China Leads the World on Renewables, But It’s Still Addicted to Burning Rocks

A coal-fired power plant constructed last year in in Bijie, China. Tao Liang/Xinhua/Zuma Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily . This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2021, China’s leader Xi Jinping made two important promises intended to signal China‘s commitment to fighting climate change. At the Leaders Climate Summit in that April, he announced that China would “ strictly control ” coal generation until 2025 when it would start to gradually phase it out. He also pledged that year that China would reduce the energy intensity of its economy—the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP—to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. This month, as China unveiled its plans for the next five years, both promises appeared to be in trouble. The annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and attended by some 3,000 delegates, is the occasion for China’s Communist Party leaders to make important policy announcements to China and the world. This year’s meeting was keenly watched: Running from March 5 to March 12, it marked the launch of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, a set of national policies and targets that will determine the shape and ambitions of China’s economy up to 2030. China is the biggest installer of renewable energy, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest user of coal. 2030 is also the date by which China promised , in 2015, that the country will have peaked its greenhouse gas emissions, a milestone on the way to becoming carbon neutral by 2060. Since first making that commitment a decade ago, China’s leadership has further promised to bring the peaking date forward. What happens in the next five years will determine if those promises can be kept. But analysts fear that the continuing growth in the numbers of China’s coal-fired power stations and the lack of any clear commitment in the new five-year plan to call a halt to coal expansion, may make both promises impossible to reach. China’s government can point to some progress in the long battle against coal: In 2015 coal generated 69 percent of China’s primary energy, and by 2024 it was down to 56 percent (still much higher than the United States at 8 percent ). But the actual volume of coal consumed was greater than ever, simply because China’s electricity demand continues to grow. Despite its efforts to reduce coal use, four years after Xi Jinping’s pledges, China was consuming 40 percent more coal than the rest of the world combined. That total might have been greater still if not for China’s impressive growth in renewable energy. China installed a record 300 gigawatts of solar power and 100 gigawatts of wind power last year, which meant that the continuing increase in China’s electricity demand was largely met by clean energy. But although China’s decades-long investm