>At the global level, 2025 also saw a sharp rebound in non-renewable additions, which nearly doubled compared to 2024," IRENA noted. China led that drive, with 100 GW of non-renewable capacity added last year, most of which was coal.

Why is China adding so many new generation plants powered by coal? On this and other forums, I see claims all the time that solar is cheaper than coal. As the world's leading producer of solar panels, you would think that they would utilize it even more if those claims are true.

Is it just the need for power when the sun is not shining? Or is it something else?

My understanding is that China is planning to build a coal-backed renewable grid. Renewables, including storage, will provide the majority of the electricity generation, and then coal will step in when renewables aren't available. This involves building modern coal plants that can be spun up and down as needed, and then paying them not to generate. This is why actual emissions have plateaued and dropped, even as new coal capacity comes online.

We are (or were) doing something similar in the US, just using natural gas as the fuel rather than coal.

- They need something to provide electricity when the sun is not shining, while they install enough batteries and more than enough solar to use during the day and charge those batteries.

- They need some backup in case the Sun is dimmed for a few days, while they install enough solar to not need this anymore.

- They need some backup in case they grow too fast and the solar installations don't keep up.

- They need some backup in case there's some natural catastrophe, or some stupid dictator somewhere decides to start a war or something and destroy some vital energy infrastructure.

Their government has explained this a few times, but not on those words. It probably helps that those are government projects, and failing to deliver government projects is a very rude attitude that can end people's careers. But the rationale is sound too.

Mostly it's that solar doesn't work at night. That means you have to use batteries, which are impractical to store more than a certain amount of energy, after which you need another very large and stable energy source. So a nation-state that can't go dark must have a constant load source, such as nuclear, hydro, or coal. There's also limitations of geography, industry, production capacity, and other issues.

More than anything it's a supply limit. Solar is consistently scaling about as fast as any manufacturing industry scales. The TAM is just big.

Part of China's "new" coal capacity is modern, efficient coal plants with lower emissions being built to replace old, inefficient, highly polluting ones.

There's a recent AP article talking about this some (I don't know enough to know the quality of the article): https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...

Inertia I imagine. Planning cycles can be 10, 20 years, perhaps longer for big infrastructure projects.

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