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Even though solar and wind power are growing at a blistering pace

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In Shuozhou, a nondescript city of 1.6m people in northern China’s Shanxi province, the veins of the local economy run black with coal. To the north of the city lies one of the largest open-pit mines in the country. Shuozhou’s mines churn out 200m tonnes of the black stuff every year (the country as a whole produces 4.8bn tonnes). Lines of trucks carry it to be washed, sorted, then burned in power stations across the country. If China ditched coal in favour of cleaner sources of power, the city “would be finished”, warns Sun Zhigang, a recently retired miner who is out walking his dog in the park.

Shuozhou probably need not worry. Wind capacity tripled and solar capacity increased by a factor of 30 from 2014 to 2024, giving China more wind and solar capacity than the rest of the world combined. On March 5th, at the annual session of China’s parliament, the prime minister, Li Qiang, talked up “green” and “low-carbon” development. But few coal-fired plants are being retired in China—and more are being built. Last year construction started on enough of them to produce 100 gigawatts (gw) of energy (see map), on top of the 1,170gw of capacity already installed. That addition alone would be roughly equivalent to the capacity of Britain. Though the share of electricity being generated by coal is shrinking (see chart), the amount of coal being burned continues to increase with soaring demand. Officials seem to think that the costs of phasing out the fossil fuel, which supplies over half of the power China generates, are too great. Are they right?

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The stakes are high. China’s coal-fired power sector creates about 15% of global carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Even though average utilisation per plant has fallen to below 50%, overall generation is still increasing as more plants are built, with China looking to create still more capacity in case it needs it. Coal mines also release methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

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More from China

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On current trends, China’s carbon-dioxide emissions might peak in the next year or two, but then plateau as coal usage slows, rather than fall rapidly. That would stop the country from eliminating net emissions—becoming “carbon neutral”—by 2060, as it has pledged. It would also undercut global efforts to combat climate change.

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Counting the cost

Cutting coal use faster would be painful for many. One big cost would fall on power companies. The country’s coal-fired plants are, on average, just 12 years old, so most could keep generating for decades. Their owners would either have to swallow the costs of retiring them early, or else retrofit them to become cleaner by adding technology to try to capture the carbon they release. An ambitious phase-out could cost as much as $1.4trn, according to a study published in January by researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing and at the University of Maryland.

Chart: The Economist

Still, that would be spread over decades, and it would also be borne by state-owned firms, rather than more fragile private ones. In theory China’s carbon market, set up in 2021, should motivate them to clean up. Such schemes can put more polluting companies at a competitive disadvantage by making them buy credits to offset emissions. But China’s market has had little impact so far because regulators just give out most credits for free. Another flaw is that the market is not based on companies’ total emissions but on their emissions per unit of power. That incentivises them to upgrade their old coal-fired generators to more efficient new ones, but not to stop using coal altogether.

A second cost to cutting coal would fall on workers. In Shuozhou it is hard to find anyone whose job is not linked to the industry. Some families have been mining for three generations. In a part of the city that was purpose-built for miners, a park celebrates them with stone carvings of coal trucks, machinery and triumphant labourers.

In the dust

Across China, the sector employs about 2.7m people in mining or processing. Yet that accounts for just 0.4% of the country’s total workforce. And, strikingly, it is only half as many jobs as there were in the industry a decade ago. Thousands of small coal mines have been closed because of a government campaign to reduce mining accidents. The remainder have become more automated. Last year one open-pit mine in the western region of Xinjiang boasted that the 300 smart vehicles it used to strip topsoil were controlled by just six employees. In other words, much of the pain brought about by lay-offs has already been felt. Wind and solar power, which require lots of workers for installations and maintenance, are a rapidly growing source of jobs. In 2023 the renewable-energy sector employed 7.4m people, a third more than the year before.

The third and biggest cost to cutting coal, as China’s leaders see it, would be for the country’s energy security. China has to import most of its oil and gas but has big coal reserves. In 2021 officials were spooked when droughts disrupted hydropower supplies, leading to blackouts in some of China’s industrial centres. Then in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, pushing up oil and gas prices. Meanwhile, a manufacturing boom increased demand for power. All of that convinced policymakers that more coal was needed to keep the lights on in factories and houses.

A lobby of mining firms and officials with ties to coal-rich regions is encouraging this line of thinking. So are some local governments, who like to build more power plants than are really needed to avoid having to rely on other regions when demand is high. And things are not helped by conservative grid operators, who want to be sure they will always have enough electricity, according to one academic who advises them. “They always say the more coal plants the better; they never say the fewer the better.”

A bolder approach could let China phase down coal without causing power cuts, says Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (crea), a think-tank in Finland. It would need lots more renewable power and big upgrades to China’s grid to allow clean energy to be transferred over long distances or stored (to offset for the fact it can be generated only when the sun shines or the wind blows). All that would require huge sums of money. Clean-energy investments came to $940bn, or 10% of China’s gdp, in 2024. Just that year China installed more solar-power capacity (277gw) than exists in the whole of the United States (200gw).

The bottleneck is that China lacks a flexible, nationwide power market that could ensure clean power is efficiently dispatched to where it is needed. At the moment most power is sold locally through long-term contracts, which typically favour coal-fired plants by guaranteeing the purchase of fixed amounts of power. Attempts to reform the system are slow. In the last quarter of 2024 China’s wind and solar power utilisation dropped despite favourable weather, thanks to an “oversupply” of coal-fired power, according to analysis by crea. All this threatens to further entrench the role of coal in the power system and will make it expensive to phase it out, says Yan Qin of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The more plants that are built, the higher the cost of abandoning them.

In Shuozhou, at least, few locals believe that China could ever cut its coal habit. When local pits are exhausted, there is plenty more coal elsewhere in China, notes one mine administrator. Consumption might start to decline soon, he says, but only very slowly. “It can’t be phased out,” says Zhu Zhiming, a former coal-truck driver who now runs a restaurant near one of the city’s mines. “They will keep mining it for a hundred years.” ■

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Источник: www.economist.com