The growth in China’s demand for coal-fired power – and the construction of new plants to generate it – is a case of full steam ahead.
Where the climate industrial complex is delighted by the destruction of reliable and affordable power supplies in the West, it stands powerless against China’s insatiable demand for coal-fired electricity. And it’s growing ever more furious at the fact that China is taking the West for fools and knaves.
In what passes for Chinese diplomacy, the CCP might mouth welcome platitudes about reducing their carbon dioxide emissions, some time, generations from now. But, ever inscrutable, the regime is not about to give up on the cheapest and most reliable source of electricity there is: coal-fired power. And why would it?
The CCP must be both bemused and delighted with the manner in which an energy rich country like Australia has deliberately destroyed its reliable and affordable power supplies with massive (and seemingly endless) subsidies to hopelessly unreliable wind and solar.
It’s a model that is, of course, in tune with the climate industrial complex’s mandate to get control of the global economy, via claims that human-generated carbon dioxide gas is destroying the planet. The naturally occurring stuff, barely rates a mention.
However, we digress.
The point of this post is to, once again, counter the myth that China is headed for a renewable energy Nirvana; one where it would start using some of the millions of solar panels and wind turbines that it produces, rather than dumping them on virtue signalling Western nations. Now, for the facts.
China’s coal use offsets global cuts
The Times
Ben Webster
7 April 2021
A big increase in coal-fired power stations opening in China offset all the closures in the rest of the world last year, a report says.
Coal plants with a collective capacity of 37.75 gigawatts were retired globally last year, with the US shutting down 11.3 gigawatts and the European Union 10.1 gigawatts, according to analysis by Global Energy Monitor, a group that monitors fossil fuel trends. The total reduction was close to the record of 37.8 gigawatts that closed in 2015.
However, China opened 38.4 gigawatts of new plants in the same period, just over three quarters of the global total of 50.3 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity. China is building 88.1 gigawatts of coal power and a further 158.7 gigawatts are planned, totalling 246.8 gigawatts, half of all new coal plant capacity in development globally.
China’s continued reliance on coal is undermining the UK’s plan to make the closure of coal plants a key theme of COP26, the UN climate conference due to be held in Glasgow in November.
Coal supplied only 1.6 per cent of the UK’s electricity last year, down from almost 25 per cent five years ago. The country’s three remaining coal-fired power stations are due to close by 2024.
India was second to China in the amount of coal capacity that opened last year but its total of 2 gigawatts was well down on its annual average of 17 gigawatts from 2010 to 2017.
Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which contributed to the report, said: “Dozens of new coal power projects, equal to the total coal power capacity of Germany and Poland combined, were announced last year in China. These projects are a key test of the country’s pledge to reach peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060. Cancelling them would put the country on track to the low-carbon development the leadership says it wants to pursue.”
The Times
Of course China ‘wasn’t going to follow through’ with climate promises
The Australian
Nick Cater
7 April 2021
Of course China wasn’t going to follow through with its climate promises because the Kyoto agreement gave them a “leave pass”.
China has generated over 50 per cent of the world’s total coal-fired power in 2020 despite climate goal pledges and the building of hundreds of renewable energy plans.
“We gave them every incentive to do this when we gave China and India and other so-called developing countries a leave pass. They don’t have to meet any targets until 2030 at least, so of course, they’re piling it on,” he said.
“That quantity of 36.9 gigawatts of new coal-fired power last year… our total is 24 gigawatts, so that means, in the first eight months of last year, China built the same amount of coal-fired power extra than we have in this country. So if we were to shut our entire fleet down, it wouldn’t have made any difference, China would have replaced it within eight months.
“In the end, this is the international process that we put so much store-buy, that stuffed this up.
“Why give China a leave pass until 2030 when they’re bound to inflate it as high as they can so after that they can start to show they’re cutting it?”
The report also revealed that more coal plants were retired under President Trump than in President Obama’s second term, despite Trump promising to end the “war on coal”. A total of 52.4 gigawatts was retired in 2017-21, exceeding the 48.9 gigawatts shut down in the preceding four years.
The Australian
STOP THESE THINGS 
Re coal plants closing lately in the US. Ending the war on coal during President Trump’s watch did not stop the major factor that made life harder for coal, that was the fracking revolution that started under Obama (despite his objections) and it gathered momentum into the Trump era. The point was that Trump ended the war on fossil fuels and let the market decide how that would pan out.
Obama might have been able to slow down the fracking revolution if the Democrats had control of the House and the Senate, now Biden will do his best to do what Obama could not do. God save America:) They will sacrifice their greatest strategic advantage in energy production and have to start importing oil again.