coal plants at a breakneck speed.Out of Step: CHINA IS DRIVING THE CONTINUED GROWTH OF THE GLOBAL COAL FLEETThe year 2018 marked a milestone: for the first time since China’s coal-building boom began in the 1980s, the coal fleet outside of China shrank. From January 2018 to June 2019, countries outside of China decreased their total coal power capacity by 8.1 gigawatts (GW), due to steady retirements and an ongoing decline in the commissioning of new coal plants. Yet over the same period China increased its coal fleet by 42.9 GW, and as a result the global coal fleet overall grew by 34.9 GW (Figure 1). As more countries turn away from coal and retire their plants, China’s continued pursuit of coal is increasingly out of step with he rest of the world, and is now effectively driving the ongoing expansion of the global coal fleet.
Today, 147.7 GW of coal plants are either under active construction or under suspension and likely to be revived—an amount nearly equal to the existing coal power capacity of the European Union (150 GW). Given the amount of capacity under development, China’s central government looks ready to increase—perhaps significantly—its 1,100 GW coal power cap, as set by its 13th Five-Year Plan (FYP 2016–2020). Coal and power industry groups are proposing the central government increase total coal power capacity by 20 to 40% to between 1,200 and 1,400 GW as part of China’s 2035 infrastructure plan. The 2035 infrastructure plan is expected to be released next year, and the 14th FYP in 2021.
The continued growth of China’s coal fleet and consideration of plans to significantly raise the nation’s coal power cap show that while the country is often hailed as a clean energy leader, the momentum of coal power expansion has yet to be halted. In July 2018, Global Energy Monitor (GEM) noted the central government was either unable or unwilling to slow the development of new coal plants permitted by provincial authorities in 2014–16. While the central government had issued measures slowing or stopping development on hundreds of coal plants in 2017, GEM found in 2018 that over a third of the restricted capacity had advanced in development or commissioning. Those trends have since continued, with about half of the capacity now moving forward in development.
The funny thing is they have much more coal power supply than they actually use. China's coal power plants are sitting idle half the time and yet they still build more. Despite the continued increase in coal power plants, China's coal consumption hasn't changed much in the last few years as it's still below it's 2013 peak.China Is Still Building an Insane Number of New Coal PlantsHere’s the weird thing—more than half the time, China’s coal plants are just sitting around collecting dust. If China already has more coal power than it needs, why does it keep building new plants?
The answer can be found in energy regulations crafted during the Chinese coal boom of the 1980s, says Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University. As China opened itself to market reforms, it accelerated economic development, and its energy supply simply couldn’t keep up. Coal is an abundant natural resource in China, so the government adopted several energy policies to encourage the construction of coal plants. As a result, the plants proliferated as fast as the government could process them.
But that, says Branstetter, is the other key to understanding how China came to build more power plants than it needed. When the central government was the one approving each new coal plant, it could ensure that supply approximated demand. That all changed in late 2014 when China’s federal government allowed provincial governments to approve power plants on their own. The idea was to expedite the years-long approval process for new power plants while also boosting China’s economy by meeting its projected energy needs.
“On the surface it sounds great: You’re decentralizing the permit process and making it simpler,” Branstetter says. “But unfortunately for China, this opened the floodgates and resulted in an explosion of coal power plant construction.”
Even if all those power plants end up on China’s grid, Branstetter says there’s a good chance they won’t be used to their full potential. “China has a long history of building energy capacity that is not fully utilized,” says Branstetter. “From a Western perspective this seems wasteful or inefficient, but the possibility exists that coal plants will be built and not utilized on the grid.”
Indeed, coal-powered electricity generation in China has flatlined, despite the explosive growth in the number of coal plants. According to Daisy Ren, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon who studies the economics of energy policy, China’s coal use is expected to peak around 2020. “We should be concerned about whether China is burning more coal in the future, but increasing its coal capacity is not equivalent to using that much coal.”
I believe this "overcapacity" is the result of China building new plants further away from major population centers in a serious effort to reduce urban air pollution. Heck when they hosted the Olympics they closed every nearby coal burning power station to let the air clear for the international athletes. Someone in authority realized that the lower medical expenses of treating large urban populations with cleaner air to breath more than offset the cost of building long distance power transmission systems.
