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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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

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

My knowledge is a few years out of date, but at the time china’s power generation was mostly coal, despite the heavy investment in solar.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You don't want to be a few years out of date when making statements about China's electrical grid. Things are changing so rapidly that even being a year or two out of date is talking about the distant past.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.

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