But when I went to check it out I found this - which reminds me of the ghost cities China has build - cities with nobody living there.
To meet its climate goal as stipulated in the Paris agreement, China will need to reduce its coal power capacity by 40 percent over the next decade, according to Global Energy Monitor’s analysis. At present, this seems unrealistic. In addition to roughly 1,000 gigawatts of existing coal capacity, China has 121 gigawatts of coal plants under construction, which is more than is being built in the rest of the world combined. But here’s the weird thing—more than half the time, China’s coal plants are just sitting around collecting dust. If China already has more coal power than it needs, why does it keep building new plants?
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Local governments were under enormous political pressure to increase the economic productivity in their region and saw new coal plants as a great shortcut. China’s energy policies from the '80s and '90s basically guaranteed new coal plants would turn a profit, so local officials were incentivized to approve as many new coal plants in their region as possible—and that’s exactly what they did. The following year, the capacity of newly approved coal plants in China tripled.
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Indeed, coal-powered electricity generation in China has flatlined, despite the explosive growth in the number of coal plants. According to Daisy Ren, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon who studies the economics of energy policy, China’s coal use is expected to peak around 2020. “We should be concerned about whether China is burning more coal in the future, but increasing its coal capacity is not equivalent to using that much coal,” Ren says. Still, if China has any hope of meeting its climate goals, it needs to be retiring coal plants, not opening new ones.
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Although China continues to be a world leader in the deployment of renewable energy resources, its continuing reliance on coal also means its carbon footprint tops the charts. The path forward is clear, but whether Chinese officials can strike a balance between economic imperatives and solutions to a mounting climate emergency is not.
https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insane-number-of-new-coal-plants/
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