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> All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself
by sippingabonedry 6d ago
> All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals
China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
- layer8 6d agoChina brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, but also 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind.
- tonfa 6d agoAnd coal is mostly flat, while electricity demand is going up. https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Transition-Review-2026.pdf https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Tr... (Page 14)
- leonidasrup 6d agoChina mined more coal in 2025 then ever, but burned less in coal plans. Coal is slowly shifting from electricity production to synthetic oil and chemical production. https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in-2025-even-as-it-burns-less/ https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in... https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-region-expand-coal-to-oil-output-energy-security-push-2026-06-12/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-regi...
- sippingabonedry 6d agoWhich is easy to do when you live an authoritarian state with plenty of vast desert wastelands to erect solar/wind farms. Was there a village there last week? Not anymore, it was in the way. And best of all they can build it all with Uyghur forced labor. Accolades for China all around!
- harimau777 6d agoYes, and? That's not really relevant to the topic at hand. No one has said that China is a utopia and paragon of human rights.
- piva00 6d agoI don't see the USA building out that much solar in its vast desert wastelands.
- consensus1 6d ago78 GW of coal is pretty damn near 78 GW. 315 GW of solar / wind capacity is nowhere near that level of utilization.
- Timon3 6d agoWould you mind sharing your source? AFAIK the coal plants are only backups, so it'd be very surprising if they're utilized as much as the solar capacity.
- alexgieg 6d agoChina is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those. With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.
- sippingabonedry 6d agoAre you saying China is doing whatever it needs to do to satisfy its power needs, hands forced by geopolitics, and not pure altruism? Say it isn't so.
- alexgieg 6d agoIn a saner world, they wouldn't need to be wary of a catastrophic oil shortage due to another power deciding to cut off their access to oil. A saner world is achieved when all countries agree to an international system of rules and conflict resolution and abide by agreements, so things are predictable in the long term. The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios. Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more.
- consensus1 6d agoYou can't bring back something that was never there
- AnimalMuppet 6d agoNot in an absolute sense, perhaps. But it was there enough to mostly function most of the time. And international life was more stable because of it.
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- bayindirh 6d ago> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that. Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours. Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.
- leonidasrup 6d agoLast year France produced 94% of electricity from low-carbon sources, that is impressive. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of-france-s-electricity-comes-from-low-carbon-sources https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of... China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-china-s-electricity-comes-from-low-carbon-sources https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...
- bayindirh 6d agoFor me, both are equally impressive actually. Europe has some great clean-energy countries. Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me.
- matthewdgreen 6d agoThis is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.
- leonidasrup 6d agoPopulation of China is 1404 milions, population of France is 66 milion, so per capita France produces more electricity. 95% and 50% show that France has electric grid with much lower carbon emissions per unit of energy then China. France build most of its nuclear reactors in 1980s (54 reactors within 15 years), as a reaction to oil schocks in 1970s. This transformation was faster then what is currently in China (again when compared per capita).
- Hikikomori 6d agoYet coal burning isn't going up in China. They also built more solar in 2025 than the US has in total. Also currently building 35+ reactors.
- counters 6d ago> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that. China also invested significantly in technology like flue gas desulfurization 10-20 years ago, as well as other approaches which try to mitigate some of the impact of coal burning. So while bringing online coal power plants is obviously and can never be carbon neutral, a more appropriate comparison would be to measure the new plants' additional GHG and SLCP emissions, and compare that to the approach in the US.
- 486sx33 6d ago[dead]
- dalyons 6d agocoal usage has declined there the last two years. Would have declined even more this year, except for a certain very smart war.
- throw0101a 6d ago> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that. If China (and India and …) sees the US and other industrialized doing nothing, why should they do anything? The most straight-forward way of solving is either through cap-and-trade (like acid rain was dealt with) or 'carbon dividend' (which Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, Volker, etc endorsed): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Carbon_Dividends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car... Then you put a 'carbon tariff' on imports for any country that does not have a similar system (e.g., EU's CBAM).
- SanjayMehta 6d agoThe US could help itself by reducing per capita energy consumption. Since they don't seem to consider this as an option, why indeed should China or India do anything?
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- RockIslandLine 5d agoAny nation is free to set a good example.
- SanjayMehta 5d agoLet the self proclaimed leader of the free world lead by example.
- ZeroGravitas 5d agoAnd yet their coal usage dropped (for electricity) or was flat (when you include e.g. coal to chemicals) while both electricity use and GDP grew about 5% Half-coal powered electrification is cleaner, greener, cheaper and smarter than sticking to ICE cars and gas heating for homes and industry. China has gone from 10% of final energy being electricity to 30% this century while US and Europe went from around 20% to just above 20%