Catherine Mercier

It's become a bit of a cliche to call it a paradox or a contradiction that China is building staggering amounts of both new clean power generation and new coal power plants. It only is one if you fail to grasp the scale of China's electricity consumption growth, as most people inevitably do. China today generates enough power from clean sources to power Germany SIX times over, up from two times a decade ago. In a few years, China's clean power generation will be equal to U.S.' total electricity consumption. China's power generation from wind&solar alone is about to hit three times Germany's total electricity consumption next year. If China's power demand had stayed on 2009 level, the massive increase in CO2-free power generation would have made the grid 80% clean, instead of the current 33%. CO2 emissions from the power sector would have fallen by 75%. What happened instead is that electricity demand doubled and clean power generation didn't keep up, while it did manage to increase its share from 20% to 33%. Predictably, the difference was delivered from coal, and CO2 emissions went up by 90%. China now uses twice as much power as the U.S., after overtaking the country only in 2010. Put another way, China's additional power demand since 2010 is equal to the total consumption of the U.S. 60% of that electricity demand growth went to industry, mainly basic manufacturing like steel and other metals, cement, glass and chemicals, so it's really a function of China's extremely investment- and construction intensive growth model. And no, it's not just about the size of China's population: per capita electricity consumption in China overtook Germany in 2022. The good news is that China's clean energy growth is finally reaching the scale where it can cover all of the growth in power demand. This is happening even as power demand growth likely slows down with the economic slowdown. These trends have been masked in the past year by the collapse in hydropower generation which is readily visible in the graph, but will likely become apparent in the year or two. Most of the data for the post and the graph is from the amazing datasets of @EmberClimate.