Just quietly, while everyone was gushing tears over a two year extension to a fifty year old Australian plant, China added a gargantuan number of brand new coal plants.
Australia’s total coal fleet stands at 26 gigawatts in capacity. Yet China added three times that capacity in a single year.
Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor.
The graph below represents how many gigawatts were added, but only in the largest turbines size. China added 52 gigawatts of energy from one gigawatt units. Presumably the rest of the 78GW came from smaller sized turbines. And here’s the thing, while everyone will pretend this is the peak and tell us “it will decline soon”, another 83 gigawatts of coal plants has already started construction, and another 161GW is newly proposed or applied for.
These coal plants are apparently only being used at 50% capacity, but the thing is, if China ever needs to ramp up its energy supply, like say, in a time of war, it could double it in days.
Click to view
But China is just replacing the old dirty coal plants, right?
That’s what they want you to think. See the tiny black bars, top left, marked “Retired”
Click to view
All the coal power Australia has built in the last 50 years, China just effectively added that in the last four months.
According to a research report published on February 3, more than 50 large coal-fired power plants will be connected to the grid in 2025. These are individual boiler and turbine sets with a capacity of at least one gigawatt. In the ten years prior, the number was less than 20 per year. Depending on consumption, one gigawatt can supply several hundred thousand to over two million households with electricity. — Euronews
Euronews asks — if wind and solar are booming in China …why is it building so many new coal plants?
The answer apparently is that there were blackouts in 2021-22, and it takes a few years to
h/t to Eric Worrall at WUWT, and Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone, plus Leith van Onselen on Macroeconomics.
Joanne Nova is a prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology. This article was sourced HERE
6 comments:
Thank you for this authentic information Joanne. NZ makes an embarrassing fuss of our miniscule contribution.
China build modular coal power stations. Turbines, boilers, valving etc is standardized so they can simply add another plant to the list.
Take NZ as a good example of how not to build electrical capacity, cheaply and on time.
Just about all the power plants are different apart from the Ormat binary units.
Why is our electricity so expensive?
Build solar, wind , geothermal, and no coal powered stations. The country sits on a huge coal deposit.
You could buy a 1200MW super critical Chinese power plant off plans and have it built in a year.
They look at us and shake their heads as to why we are so stupid.
I built a few GW of coal fired thermal power stations in India. Unlike us India recognizes the value to cheap baseload power to build the economy.
Anon 9:36 China doesn't wonder why we are so stupid. They laugh at us and wonder how long it will take before we are some broke they can buy us for cents in the dollar.
Of course the Chinese government doesn't care about the climate, the environment, animal rights, human rights....
Why don't we just give up now, its just a matter of time before our woke western civilization fully implodes then the Chinese will have the lot, they won't even have to have a war.
We will be the future peasants building the coal fired power stations for our masters (Chinese) . The Chinese are so very much smarter than us and all they have to do is wait with a smile while we destroy ourselves.
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