China will allow the construction of new coal power plants through at least 2027 but with restrictions aimed at limiting emissions and boosting renewables, according to a newly released action plan.
The plan clears the way to build new plants where needed to shore up the supply of power or to balance solar and wind, Bloomberg reports. To that end, new coal plants must be able to ramp up and ramp down quickly. The plan also directs new plants to burn coal more efficiently than the existing fleet, and it will require some new power stations to run less than 20 percent of the time.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has called for curbing the consumption of coal starting in 2026, and despite a recent surge in the construction of coal generators, China permitted fewer new plants last year than the year before.
Even as coal plants multiply, and coal burning edges upwards, the average plant is also burning less coal. In the early 2000s, Chinese coal plants were running roughly 70 percent of the time, but today they are running only around 50 percent of the time. In competition with cheap solar and wind, a large share of coal plants are now operating at a loss.
As renewables continue to grow in China, writes Oxford data scientist Hannah Ritchie, coal generators will increasingly serve as “peaker” plants, meeting spikes in demand or gaps in supply. “Most of the world is used to gas playing that role. But China has never embraced gas,” she writes. “So, coal is the ‘flexible’ or ‘peaker’ fuel of choice.”
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