China: Heatwaves worsen dependence on coal – 07/22/2023 – Environment

China has an answer to the heat waves that are hitting much of the northern hemisphere: burn more coal to maintain a steady supply of electricity for air conditioning.

Even before this year, China was already emitting nearly a third of all the world’s energy-related greenhouse gases — more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. China burns more coal every year than the rest of the world combined. Last month, China generated 14% more electricity via coal, its main power source, than it did in June 2022.

The country’s ability to increase coal consumption in recent weeks is the result of a huge national campaign over the past two years to expand mines and build more coal-fired power plants.

State media praised the 1,000 workers who toiled without vacation this spring to get one of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the south-east ready in time for the summer.

The paradox of Chinese energy policy is that the country also leads the world in installing renewable energy sources. It dominates most of the global supply chain for clean energy — from solar panels to battery storage and electric cars. However, for reasons of energy security and internal politics, it is reaffirming its bet on coal.

After three days of negotiations in Beijing, John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, said on Wednesday that China’s coal program was the thorniest issue. “The question now is how to get rid of some of this reliance on coal,” he said.

The United States, which emits less greenhouse gases than China, is taking a different tack. The country has not built a coal-fired power plant in a decade and has cut its use of coal by nearly half, boosting consumption of natural gas.

No country has as large underground coal reserves as China, whose authorities view domestic supplies as essential to their energy security. Zhang Jianhua, director of the government’s National Energy Administration, described coal as the “ballast stone” of his country’s energy mix.

“We must always view the protection of national energy security as the most important mission,” he said at a press conference.

Chinese top leader Xi Jinping said in April 2021 that his country would “tightly control coal-fired power projects, tightly control the increase in coal consumption” until 2025 and then “gradually reduce it” over the next five years.

In mid-September 2021, he banned, in a separate act, any further Chinese construction contracts for coal-fired power plants in other countries.

A week later, in late September 2021, hot weather overloaded the Chinese power grid and caused back-to-back blackouts across the country’s coast. Employees had just a few minutes’ notice to exit tall office buildings before elevators stopped working. A sudden blackout at a chemical plant triggered an explosion that left dozens of workers injured.

The debacle led to an emergency effort to increase coal extraction and build more coal-fired power plants. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent suspension of Russian energy supplies to Europe has intensified Beijing’s determination to depend on coal as the basis of its energy security.

China imports most of the oil and natural gas it uses. Much of it arrives via sea lanes controlled by the US or Indian navies, both of which are geopolitical rivals. After the partial meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, China limited the construction of nuclear power plants to a few sites near the coast.

As of January, China had more than 300 coal-fired power plants in various stages of proposal, authorization or construction, according to research group Global Energy Monitor. That’s two-thirds of the world’s coal-fired power generation capacity under development.

Also contributing to this boom is the fact that during the 2021 blackouts, Chinese provinces tried to store electricity and not sell it to other provinces. Many local and provincial governments responded by trying to build coal-fired power plants in their own areas.

“Building all this coal-fired super-redundant power will drive up our entire energy cost,” said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based environmental group.

Virtually all of China’s new power plants are being built by state-owned companies because private companies see the plants as financially unfeasible, said David Fishman, a Chinese electricity analyst at Hong Kong-based consultancy Lantau Group.

At the same time that China is building more and more coal-fired power plants, it is also leading the way in solar and wind power. It has already installed 3.5 times more solar capacity and 2.6 times more wind capacity than the United States, according to the International Renewable Energy Association, an intergovernmental group based in the United Arab Emirates.

The largest wind and solar projects tend to be located in sparsely populated western and northwestern regions of the country, where the weather is sunny and windy most of the year.

But these locations are far from the provinces closer to the coast, where most of the population lives and where many companies that consume a lot of energy are located – and where the weather is generally cloudier and with less wind.

Another big problem that China’s continued intense use of coal poses for climate change is the way in which coal is mined. More than in most countries, Chinese coal is mined underground, a practice that tends to release a lot of methane into the atmosphere.

Methane is 20 to 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in its atmosphere-warming effects. Chinese physicists have estimated that a quarter of the country’s methane emissions come from its more than 100,000 coal mines, most of which are small mines that have long been abandoned but still leak gases.

One unforeseen force, however, could help China reduce its reliance on coal: a meltdown in its housing market.

Factories consume two-thirds of China’s electricity, and the biggest users are the steel mills, cement and glass factories that supply the country’s massive construction efforts.

But home prices are falling because years of overbuilding have produced as many as 80 million vacant apartments. In the first half of this year, builders started building almost 25% fewer apartments than last year.

But even a housing slowdown won’t reverse the monumental investments in coal that China has just made.

“All the coal being added makes it difficult for the country to be more ambitious” in tackling climate change, said Michael Meidan, director of research on China’s energy sector at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, an independent think tank. “This potentially complicates a more aggressive schedule on emissions.”

_{Translated by Clara Allain}