Coal bubble burst: China's "key control provinces" revealed to be teeming with coal-fired plant build

Over 40GW of capacity are under construction.

Greenpeace revealed another research in protest of China's unstoppable buliding of a coal-powered kingdom. Despite the control policies included in the National Air Pollution Action Plan, the eight “key control” provinces still have over 40GW of coal-fired capacity under construction, and another 10GW of capacity could be added through Combined Heat and Power projects.

Greenpeace said in its report that an optimistic reading of the retirement policies suggests that by 2020, up to 30GW of capacity could be retired in these provinces; however this is more than the entire national target in the State Council energy plan for 2014-2020. In any case, coal-fired capacity is projected to increase by at least 20GW.

In-province power demand growth to 2020 will be covered by expected expansion in wind, solar and nuclear power generation. At the same time, approximately 120GW of coal-fired capacity will be made redundant if the planned imports through UHV lines are realized.

Given that utilization of coal-fired generators in the key regions would decline even if there was no increase in power imports, this surge of imports is likely to prove contentious.

"These provinces will be expected to pay over 200 billion CNY (over 30 billion USD) per year for power that they don’t need, while depriving their in-province generators of the said revenue," it said.