"A bolder approach could let China phase down coal without causing power cuts, says Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (crea), a think-tank in Finland. It would need much more renewable power and big upgrades to China’s grid to let clean energy be transferred over long distances or stored (to offset for the fact it can be generated only when the sun shines or when the wind blows). China is already spending substantial amounts on trying to clean up. Clean-energy investments came to $940bn, or 10% of gdp, in 2024. In that year alone the country installed more solar-power capacity (277gw) than exists in the whole of the United States (200gw).
The bottleneck is that China lacks a flexible, nationwide power market that could ensure clean power is efficiently dispatched to where it is needed. At the moment most power is sold locally through long-term contracts, which typically favour coal-fired plants by guaranteeing the purchase of fixed amounts of power. Attempts to reform the system have been slow. In the last quarter of 2024 China’s wind and solar power use dropped in spite of favourable weather, as a result of an “oversupply” of coal-fired power, according to analysis by crea.
All this threatens to further entrench the role of coal in the power-generation system and will make it expensive to phase out, says Yan Qin of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. After all, the more plants that are built, the higher the cost of abandoning them."
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/03/31/china-could-greatly-reduce-its-reliance-on-coal-it-probably-will-not
