China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal

a yes, they already said that already in 2015, 2017

For a good portion of the nation, _some_ power is better than no power. Unlike the west which had electrified heavily early on, India has lagged on that front. The government of india is building coal capacity, as well as renewable capacity. We are rather fortunate that our peak of power use oft coincides with peak solar (as, our largest non industrial power consumers have usually been air conditioners).

The electricity demand in india is only going to grow, and i would expect that coal will be one of the many sources of electricity, and will probably decline.

As a society, I hope that we electrify, and fast.

We are also seeing a revolution of electric scooters in the country, which are cost competitive with ICE scooters already (less than 33% more). If this trend continues, I would expect that the demand for electricity will further grow

It's not that cheap. And it's not abundant locally so they have to import it. The reality is that it's more cost effective to generate energy using wind and solar at this point. Which is why China is deploying so much of that. You are right they don't care as much about the environment. But they do care about cost.

Coal stopped being economical in most places years ago. That's why so many coal plants are closing everywhere. The reason the Chinese are still building coal plants is that they can't ramp up solar and wind production quick enough and they don't want to switch to gas at this point, which would be a temporary thing as well.

As per their plans a few years ago, they would bridge the gap with nuclear and renewables with temporary coal plants with that peaking a few years from now and that ultimately being largely gone by 2065.

However, the calendar keeps shifting there, in favor of solar and wind. Which is why this article is projecting the number of plants to still grow but less coal burned overall. Which is good news of course. I think their nuclear plans are being adjusted downwards for the same reasons. Cost.

So you are convinced that those empty apartments are actually a rational, planned investment that will be useful in the future, and not just a classical misallocation of money?

I have seen the results of a previous real estate bubble in Spain. Plenty of homes in weird locations, slowly falling apart, never occupied, some never even finished. As the local left said: "People without homes, homes without people". I am not a leftist, but they were onto something here.

The estimates vary but China has ~60 million empty homes/apartments which is vastly larger than the US homeless population which runs ~0.6 million people each year when you include people living in temporary housing.

There’s many ways to slice these numbers but it’s not even vaguely close.

It's obviously incentivized by energy security. But PRC has also stopped funding/constructing new coal plants abroad. So their incentive to limit new emissions is at least genuine. They could have pocketed 100s of billions in BRI coal plant projects.

Like US did massive shale/LNG build out for energy security, except they ended up being the largest producer/exporter of both.

But they are not going to be impacted less if they burn less (on the margin). Most of the impact is already locked in in short term.

But thankfully they will easily find some external enemies to blame for their own mistakes and nuke from orbit.

I think you’re missing the emphasis. The headlines is that less coal is being burned, which implies less emissions. But there arent less emissions - its a false hope.

In some ideal world - yes. In the real world that number can be easily cheated and hard to verify, and hard to translate into emissions, due to different tech, different fuel composition, different usage patterns and so on. So estimate, then use estimate to estimate a bigger picture and on and on, introducing errors every time and never being sure about base numbers, if they are true or fake.

We can't cheat or fake CO2 level in the atmosphere. You can plop a spectrometer in the middle of Beijing and no CCP can alter that number (there was a fun permanent scandal similar to this, when US embassy in China was measuring air pollution daily and published it in Xitter, CCP was furious). No politicians at COP9000 can sit together and fudge some numbers to make their work look good and important. It's just there, in every place on this planet, easily measurable by everyone.

See, this is exactly what I was talking about. With all due respect to the IFA and all other people involved in the climate issue - they obviously know more than me, they obviously have a better expertise. And they may be even correct. Who knows, maybe emissions are indeed slowing down. The problem is that "Emissions" is a doubly problematic value. It is a derivative number (because it is impossible to measure directly), so it is an estimation which relies on other estimations. And another problem is that it is kinda meaningless on its own, we aren't interested in the emissions per se, we are interested in the damage done by them, in particular temperature. And temperature depends on the amount of GH gasses deposited by emissions.

So IFA paints a bright rosy future for us, emissions peaked and will even go down. But if we go to the agency measuring actual CO2 in the atmosphere (and let's not forget about methane and other gasses), we see that the graph is only ever increasing and slowly turning upwards from the mean line, accelerating. https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/

PS: I really hope to be wrong in this. Reeeeally hope.

>their emissions may well peak within the next few years, between 2026 and 2030.

That's quite a hypothetical feat that will not actually happen.

Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal so it is in China's economic interests to put in more solar and wind so I personally don't think they need to lie about it. Now politicians in China fudging numbers that their cities or provinces have met targets is not out of question but economically adding more solar, wind and batteries makes more sense. I predict in 3-4 years China will start removing a lot of coal from its grid as cost of solar and batteries drop another 40-50%.

Recently I was looking how many electric vehicles China alone has added in the last 4-5 years and it hit me that had China not gone big on electric the world's oil consumption would be few million barrels per day more and the prices would be above $120+ per barrel.

If anything, their predictions will have a bias to overstate economic growth and demand for electricity.

Why do you assume electric batteries have to be used?

We've had things like reservoir lakes for hydro plants for a long time. Energy can be stored in more ways than electrical.

China has over 20 nuclear plants under construction and another 70 planned.

Hydrogen and gas turbines are available today.

Grid-scale lithium batteries are being built in Australia and California. With enough PV they are profitable today. Costs of batteries have been exponentially going down by 13% every year (halving in 5 years) for 3 decades.

They are already the cheapest in Australia, and at some point, grid-scale batteries are going to be cheaper than gas peakers everywhere.

To do baseload with solar it's easy: deploy enough PV and back that with 20 hours grid scale batteries.

Sources: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/australia-leads-globa...

Energy use per person is going down in developed nations.