I was gonna say "then why did China add so much coal last year", because I remembered reading that they added something like 50GW of coal, even as they added more than 150GW renewable.

But as of Jan 1 2024, they also had to introduce a financial incentive just to keep coal plants online, because otherwise the coal plants can't compete on price, just like you said! Some weird economics going on here, but it seems like China is still adding coal just to maximize total power deployed, even if it's uneconomic at the margins.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-guarantee-payments...