Red coal trucks zip up and down narrow dirt tracks, churning up clouds of dust in China’s remote Gansu province. Nearby, the towering stanchions of a new railway bridge rise out of a muddy river winding through the hills. The Huaneng Group, one of five big Chinese state utilities, is building a $1.9 billion 4 gigawatt coal and power project in the northwestern region near the city of Qingyang, with the aim of delivering its electricity to the east of the country.
President Xi Jinping surprised the world last week by pledging China would aim for “carbon neutrality” by 2060, but Beijing remains worried about energy security, jobs and growth, especially as the economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. China is adding wind, solar and hydropower projects at a heady pace so the Zhengning plant itself is unlikely to threaten any of the country’s carbon targets, and coal could still decline as a proportion of the country’s energy mix. China is also decommissioning outdated coal-fired plants and replacing them with new, more efficient power stations that will burn less coal and provide crucial baseload electricity to support the country’s shift towards more renewable energy.
“New coal plants are a way for provinces to support other industries like coal mining and heavy industry,” said Christine Shearer, coal programme director at GEM, which tracks fossil fuel infrastructure worldwide. “You have a lot of entrenched coal interests in China and the central government has not reined them in, despite Beijing’s strong support for clean energy,” she said. A study co-authored by a Chinese government-backed research institute said in January that China must end the construction of all new coal-fired power plants to meet its long-term climate goals in the most economically feasible manner.
Source: Trust
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