China secretly building hundreds of new coal plants, new report claims

China is building hundreds of new coal-fired plants despite official assurances construction has stopped, a new report claims.

A farmer leads a cart walking past a coal-fired power plant in Datong County. Picture: Getty

China is building hundreds of new coal-fired power plants with a capacity equal to five times Australia’s entire electricity market despite assurances from central government that construction had been stopped.

A report by environment group CoalSwarm used satellite images to prove construction was well underway on plants with a total capacity of 259 GW.

This compares with Australia’s total electricity capacity from all sources of 50 GW and was enough to lift China’s coal-fired power production by 25 per cent and overshoot the country’s own announced 1100 GW cap.

CoalSwarm said commissioning of the coal plants would leave China with 1010 GW of operating coal capacity in 2045, the year it should have phased out coal to meet its Paris climate goals.

“While China’s central authorities have sought to mitigate the surge through a series of special regulatory measures, new satellite imagery and plant-by-plant research show the measures to have been only partially effective,” the report said.

“Rather than cancelling unneeded coal plants, China’s officials in many cases have merely rescheduled them,” it said.

China is responsible for 48 per cent of global coal-fired power production.

The new capacity was the result of a permitting surge from late 2014 to early 2016, after regulations were handed from central to provincial authorities.

In 2016 and 2017, central authorities sought to rein in the surge through a series of suspension orders.

However, many of the restrictions only delayed new projects rather than stopping them.

The CoalSwarm report said overall, 126 GW of coal capacity were in active construction, 57 GW were currently frozen in mid-construction, and 76 GW were in unrestricted pre-construction development.

“Once completed, the pipeline of 259 GW will increase China’s current operating capacity of 993 GW by 25 per cent, an amount comparable to the current operating coal power capacity of the United States (266 GW),” the CoalSwarm report said.

During the peak of the boom, the decade from 2006 through 2015, China added 618 GW of new coal power capacity or “one coal plant per week”.

CoalSwarm said China’s authorities had shown little appetite for cancelling plants that had entered construction.

“Instead, they appear to be aiming to preserve the 1100 GW cap on coal-power capacity through administrative sleight of hand: i.e. simply holding back on official start-up of many completed plants until after the end of the country’s current Five-Year Economic Plan (2016—2020),” the report said.

For 2018, authorities had listed by name the coal-fired units that can go online in the current calendar year, totalling 21 GW of capacity.

An additional 11 GW of projects were seeking authorisation to go online, and it was not yet clear how much completed capacity would be authorised for operation in 2018, and how much would be postponed to a later date.

“Presumably limits on total operating capacity could also be imposed in 2019 and 2020, and be designed to keep the operating coal fleet technically under the 1100 GW cap,” CoalSwarm said.

“But such limits do not actually address the overcapacity problem, which can only be solved by cancelling capacity outright, not by rescheduling it,” the report said.

CoalSwarm said any solution based on shifting start dates would be illusionary because it would simply create a growing reservoir of fully completed plants that were ready to begin operating after the end of 2020, as soon as they received authorisation from the central government.