China's coal usage is down 5% in the last 12 months: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/20/chinas-coal-generation-...

They're adding coal capacity quickly, but they're lowering the capacity factor of that usage even faster. Those coal plants are peakers that only run when solar & batteries are empty.

I think it was on Volts podcast where I heard that many of them are built as political insurance for regional governments who don’t want an angry population if they have an unusually cold winter and a lot of them are going to end up as stranded assets which the population gets way less mad about.

Ironically building coal plants probably helps wean China off coal. They use a lot of coal for heating. But nobody is going to want to switch to a heat pump unless they have reliable electricity.

to add, given the governing structure in china, the coal plants don't have to make economic sense. one-party politics would thus prefer to overbuild as a hedge against the population getting mad at them.

Not in the last 12 months. This quarter compared to a year ago.

It was up 1.5% for 2024 compared to 2023: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-thermal-power...

China is deploying far more solar generation, at an increasing rate. [0]

Increasingly cheap battery storage, also built in China, is also being deployed rapidly.

It all makes a lot of difference.

[0] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/02/02/chinas-new-pv-install...

It provably does matter.

Western transition away from fossil fuel usage is still a reduction in net fossil fuel usage when compared to no shift at all. In other words fossil fuel usage might still be growing, but it is growing at a slower rate. If we accept that fossil fuel usage should be minmized then it very much matters.

Aside from that; this argument reduces to an exceptionally bad moral stance which is: Someone else is doing bad things, therefore that justifies me doing that bad thing. Or as you might phrase the counter-argument to a young child: just because someone else is littering doesn't mean that it is ok for you to litter.

China also installed way more solar than, for example, the US. Their energy needs are growing quickly as a developing nation.

China didn't just install more solar than any other country, they installed more than all other countries combined.

Economies of scale. That's how you win.

The top-line number doesn't accurately explain what's going on in China: they have a bunch of coal plans, but many of them operate at 10% or less of rated capacity, probably out of a combination of "these are peaker and/or worst-case (i.e. American oil embargo) scenario energy security plants" and old-fashioned deficiencies in central planning. In any case, you should measure coal burned instead of capacity installed, which is leveling off: [1]

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265491/chinese-coal-cons...