A Chinese official said in an interview that coal power is essential to the country’s growth and worries about its carbon footprint will have to take a back seat for the moment, according to CNBC.
Su Wei, the deputy secretary of the National Development and Reform Commission, said China’s “energy structure is dominated by coal power,” and “Because renewable energy (sources such as) wind and solar power are intermittent and unstable, we must rely on a stable power source.”
According to the network, Wei also said, “We have no other choice. For a period of time, we may need to use coal power as a point of flexible adjustment.”
CNBC noted that China’s President Xi Jinping announced last September that the country’s carbon footprint would begin to decline by 2030 and plans to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. In just the last year, according to Global Energy Monitor, China built more than triple the amount of new coal power capacity as the rest of the world combined.
The Union of Concerned Scientists identified China as the world’s heaviest emitter of carbon dioxide and the world’s biggest coal consumer. Beijing has also funded half of the world’s coal-fired power plants in 2020, according to Reuters.
The U.S. and India were the next two countries, the CNBC report said. China’s electricity use increased by 3.1 percent in 2020, the report noted.
The U.S. in March sold about 663,000 tons of coal to China, according to the South China Morning Post.
TREND FORECAST: Despite the push for climate change and the elimination of coal, last year, some 40 percent of the world’s electricity, close to its highest share in decades, was coal-generated.
According to CarbonBrief, since 2000, the world has doubled its coal-fired power capacity to around 2,045 gigawatts (GW) after explosive growth in China and India. A further 200GW is being built and 300GW is planned.
We have also reported that many developing nations, such as Vietnam and Indonesia, will be building coal-fired plants because it is cheaper.
Thus, until a new power source is invented, the push for “clean energy” is decades away.
