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Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

> coal is expensive and unreliable

Please elaborate. China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal, with last year hitting a new high of coal deployment[1]. Why would they do that if it's expensive and unreliable? The letter you linked is advocating for a new gas plant.

And no, I am not advocating for building more coal plants.

[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/4658e336-930f-49db-abc9-0036ee0ea...

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They are building more plants but starting to burn less coal. Both can be true at the same time. They are expected to hit peak coal as early as this year. So, far coal generation is slightly down relative to last year.

What's happening is part just bureaucratic inertia. They raised funding and are building the plants even though strictly they aren't needed anymore. And part of it is them replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones. They close plants regularly as well. Instead of operating plants 24x7, they keep a few around for when wind/solar fall short. It seems even the Chinese have a hard time predicting how fast the energy transition is going. They've hit their own targets years ahead of time repeatedly in the recent past.

Apparently China coal imports could drop by about 18-19% this year. That seems to be part of a bigger five year plan. They might be hitting the targets for that early as well.

I think you're relating coal as a percentage of all energy rather than relative to itself year on year.

The data here shows that coal consumption is simply increasing in China. Therefore, I believe it is inaccurate to say "they are building more plants but starting to burn less coal." It is more accurate to say "they are building more plants and burning more coal, but they are not increasing their coal use at the same rate they increase their use of other energy sources."

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-coal?tab=line&...

Our World In Data gets that information from https://globalcarbonbudget.org/. I believe that the next update will include 2024 data, and should be available next month.

My reason for challenging the phrasing is just to be precise. This is a complex topic, and the distinction between a falling percentage of energy mix versus a rising absolute amount of consumption is a key detail that's often missed.

This is 2025 data. Absolute coal usage is declining since the beginning of 2025.

China gets most of its thermal coal locally, it imports specialty coking coal from Australia (to make metal), as well as some thermal coal. It also gets thermal coal from indonesia. It mines 10X what it imports, but really needs to import coking coal to keep making metals (it could probably survive on its own thermal coal reserves).

I had read the coal plants are also political safety nets for the local governments. Some populace is worried the switch to renewables will go wrong and they will freeze over winter, so the coal plants are built as a perceived backup option.

As another comment pointed out, China isn’t afraid to let infrastructure sit idle. That if these coal plants sit unused or demolished in the end - it would be better than the political risk mentioned above.

[1] shows that they their coal plants have not been sitting idle i 2025 and are producing close to what they did in 2024. [2] shows that coal based electricity produced is still increasing, but their overall CO2 emissions / kWh is lowering [3]

[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?dat...

[3] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?dat...

Coal is still used for making steel (and other stuff as well I guess), but that use is slowly getting replaced by hydrogen.

> China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal

Are you sure about that 'most' part? Hasn't China been building something like a coal plant's worth of solar power generation every eight hours for the past year or so?

My knowledge is a few years out of date, but at the time china’s power generation was mostly coal, despite the heavy investment in solar. New power generation at the time was not replacing old but just keeping up with rising demand, so china was building new coal plants as well. I don’t think most _new_ generation was coal even 5 years ago, but most existing _generation_ was coal , and I expect that is still true

As of 2023, China ~50% coal and the almost all of the rest is renewable (they use very little oil/gas since it all has to be imported). Since then, chinese solar capacity added has been absolutely ridiculous. In 2024, they added 125 GW, and in 2025 they have so far added >250 GW of solar. If my math is right, this means that China is as of this year, adding ~5% of 2023 electricity consumption per year, which would mean that within 5 years of similar production (which seems overly pesimistic given how much solar has increased every year up till now) they will be down to ~25% coal

Are they actually decommissioning power plants? Or just adding new capacity? Last I heard it was purely additive, ie they are using the extra capacity, not replacing existing capacity

You don't want to be a few years out of date when making statements about China's electrical grid. Things are changing so rapidly that even being a year or two out of date is talking about the distant past. Most recent data is available from a good search LLM.

87% of power added in china in 2024 was renewable.

https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/...

> China is building an absurd amount of new [coal] plants

Fossil fuel advocates in the West love repeating this "fact" and omit another, rather more inconvenient fact. 80+% of all new electricity generation in China is solar or other renewable. China builds coal plants but they don't really use them much.

These coal plants either replace older ones shutting down or are mostly left idle. Why? My guess: to keep the jobs and skills around, to juice GDP, and as a backup.

China has lots of coal (to mine from the ground), and most of their solar/wind is out west, and most of their huge hydro is south, but is not enough anyways. They are able to reduce the amount of coal they depend on for their rising energy needs, but not eliminate them. It isn't just to keep the jobs/skills around, actually that would be easily transferred, they just can't pragmatically stop using coal yet.

Right they're gonna continue using as much coal they were already using. Because they have coal. People like the commenter I responded to repeat the talking point about "more coal plants". Because that automatically makes others think China is burning more and more and more coal and we're the only suckers who try to "go green". When in reality China's manufacturing prowess is responsible for solar power becoming so cheap in the first place and they're the biggest users of it by far.

They're going to operate a coal-backed renewable grid, while we (were up until recently) trying to build a natgas-backed renewable grid. They just have coal instead of natural gas, and they're actually building the renewables.

Natural gas isn't an option for them, but they can use coal. The biggest problems with renewables is that they exist too far away from where electricity is being used, and moving much more industry out west isn't very viable because it doesn't have enough water.

They are addressing that with HVDC transmission lines. They currently have around 48 000 km of such lines and are 2-3000 km more per year. They cross much of the country, including a 3300 kM line that runs between the Northwest and the middle of the East that operates at +/- 1100 kV and carries 12 GW.

It will take the, a few decades to build what they need, and they still need to add capacity until them for the east coast. Also, there is loss from moving power all the way from gansu to say hebei. Nuclear combined with renewables should make coal obsolete in a few decades, but they have to make do until then.

I think TVA's elaboration, which I linked to, is not only far more authoritative and trustworthy than me, a random internet poster, but here goes:

1) Our coal plants are old and trip off all the time, putting the grid at high risk. 2) The cost to upgrade a coal plant or build a new one is far higher than the gas alternative, so no financially competent entity is going to go with coal unless they are forced to by political manipulation/strong arming/bad incentives that hurt ratepayers.

Prices in China have literally nothing to do with the US, for either construction or gas or coal, so I'm not sure why you're linking to that in favor of our actual utilities' opinions here in the US. Is China's experience with coal really the reason you think that coal is either reliable or cheap?

My understanding is that china has a lot of coal, but has to import natural gas and petroleum products. I believe this changes the cost calculus in favor of coal specifically in china. That said, Chinese coal power plants are also much newer than US plants, which might mean they require less maintenance.

In terms of absolute usage the coal use in China is declining since the start of 2025. Deployment of renewables and storage are enough to supply both the grid expansion and displace existing coal demand.

China is build coal plants, solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas. They do less natural gas because they don't really have much of that, they do more coal because they can mine that locally, solar/wind are really only abundant out west while most people live in the east, and nuclear is a new thing that they are still getting into (and has lots of expenses that they haven't made cheap yet).

China is building less coal plants than they would need to if they just focused on coal, so they are improving over time.

87% of all capacity added in 2024 was renewable.

https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/...

You have to look at the locations of their renewables, China can only move so much industry out west due to a lack of water. They haven't been able to bring as much as that electricity back east with UWH transmissions lines as they hoped.

Can you give me some links supporting this? All the references I can find show that China is building transmission lines at about the rate they originally planned to.

They just haven’t built out wha they needed yet, they have capacity and are adding, but there is still a surplus of renewables from the west. At least Lanzhou has went from one of china’s dirtiest to one of their cleanest cities.

They also have a huge amount of line construction in the pipeline and have a tendency to do well at building things when it’s a priority. I feel like in just a few years we’ve seen anti-renewable/anti-China talking points shift from “China won’t build renewables” to “China can’t build renewables, it’s not economically feasible” to “ok, China is building renewables inexpensively and at massive scale but for some reason they won’t connect them to the grid” to “oh they are actually connecting renewables to the grid and emissions are dropping.” That midpoint of “they build but don’t connect” doesn’t feel like a hill I’d want to die on, and instead feels a lot like cope.

The future remedy will take a while to build, in the near term they still have to be flexible. I don’t think is doubting china’s ability or will to build things at this point.

they build them but they’re mostly not running them, utilization numbers keep falling. It’s either a central-planning failure or some kind of hedge

If they build gas plants then they'd be so much more entangled in conflicts in the middle East (and Russia) . I'm not sure that that would be fantastic for anyone, the Chinese included

I wouldn't be surprised is the anti coal movement has been pushed by the petrostates

Coal sucks but it does ensure energy independence (as does solar and wind)

If you count total generation capacity added and not “plants” China added more solar than coal.

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