China’s Green Energy Surpasses Half of Its Total Energy

(RightWing.org) – Over half of China’s power generation capability now comes from green energy sources. The communist dictatorship has been building wind and solar generators for years and is a world leader in renewable energy systems. But not everything is a pleasant shade of green — Beijing also plans to keep building coal-fired power plants.

On June 12, China’s state-controlled Xinhua news agency reported that the regime’s ambitious target of having half its energy generated from renewables by 2025 had been achieved early. As of Monday, 50.9% of the country’s installed generating capacity isn’t powered by fossil fuels.

Of course, that doesn’t mean renewables are generating half the country’s electricity; research shows that the actual output of wind, solar, and hydro plants is usually less than 30% of their rated capacity. Still, it’s a major milestone, and the Chinese Communist Party wasted no time letting the world know. Beijing’s next target is to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, but they might achieve that as early as 2024.

Or they might not. China’s drive for renewables looks impressive — the country accounts for almost half of all spending on green power generation. China is also the largest manufacturer of solar panels and has something close to a monopoly on many of the rare earth metals used to make green devices.

However, the reality is that last year 56.2% of Chinese electricity was produced by burning coal, and it’s the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels. In fact, the share of actual electricity generation from renewables is falling. In 2020 renewables, which include nuclear power as well as wind and solar, produced 28.8% of China’s power. Last year that was down to 25.9%, partly because hydroelectric production was lower than normal.

The power shortages forced many factories to close temporarily and reminded China that renewables can be unreliable and need conventional backups. To provide those backups, Beijing plans to build around a hundred new coal-fired power plants, so the CCP’s energy policy is nowhere near as green as it looks at first glance.