China’s use of coal for electricity grew in the first half of 2026 as a record amount of wind and solar power was wasted through curtailment, new research has found.
The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter brought 30 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity into operation in the six months to June and coal-fired generation rose 3% after falling last year, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Only 2.7GW of coal power was retired in the same period.
The coal expansion stems from a surge in power plant approvals that followed power shortages caused primarily by high coal prices in 2021, when blackouts and factory shutdowns hit roughly 20 Chinese provinces. Local governments responded by fast-tracking new coal projects as insurance against future outages.
A further 274 GW of coal capacity - equivalent to roughly a fifth of China’s existing coal fleet - is already either under construction or has permits to be built, meaning much of the sector’s expansion is locked in for years, the report says.
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paywalled?
The archived link works fine here.
It has seemed to me that almost every jurisdiction that has installed a lot of renewable power generation has run up against pretty large issues once the renewables reach a certain scale.
Its stuff like an unstable power grid, escalating costs, rising power rates leading to economic and indistrial fallout, reliance on imports… Etc.
A lot of green transition proponents point at this growth momentum in the early innings and they trumpet lower costs, the advantages of renewables etc and then when the plans fail there is this silence.
There is this narrative that says that if you just look at a narrow metric like gigawatts of generation, throwing more solar or wind into the system has no tradeoffs.
I honestly wish the bugs were all worked out, but so far it seems like we cannot go any faster than we already are. We lack the technical ability to run anything like a modern civilization without fossil fuels