Out of Step
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The 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.1 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).....MUCH MORE ( 17 page PDF)
As more countries turn away from coal and retire their plants, China’s continued pursuit of coal is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world, and is now effectively driving the ongoing expansion of the global coal fleet.China’s recent growth is due to a brief but massive spree of project permitting that occurred from September 2014 to March 2016, a period when the central government delegated permitting to provincial authorities who had strong incentives to approve and build coal plants to hit province-level economic targets.
The permitting spree brought a cohort of 245 GW of new projects nearly equivalent to the U.S. coal fleet (254 GW) into the developmental pipeline, inflating what was already an overbuilt coal power fleet, with the average running hours for China’s coal plants hovering around 50% since 2015. 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.
Yet while the central government has allowed most of the plants from the permitting boom to continue into construction and commissioning, it has also introduced measures that have significantly slowed the rate of new coal proposals and permits since the boom, with only 8.5 GW of newly proposed coal power capacity and 2.6 GW permitted for construction over the past year. However, the country’s proposal to increase total coal power capacity by up to 1,400 GW suggests these measures are at risk of being weakened or reversed.....
