China produced as much clean electricity in the first half of this year as the UK generated from all sources in the same period last year, data shows, as wind and solar power generation continued to surge in the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Electricity generation from coal and gas dropped by 5% in China in July, year on year, according to an update from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) thinktank, basing its analysis on data released by the Chinese government on Thursday.
The latest figures reinforce a clear trend – China is racing ahead in renewable energy, adding record-breaking amounts of solar and wind generation, eclipsing the rest of the world. It is a transformation that analysts are saying could be the world’s best hope yet of staving off climate catastrophe.
“China is leading against all of its competitors, when it comes to green technology,” said Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Policy Institute in Washington DC. “China has a real advantage, and has established a huge green industry.”
Last year, China installed a record 293GW of wind and solar generating capacity. Last month, solar and wind capacity outstripped China’s coal-fired electricity capacity. By 2026, solar power alone will surpass coal as China’s primary energy source, with a capacity of more than 1.38TW, or 150GW more than coal, according to forecasts by Rystad Energy.
Electric vehicles production is surging ahead, with hybrids and fully electric cars making up more than half of all new models sold in July, and the steel industry is also changing, with no permits for coal-fired plants issued in the first half of this year.
This continuing boom in clean technology has led some analysts to suggest China’s greenhouse gas emissions may have already reached a peak, perhaps as early as February this year. This would be momentous. For China, the world’s second biggest economy behind the US, to reverse its decades of almost unbroken rapid growth – nearly tripling from about 3.6bn tonnes of carbon emitted in 2000 to 11.4bn in 2022 – would have seismic implications for the global climate emergency.
China is responsible for about a quarter of global carbon output – roughly as much as all of the world’s developed countries combined. Without China, there can be no effective global climate action.
China committed in 2020 to causing its emissions to peak before 2030, and that is still its official target. But analysts have long argued that the country has the ability to peak by 2025, if the government takes sufficient action. For the world to limit global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, which scientists say is still technically feasible, global emissions must halve by 2030, which is unlikely to be possible unless China’s emissions can be made to peak in the first half of this decade and fall rapidly in the second.
According to CREA, carbon dioxide emissions from energy use and cement production, which account for more than 90% of China’s total carbon emissions, began to decline in March. CO2 output fell by about 1% in the second quarter of this year, according to the thinktank, marking the first quarterly decline since the country’s economy was reopened after the zero-Covid policy lockdowns.
Within this overall reduction, CREA estimates that power sector emissions dropped by about 3% and cement production emissions by about 7%, while oil consumption fell by 3%.
“If renewable energy continues to displace coal power generation, 2024 emissions could continue to decrease, potentially making 2023 the peak year for China’s emissions,” said Qi Qin, an analyst at CREA.
However, calling the peak of China’s emissions can only be a tentative conclusion, as some of the factors behind the shift could reverse. Problems in the Chinese property market have led to a slowdown in China’s construction sector, meaning less concrete poured with its associated high emissions, and the carbon-intensive iron and steel sectors have also faltered.
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But these markets could pick up again, under the influence of government stimulus, and drive emissions higher. This has happened before: China’s emissions dropped after 2014, leading to premature hopes of a peak, only to jump again in 2017, and they continued to rise through the Covid-19 crisis.
Qin said: “Faster than expected energy demand in the first half of 2024 adds uncertainty, and emissions may stay flat if these trends persist.”
Lauri Myllyvirta, the lead analyst at CREA, added: “It’s clear that the economy is not in the shape China’s policymakers would want it to be, so the actions they take to boost growth will determine whether this drop in emissions marks the peak. If growth shifts to less energy-intensive sectors, and the current rate of clean energy additions continues, then emissions will begin their long-term decline.”
The chief issue is coal. Although renewable energy generation is increasing, coal still provided 60% of China’s power in 2023. It is still building new coal-fired power plants – more than 40GW worth last year, according to the Global Coal Plant Tracker. The rate of new additions is falling, however – about 8GW were added in the first half of this year.
It is important to note that capacity is not the same as generation, when it comes to China – for various economic and political reasons, plants can be built even when there is not a clear need for them to operate at full capacity, so there can be a mismatch between the amount of power that China is capable of producing and the amount that is actually generated. Even so, with so much investment still going into coal, that could spell a later peak.
While coal remains at the core of China’s power sector and economy, the steep plunge in emissions that the world needs will remain elusive.
If Donald Trump wins the US election, he has said he will withdraw the US from the Paris agreement, which would throw global climate action into turmoil. This year’s Cop29 UN climate summit starts a few days after the election and will focus on climate finance. After that, countries will be asked to draw up new national emissions-cutting plans under the Paris agreement, to be submitted early next year.
If Trump loses, China will come under much greater pressure from the US to agree stiffer emissions cuts in its next national plan. As China’s economy is at a crossroads, with a clean energy future battling against entrenched coal and steel interests, the outcome of the US election could be a decisive factor in what happens next with China’s peak.