Por Joshua Frank
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| Image by Sam Bark. |
Every time I write about China’s dirty energy consumption, there’s bound to be a reader or two who thinks I’m picking a fight. They say China is making major gains in renewables and that it’s only burning fossil fuels for now because the economy is still growing. If anything, these critics point the finger at the West, which consumes the goods China produces. So it’s the West’s fault, not the fact that China is (by choice) an integral part of the global capitalist economy.
Yes, China is rolling out renewables at an amazing pace. There’s no denying it. And as far as individual consumption is concerned, the average person in the US burns a hell of a lot more fossil fuels, and the West is overwhelmingly responsible for getting us in this mess. The rub, however, is that, on a country-wide scale, China is now by far the largest contributor of fossil fuel emissions (roughly one-third of global fossil fuel and industrial CO2 emissions), and its government (not a typical Chinese citizen) plays an outsized role, directly dictating how its economy operates.
That might not sit well with the pro-China crowd, but that’s a fact. Another fact is that, when it comes to climate chaos, our atmosphere doesn’t give a shit about where those emissions come from. The result is the same, and the world pays the price. Even so, China’s continued reliance on coal deserves a little nuance, so let’s get into the numbers a bit.
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According to a July report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (where I once worked as a researcher), China added 30 GW of new coal-fired electricity capacity in the first half of 2026. It retired only 2.7 GW during the same period, meaning China added a net 27.3 GW of coal-fired generating capacity to its growing mix.
It’s the highest first half-year China has experienced since 2016. At the same time, the report estimates that China curtailed about 360 TWh of wind and solar generation in the first half of 2026, including unreported curtailment. Curtailment is just another word for “didn’t use.”
There’s more bad news. China has another 274 GW of coal power in the pipeline, which would account for 22% of its current coal-powered fleet. In short, the sheer scale of that pipeline risks locking in an enormous amount of future dirty coal capacity even as China’s renewables expand.
Because China’s existing energy contracts prioritize coal-fired electricity, renewables may be pushed out of the country’s energy market. Add China’s insufficient grid flexibility, transmission capability, and storage, and you have a recipe for a lot more wasted green energy and a clear advantage for its massive coal fleet.
“China’s coal buildout is a warning about overcapacity, not a blueprint for energy security. Coal capacity is still growing because of legacy approvals and policy protections, even as plants run fewer hours and large volumes of clean electricity go unused,” explains Qi Qin, China analyst at CREA. “The answer is to reward genuine reliability, not to protect coal in both the capacity and energy markets, which pushes out the clean power generation that is the only viable path to genuine energy sovereignty.”
In short, China isn’t just building new coal plants as theoretical backup for its electricity grid. It’s currently generating more coal power than it did last year while also building so much additional capacity that the use of its overall coal fleet is actually falling. It’s a wild situation.
We’re not picking on an emerging economy here, like India. We’re talking about China, which generates almost 20% of global economic output and is the world’s largest economy by purchasing power. China is also the world’s second-largest economy by nominal GDP, only behind the US.
By these metrics, China is not part of the Global South but a powerhouse in the global capitalist system, even if many of its domestic policies (if you aren’t counting its mass surveillance) are admired by some of the Western left.
There’s something not so unique to capitalist economies (state-run or not) going on here. China’s energy demand is growing, and coal, while still a hefty part of the country’s overall energy use, isn’t as dominant as it once was. The caveat is that, despite China building out more capacity, its coal-fired power generation fell slightly in 2025. Overall, China’s energy use has expanded as its economy continues to grow.
That distinction matters. China can build many more coal plants without using the electricity they can produce. Whether they do so or not, however, is a matter of choice, not of ability. China, for instance, burns more than 10 times as much coal every year as the United States, and with more plants being built, that number could well grow.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that despite building out all this coal power, the IEA expects China’s coal demand to slightly decline through 2030. Of course, as the world burns and floods, this is not fast enough.
Despite its increased capacity, coal-fired electricity generation fell 1.5% last year (coal demand grew by 0.1%). The hope, at least, is that even if China builds more coal plants (which it is), it won’t need to use them.
Right now, the story is about which energy sources China opts to tap, which could all be complicated by the country’s data center boom. While still trailing the US’s data center rollout, China is increasing its investment and building out more data centers, increasing demand for electricity just like we’re doing here in the US. A recent Wood Mackenzie estimate reported that China could consume about 774 TWh annually by 2030, roughly four times its current electricity consumption from data centers.
We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out, but in the meantime, we have every right to be concerned about where this could head.
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JOSHUA FRANK is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Bluesky @joshuafrank.bsky.social
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