Chinese Companies Set New Records in Overseas Renewable Deployment

China installed a record amount of wind and solar capacity at home last year, data showed earlier this month. Yet, the country did not stop there. Chinese companies also installed record power generation capacity abroad as well—and half of it was neither wind nor solar.
Wood Mackenzie reported this week that Chinese power generation capacity developers completed some 24 GW of new capacity across more than 150 countries that are part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The number compared with just 10 GW installed in 2023 and 22 GW installed in 2022, Wood Mac said.
A little more than 50% of that total was wind and solar, which must have made climate activists happy—but not too happy because the rest of this new capacity will run on coal, gas, and crude oil. The combined Belt and Road countries’ new generation capacity fired by hydrocarbons rose from 3 GW in 2023 to 12 GW last year. China also installed 8 GW of new solar capacity in Belt and Road Initiative countries last year, as well as 5 GW of new hydropower capacity.
These figures reflect a trend that is also evident in transition-oriented Western countries: gas generation will be hard to shake off, and so will coal generation. The latter was recently demonstrated by Germany, where the chief executive of grid operator Amprion said this month coal plants will need to be kept on standby for longer than previously expected.
“Some of these plants currently only have an operating perspective until 2026, the vast majority until 2031,” Christoph Mueller said, referring to the coal plants on standby. “We should do a proper analysis now in case we need these power plants for longer,” the executive added.
Coal, gas, and nuclear remain the only kind of baseload capacity that can balance the grid when demand and supply from wind and solar do not match—because the grid must be matched every second of every hour every day. Clearly, Chinese power plant operators know this, and they are exporting that knowledge to Belt and Road Initiative countries after applying it at home as well.
Even so, China has been prioritizing gas over coal since President Xi Jinping vowed in 2021 to end funding for coal-powered facilities. Indeed, many projects have been canceled since then, but by no means all. China has continued building coal-fired power plants both at home and abroad, and, according to Wood Mackenzie, there are still some 19 GW of future coal capacity in the pipeline. Since the pledge, however, a total of 42.8 GWS of new coal capacity has been canceled, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which tracks these projects.
However, Chinese companies are investing a lot more in wind and solar energy abroad—hardly a wonder given that China is the total dominant power in both solar and wind technology on a global level. “Chinese companies are heavily prioritizing greener technologies overseas,” Alex Whitworth, vice-president and head of Asia-Pacific power and renewables research at Wood Mac, said, as quoted by the South China Morning Post. With costs declining, “[they] are leading its deployment in many developing markets that could not previously afford it,” Whitworth added.
Interestingly, even though it added a record amount of new wind and solar capacity at home and built a lot of new wind and solar capacity abroad, China last year booked a record in coal-powered generation. The total for 2024 stood at 6.34 trillion kWh, which was 1.5% higher than the total for 2023. Although the growth rate was the weakest in close to ten years, the fact of the record stands, reinforcing the perception that coal is going nowhere despite forecasts that consumption of the hydrocarbon fuel was nearing its peak in China.

About Parvin Faghfouri Azar

Check Also

German Gas Marketer Seeks State Subsidy to Refill Storage

Trading Hub Europe GmbH, the German natural gas market area manager, is holding “intensive discussions” …

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *