China's war on coal

China's "airpocalypse" in winter 2013.  Source: The Age

China is to stop work on 151 planned or under-construction coal power stations. 

The list affects coal power plants with capacity equal to the combined operating capacity of Germany and Japan (95,000 megawatts) costing around US$60 billion (389 billion rmb).

The amount of capacity affected hence exceeds the target set for this year but is still well short of the total of 150,000 megawatts the government says is needed by 2020.

However the number of plants on the list has shrunk by around 15% from an original list of 182; a watering down of earlier plans after intense political negotiations. Also, the majority of the plants are technically only “delayed”, putting off the final decision to cancel the projects.

Building new coal-fired power plants doesn’t directly increase CO2 emissions, because coal-fired generation in China is limited by lack of demand. But it does create a conflict between dirty and clean energy in the grid, because the grid operators tend to favor coal power plant operators when dispatching electricity.

It's not all good news:

China hit the brakes on approvals of new coal-fired power plant projects on the second half of 2016, but previously approved plants have continued coming online at a rate of almost one large plant per week.

Last year, China set a target of stopping or delaying at least 150,000 megawatts of coal-fired power plant projects to alleviate the looming overcapacity problem with the new list marking the start of this process.

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For 50 years, coal power stations have been a symbol of progress in China.  Electrification is the sine qua non of economic progress.  In India, 25% of the population still has no access to the grid.  But in China it's 3%.  Electrification was the obvious and visible symbol of progress under the Communist regime.  It's hard for local and provincial officials to get used to the new idea that coal power stations are antiquated, and should no longer be built. 

But the opposition by the central government to coal power is based on more than the need to reduce carbon emissions:

The war on coal reached fever pitch here [in China] this month. As a deadline looms to achieve clean air targets by the end of 2017, October has seen unprecedented measures come into force to curb air pollution and reduce emissions.  Steel production has been halved in major steel cities, coal banned in China's coal capital, factories closed down for failing pollution inspections, and hundreds of officials sacked for failing to meet environmental targets.

The complete shutdowns, or 50 per cent production cuts, will stay in place for an unprecedented five months.  The winter heating season in China is approaching, when coal use has traditionally spiked, worsening northern China's notorious air pollution.  But cities are under pressure to meet important domestic targets for clean air, set five years ago by the State Council in response to a public outcry over pollution.

China can't allow a repeat of last winter, when, after several years of improvement, air quality suddenly worsened in some cities.  For a few days in January 2016, the sky darkened and it looked possible that the "airpocalypse" of 2013 – which first drew global attention to Beijing's severe air pollution – was back. Social media went into overdrive.

Fighting air pollution is a matter of social stability, Environment Protection Minister Li Ganjie said a fortnight ago.

So now the Chinese government has brought out the "iron fist".

That was the phrase used by the environment protection bureau in China's most polluted province, Hebei, as 69 government officials were sacked and 154 handed over to police for investigation last month for failing to implement pollution control measures.

Meeting emissions targets has become a key performance indicator for local Communist Party bosses and mayors alike.

Local governments that don't enforce the pollution controls will have environmental assessments for new property developments suspended by the Ministry for Environment Protection, effectively blocking deals.

A battle plan has been drawn up by the ministry to cover 28 northern cities, including Beijing and Tianjin, where 7000 pollution inspectors will be deployed to expose violations and look for data fraud.

Yuan Xu, associate professor with the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Institute of Environment, Energy and Sustainability, says there has been a major change in the Chinese government's understanding of the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection.

"In the past, the two were taken as tradeoffs ... China has been more and more benefiting from newly created industries and jobs due to environmental protection and especially climate mitigation," he says.  Renewable energy has created several million jobs and multiple world-leading industries.

China's special representative on climate change, Xie Zhenhua, has said: "The cause of air pollution and climate change is the same - the burning of fossil fuels. Many of the policies and measures to solve the two issues are the same."

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China consumes half the world's coal output and produces 1/3rd of the world's carbon emissions.  So it's a key factor in reducing global carbon emissions.  It's aggressively pushing to de-carbonise its economy, in electricity generation and in transport.  That's good news for global warming, and for the cost of renewables, as the sheer volume of demand from China pushes renewables down their learning curves.  It also completely demolishes the argument of the soft denialists who say that reducing our own carbon emissions is pointless while China is still increasing hers.