#13: Clearing The Smog Over China's “Low-Carbon Coal Power”

China seeks low-carbon solutions to clean its coal power fleet. But the only promising path forward is to say farewell to coal and embrace renewables.

This week, China’s top energy planners unveiled a new policy for the “low-carbon transformation” of coal power plants. The three-year action plan aims to retrofit existing coal power units and build new ones with “low-carbon” technologies, namely co-firing with biomass or green ammonia, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS).

In this newsletter, I worked with Xinyi Shen from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Aiqun Yu from Global Energy Monitor to develop an exclusive analysis for Shuang Tan. The two analysts argue that, at best, the new solutions distract from the energy transition; at worst, they enable greenwashing and subsidy fraud, with a high risk of abandonment midway.

Several aspects lead me to believe that the action plan is unlikely to drive industry-wide transformation or attract large-scale investment. Instead, it appears designed to test the selected technologies at a few carefully chosen coal power units, managed by a handful of Chinese central state-owned enterprises.