China’s pledge to halt overseas coal-fired power plants leaves a third of proposed capacity in ‘grey area’, report says
- Eighteen projects with a combined capacity of 19.2 gigawatts could still proceed towards construction, CREA says
- It may be difficult to halt some proposed projects because they are linked to the host countries’ development and are favoured by local governments and businesses
The ambiguity in China’s plans to stop building new coal-fired power plants outside the country could dilute its climate-control pledge, with more than one-third of the potential capacities falling “in the grey area”, according to an industry report.
Eighteen projects with a combined capacity of 19.2 gigawatts (GW) could still proceed towards construction, the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) said, because the promoters have secured the relevant permits and financing for these.
They amount to 34 per cent of the capacity in 50 Chinese-backed overseas coal-fired projects identified by CREA, the think tank said in a report released on Friday. China’s top planning agency has pledged to halt all new overseas projects while pushing those under construction in its much vaunted Belt and Road initiatives in developing countries.
“The Chinese firms will have good reasons to start renegotiating the contracts and see whether it is feasible to use low- or zero-carbon emission generation technologies for those projects” if the host countries intervened, said Zhang Liutong, director at Hong Kong-based WaterRock Energy Economics.
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It may be difficult to halt the proposed projects because some of the coal-fired projects are linked to the host countries’ industrial development and lobbied by local governments and businesses, he added.
Ending the use of dirty fuels such as coal is seen as a crucial part of efforts to prevent extreme weather events. The Paris Agreement seeks to maintain global warming at a rate of less than 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. To reach net-zero by then, the world should have halted new such investments after 2021, the International Energy Agency said.