Coal Use Is Falling While China Builds Coal Plants
Why combined and uneven development is still credible development
China is continuing to build coal-fired power plants even though coal-fired electricity generation fell in absolute terms in 2025. This was not merely a decline in coal’s percentage share of a growing electricity system. China actually produced less electricity from coal than it had the year before, even as total electricity demand continued to grow. That combination sounds contradictory only if we assume that an energy transition must replace one complete system with another in a single, coordinated movement. In practice, China is adding coal capacity as a national-security reserve and infrastructural backstop at the same time that solar, wind, hydro, nuclear power, batteries, and transmission increasingly supply the growth of the electrical system. Coal remains environmentally destructive and politically entrenched, but it is becoming less central to the production of additional electricity. The distinction between more coal plants and an absolute decline in coal-fired generation is the point that much public commentary either misses or deliberately obscures.
I want to resist two easy stories that turn this development into propaganda. One is the nationalist Western story in which every Chinese coal project proves that renewable energy is futile and that domestic climate action is an irrational sacrifice. The other is an equally simple celebratory story in which the scale of Chinese clean-energy investment means that the contradictions of coal, industrial growth, and provincial political economy no longer matter. Neither account is adequate. China remains heavily dependent on coal while also carrying out the most consequential clean-energy buildout in history. The task is not to select whichever fact confirms a preferred national narrative, but to understand how both belong to the same process of combined and uneven development.
The headline counts plants, but the grid uses electricity
The argument most people encounter is straightforward: China is building large numbers of coal plants, therefore China is not genuinely decarbonizing. The first clause is true, but the conclusion does not follow because installed capacity and actual generation are different measures. Installed capacity describes how much electricity a fleet could produce under maximum operation, while generation describes how much electricity it actually sends to the grid over time. A system can add backup capacity while using the fleet less frequently, just as a city can expand emergency infrastructure without increasing its ordinary reliance on that infrastructure.
That is what the Chinese data for 2025 show. Coal capacity continued to rise, yet coal-fired electricity generation fell in absolute terms. The country did not merely reduce coal’s relative share by expanding the denominator of total electricity generation. It generated less electricity from coal than in the previous year, even while overall electricity demand grew. Non-fossil generation expanded rapidly enough to meet all of that new demand and displace some existing coal generation as well. Solar and wind additions are therefore no longer merely supplementing a fossil system whose underlying trajectory remains unchanged. They are beginning to take over the marginal growth of the power system, which means that increases in economic activity and electricity consumption no longer require proportional increases in coal combustion.
This distinction matters more than the raw plant count because an energy transition is fundamentally a change in how the system supplies demand. The presence of coal infrastructure remains consequential, but the direction of development depends on whether that infrastructure is operating more or less often, whether non-fossil sources are meeting new demand, and whether the utilization rate of the coal fleet is rising or falling. By those measures, the Chinese system is changing in a way that deserves to be described as a credible transition, even though it remains incomplete and reversible.
Why China is still building coal plants
China's continued coal construction is driven partly by the problem of energy security. Natural gas is technically better suited than coal to balancing variable solar and wind generation because gas plants can ramp output more quickly. China, however, depends substantially on imported gas delivered through pipelines and maritime trade routes. Those supplies are exposed to international price shocks, sanctions, conflict, and chokepoints such as the Strait of Malacca. Domestic coal is less flexible and more polluting, but it is abundant, politically controllable, and largely insulated from foreign interruption.
Coal therefore functions as a form of national insurance within an economy that cannot tolerate prolonged electricity shortages. Severe droughts have reduced hydroelectric output in major generating regions, heat waves have raised demand, and transmission bottlenecks have limited the ability to move power seamlessly across provinces. Chinese officials also remember rolling blackouts that halted factories and disrupted supply chains. From the perspective of a provincial government responsible for maintaining industrial output, a local coal plant can look like a dependable backstop against uncertain weather, distant transmission, or interrupted fuel imports.
The institutional structure of the Chinese power system reinforces this risk aversion. National five-year plans establish broad targets for renewable deployment and carbon reduction, but provincial governments retain considerable authority over permitting and implementation. Local officials are evaluated on economic growth and their ability to prevent disruption, which can make redundant local generation appear safer than dependence on an integrated national grid. Existing contracts may also guarantee coal plants operating hours or revenue, protecting incumbent generators even when renewable electricity is available. The result is not a single planner smoothly replacing coal with solar, but a layered state in which central decarbonization goals coexist with provincial insurance strategies, legacy contracts, and uneven grid development.
Explaining coal as insurance should not be mistaken for declaring it harmless. Every new plant creates creditors, workers, local tax revenue, and bureaucratic constituencies with an interest in continued operation. Backup capacity can become carbon lock-in if owners successfully demand guaranteed dispatch or if economic stimulus raises fossil generation again. Coal construction can also delay better investments in storage, transmission, demand management, and market reform. The point is not that reserve coal poses no threat, but that its presence no longer proves that coal remains the principal developmental engine of the electrical system.
Combined and uneven development
The coexistence of an absolute decline in coal-fired generation and continued coal construction is best understood through the older idea of combined and uneven development. New productive systems do not emerge on empty terrain. They develop through institutions, infrastructures, and territorial arrangements inherited from previous periods. Advanced and archaic forms coexist because different regions and organizations occupy different positions in the transition, and because political authorities face time horizons and risks that do not align neatly.
China combines extraordinary renewable manufacturing, advanced transmission technology, large-scale battery production, and rapidly electrifying transport with a power system still shaped by coal, provincial protectionism, and administrative generation contracts. Some regions possess large renewable surpluses, while others remain worried about local shortages. Central authorities pursue long-term carbon goals, while provincial officials protect immediate industrial reliability. The new energy system is not replacing the old one from the outside; it is developing through it, reorganizing its function unevenly and often inefficiently.
Calling this development uneven does not mean calling it unreal. Historical transformations are almost always contradictory while they are occurring. Electricity reorganized factories long before steam power vanished, and digital networks transformed commerce while older retail and communication systems remained widespread. The continued presence of an incumbent technology cannot by itself tell us whether its systemic importance is growing or declining. What matters is whether investment, utilization, marginal growth, technical learning, and institutional authority are shifting toward a new configuration.
By that standard, China is showing credible development. Renewable generation expanded rapidly enough in 2025 not only to meet new demand but to push coal-fired generation down in absolute terms. Clean technologies are becoming central export industries, and the state is moving from energy-consumption controls toward direct carbon controls. None of this guarantees that China will meet its long-term targets, but it establishes that the transition is more than a publicity campaign or a collection of isolated demonstration projects.
How nationalism makes the transition disappear
The familiar invocation of Chinese coal is not usually offered as a neutral description of another country's energy system. In Western political debate, it functions as a reason to avoid domestic action. Because China remains a large emitter and continues building coal infrastructure, a wind farm, battery factory, transmission project, or electric-vehicle policy in the United States or Europe is presented as pointless. The argument converts China's incomplete transition into an excuse for preserving fossil dependence elsewhere.
This reasoning works through selective empiricism rather than outright fabrication. The number of plants is emphasized while the absolute decline in coal-fired electricity generation is ignored. Territorial emissions are emphasized while the consumption and supply chains those emissions support are placed outside the frame. The continued existence of coal is treated as the decisive reality, while clean energy’s increasing role in supplying demand and displacing existing coal generation is demoted to a public-relations detail. Each individual statement may be technically defensible, but the hierarchy assigned to the facts produces a distorted picture of the system.
Nationalism intensifies this distortion by treating economies as morally separate containers. China becomes solely responsible for emissions produced within its borders, even when a substantial portion of its industrial system manufactures goods for consumers and firms elsewhere. At the same time, Western countries claim credit for lower territorial emissions without fully accounting for the carbon embodied in imported electronics, machinery, steel, batteries, solar panels, and other manufactured products. The clean appearance of affluent economies is partly related to the concentration of carbon-intensive production in China and other manufacturing centers.
This relational problem is especially visible in the clean-energy transition itself. China absorbs the manufacturing emissions associated with producing much of the world's solar, battery, electric-vehicle, and grid infrastructure. Other countries then install that equipment and count the resulting decline in their own territorial emissions as domestic environmental progress. Chinese production appears as pollution, while the exported equipment appears as someone else's decarbonization. A national accounting framework divides what is materially one transnational process.
Against easy propaganda
Opposing nationalist simplification does not require turning China into a model beyond criticism. China's coal fleet remains enormous, heavy industry remains carbon intensive, and the political economy of reserve capacity could preserve fossil generation for decades. The ecological damage associated with mining, combustion, industrial production, and clean-technology supply chains is substantial. A credible interpretation must retain these facts rather than dissolving them into a triumphalist story about state planning.
At the same time, criticism becomes propaganda when every contradiction is used to deny the direction of change. The fact that coal remains necessary as an infrastructural backstop does not mean solar and wind are failing. The fact that provincial officials continue protecting local capacity does not mean central planning has no effect. The fact that China remains the largest territorial emitter does not mean its renewable buildout is insignificant or that its emissions can be understood apart from the global production system it anchors.
The point is not to decide whether China is environmentally virtuous or villainous. Nations are not moral personalities, and large developmental systems cannot be understood by assigning them a single ethical character. The more serious question is whether the composition and function of the energy system are changing. Coal-fired electricity generation fell in absolute terms in 2025 while coal plants continued to be added as insurance, and that combination is precisely what makes the case theoretically important. It demonstrates how a real transformation can advance through inherited infrastructure rather than appearing only after that infrastructure has disappeared.
A credible transition before completion
A completed transition would require sustained absolute declines in coal generation and economy-wide emissions, the retirement of fossil capacity, major investment in storage and transmission, reform of provincial incentives, and decarbonization of steel, cement, chemicals, and other difficult industrial sectors. China has not reached that point, and there is no guarantee that its current trajectory will continue without interruption. Geopolitical conflict, industrial stimulus, drought, or provincial resistance could slow or reverse recent gains.
Credibility, however, does not require completion. A transition becomes credible when the source of marginal growth changes, when the incumbent system operates less intensively, when investment increasingly accumulates around new technologies, and when the institutions governing production begin adapting to those technologies. China increasingly meets these conditions. The contradiction between new coal plants and declining coal use does not disprove the transition; it reveals the political and infrastructural conditions under which the transition is taking place.
The broader lesson is that easy propaganda and nationalism both depend on flattening development into a contest between good and bad countries. That framing prevents us from seeing the global energy transformation as a combined, uneven, and relational process in which countries simultaneously cooperate, compete, externalize costs, and depend upon one another's industrial capacities. China can remain a major source of emissions while becoming the central producer of clean-energy infrastructure. Coal can remain materially present while losing its role as the primary source of system growth. A transition can be compromised, dangerous, and incomplete while still being real.
Recognizing that reality does not require faith in Chinese official claims or hostility toward the West. It requires rejecting the use of isolated facts as national morality plays and examining how the system is actually changing. Coal-fired electricity generation fell in absolute terms in 2025 while coal plants were still being built because those plants increasingly serve as security reserves and infrastructural backstops inside a power system whose growth is being taken over by non-fossil energy. That is not the end of the transition, but it is credible development, and denying it will not make the transformation disappear.