by kragen | 2025-09-01 10:41:02+00:00
Although it's somewhat obnoxious, I'll quote Rui Ma's summary in https://xcancel.com/ruima/status/1955372325970514161:

> Hey n00bs: the up‑and‑to‑the‑right charts people fling around about China’s coal tell you almost nothing you think they do. Here's what actually matters:

> 1/ China’s electricity supply exploded over the last decade (versus stagnant for US)

> 2/ new growth is now being met mostly by clean power, coal is at all time low % of total

> 3/ grid delivery got a lot better (bigger and more efficient)

> 4/ China’s power‑sector emissions look like they peaked or are peaking, like 5 years ahead of its official deadline

> So if you reply with “BUT COAL PLANTS!!1!” without talking about utilization, per‑capita numbers, or the grid, you’re, uh, auditioning for the quote‑tweet (thx ChatGPT for this insult).

> More details below for those who have more than half a brain cell available: ...

Coal plant approvals in China last year ended up even lower than the 66.7 GW number you give, only 62.24 GW: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... That's for all of 02024, not (as you said) the first half.

Contrary to your assertion, that is the peak ("(p)") or nameplate capacity of the coal plants in question. However, coal plants do have a higher capacity factor than solar plants, which may have been what you were trying to say. In the US, which has the best data available, coal plants are operated with an average capacity factor of 42% (much lower than historical averages around 75%) while PV is down at 23%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capaci... but I think that in China the gap is wider. From memory, I think I worked out that China's average solar capacity factor has been around 10%, while coal is nearly 50%.

So 62GW(p) of coal capacity built would be about 30GW 'permanently available'. Moreover, However, not all of those regulatorily approved projects will actually come to fruition. You can see from boulos's numbers that only about half of approved plants ever get built. So 62GW approved is more like an average of 15GW actually produced—for the few short years before the plants are shut down.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not scalable quickly enough to meet rising energy demands". China was indeed having a hard time scaling electrical generation quickly enough to meet rising energy demands, back when they were more heavily coal-dependent. They had a full-blown crisis in 02021 with widespread blackouts. But that's because fossil fuels aren't scalable. That's why they installed 500 GW (half a terawatt) of new electrical generation capacity last year, half of which is solar and 80% of which is renewables. As Lauri Myllyvirta says in https://xcancel.com/laurimyllyvirta/status/19603213250099530..., it's probably also why they're still building even the small amount of coal-fired generation capacity they are:

> Permitting of a massive wave of new coal plants was a knee-jerk response to early-2020s power shortages and grid challenges from rapid wind and solar growth. The coal industry marketed itself as the solution, showing its entrenched influence. Since then, better grid operation and storage have largely addressed those issues, while the coal projects approved at the time are still under construction. A huge pipeline of already permitted projects remains.

He cites https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-coal-is-los... for further information.

I don't have a good handle on consumer electricity prices in China, but from Rui Ma's figures in https://xcancel.com/ruima/status/1960397673921699955, they don't seem to be exponentially rising; the average residential rate she gives is 0.542 RMB/kWh, which is US$0.076/kWh. That was for 02019. According to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e..., in 02024, Chinese consumers were paying US$0.08/kWh for their electricity, so they basically haven't seen a price increase in five years. And they're paying less than half the average in the US, where solar deployment is so much less advanced.

By the way, my comment you were replying to cited 5 sources of reliable information. This comment, in reply to yours, cites two reliable sources, plus Statista, World Population Review, and two people on Twitter. Your comment disagreeing with mine cites zero sources, and unsurprisingly virtually every assertion in it is wrong. I corrected five factual errors in your four-sentence comment, and I suspect there are more. Don't you have any information to contribute? Do you just not care whether what you're saying is true or not? Do you think that insufficient ignorance is a big problem in the world, so you'd like to create additional ignorance?