A report published by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) on Monday found that China is burning record-high amounts of coal at its power plants this year, generating roughly 21 gigawatts of coal power in the first six months of 2025.
CREA, an independent research organization based in Finland, was dismayed to discover Chinese coal use is soaring despite the Communist country’s heavy investments in renewable power.
“Although there were some signs of coal power slowing down in 2024 and 2025 has seen China’s clean energy boom meet a significant amount of power demand growth and lower CO2 emissions, coal power remains strong, with new and revived projects the highest in a decade,” the report said.
Cynical observers believe China’s much-ballyhood push for “renewable energy” was a political smokescreen for the titanic amount of fossil fuels needed by Chinese industrial policy.
Also, China makes a great deal of money selling solar, wind, and battery components to other countries, so it has a vested interest in creating showroom projects that could drive those sales. Foreign buyers of Chinese solar panels have lately been discovering that they come with disturbing bits of undocumented surveillance equipment.
CREA hopefully theorized that China’s rush to build even more coal-fired power plants is merely a bid to “expand coal projects as a last ditch effort before China’s 2030 carbon peaking deadline, right when strategic phase-down should be the priority to meet climate goals and as clean energy is meeting all of new power demand growth.”
“In June 2025, coal’s share in power generation dropped to a nine-year low of 51%, and only made up 34% of China’s total installed capacity, while renewables accounted for 60%, pointing to the ongoing trend of coal losing steam while an artificial push attempts to expand rather than phase down its historic role,” the report said.
CREA was nevertheless obliged to point out that China’s pledge in 2022 to use coal as only a secondary power source while “renewables are integrated” has “yet to be implemented in any meaningful way.” It seems increasingly unlikely that China will simply abandon all of the expensive new coal plants it is building today in five years.
The report found that Chinese coal power construction remains “high, with no clear signs of slowing.” In fact, not only did China burn a decade-high load of coal in the first six months of this year, but it commissioned the highest gigawatt capacity of new coal power plants since 2015. This was partly due to Chinese power companies scrambling to build over 100 gigawatts of coal power that was approved and permitted in 2022 and 2023.
Christine Shearer, a co-author of the report, told Deutsche Welle (DW) on Monday that coal power development in China “shows no sign of easing, leaving emissions on a high plateau and stranding coal in the system for years to come.”
DW noted that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping promised in 2021 to pull at least 30 gigawatts of coal power out of China’s grid between 2020 and 2025, but as of today, only one gigawatt has actually been taken offline.
Shearer co-authored an article for Carbon Brief on Monday that credited the rest of the world with reducing coal power, while China and India surge their own consumption of coal. Together, those two nations account for 87% of the new coal-fired power generation installed during the first half of 2025.
The article criticized the Trump administration for supposedly failing to show “clean-energy leadership,” but then grudgingly admitted “the U.S. is on track to retire more coal capacity in 2025 than it did under the Biden administration last year.”
Most European countries have halted new construction of coal-fired power plants, with zero new plants approved for construction in the European Union (EU) since 2018, although few of the major EU industrial powers are on track to meet the coal phaseout targets envisioned by the Paris climate accords. The Europeans have relied heavily on natural gas to replace coal.
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