China To Save The World (Again)–AEP

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie/Ian Magness

Everything AEP writes about Net Zero seems to be infused with wishful thinking, no more so than where China is concerned:

China’s carbon emissions have either peaked already or will do this winter, seven years ahead of schedule. They may plateau for a year or two but will then go into exponential decline for mechanical and unstoppable reasons.

The country’s target of net zero by 2060 is likely to be achieved a decade earlier than previously assumed, and perhaps earlier than in Europe.

This is a remarkable turn of events. Xi Jinping has made a giant strategic and economic bet on clean-tech dominance, aiming to corner the world’s renewable market and to break dependency on sea-borne energy supplies running through the US 7th Fleet.

The International Energy Agency says China accounts for 60pc of all new solar and wind power being installed across the world this year and next. This roll-out has combined with a drastic slowdown in China’s rate of economic trend growth and the exhaustion of its Ponzi style property model.

China is building a gargantuan network of ‘clean energy bases’ in the Gobi, Ordos, and Tengger deserts, and further across the arid wastelands of the northwest. Solar and wind parks run along an arc from Inner Mongolia to Qinghai on the Tibetan plateau

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/21/chinas-carbon-emissions-falling-xi-jinping-net-zero/

Let’s start with a few simple, basic facts:

As I have been reporting for years, large scale investment in renewable capacity has not been enough to meet increasing demand for electricity in China, which has had to be met with additional coal power. Wind and solar still only accounted for 13% of China’s electricity in 2022, compared to 29% in what he describes as the foot-dragging UK!

China’s economic growth, and therefore energy demand, has slowed in the last two years, not least because of their disastrous lockdown policies. This inevitably means that the need for more coal power is reduced. Whether economic growth remains subdued is moot – so far this year it is up 4.4% year-on-year. And it may well be that the use of coal power does flatten off in the next few years. And it also may well be the case that eventually China will catch up with the UK in terms of the renewables share.

However AEP makes a schoolboy error, assuming that current trends will continue forward in a straight line, until all China’s electricity is supplied by renewables. He clearly still does not realise that neither we or China can run a modern economy on intermittent wind and solar power alone.

He also makes the mistake of ignoring all of the energy China consumes outside of the power sector, which accounts for half of total primary energy. A good indicator is their consumption of oil and gas, which are barely used for power generation. Since 2011, consumption has risen by 71%.

None of this energy can be replaced directly with wind and solar power.

China is of course building lots of EVs, which may help to reduce oil consumption eventually, but this begs the question of where the energy needed to build and run them will come from. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding to assume that this will come from wind and solar, as these are already maxed out on the grid. Any additional demand can only come from dispatchable sources, which basically means coal.

AEP is right about Xi’s concern for energy security, but that is precisely why China will want to maximise its own coal reserves. It is also why they have been strategically developing secure supplies of oil and gas, in particular from Russia and Turkmenistan, from where new pipelines are either being built or planned. China has also been assiduous in building relationships with the Middle East. Imports from Iran, for instance, are 60% higher than pre-sanction peaks in 2017.

Another indicator of China’s addiction to oil is the fact that the country’s oil refining capacity has grown by 40% since 2010, and is now bigger than the US.

AEP relies on Carbon Brief for advice in his article. Given that they are a lobby group set up specifically to campaign for climate action, they are hardly a reliable, objective source! Maybe he should have consulted Climate Tracker, another group keen to push the same agenda, but also determined to report the realities. This is how they sum up China’s climate policies:

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

As Climate Tracker suggests, China’s emissions may well start to level off by 2030. But there is nothing to suggest that they will actually start to fall drastically thereafter.