China plans to double its renewable energy use by 2035. This is good news. – Clean Technica

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On April 17, 2026, Wang Changlin, vice chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, announced that China intends to double its non-fossil fuel energy supply by 2035. Most analysts see the initiative as a way for the country to meet its climate goals, as recently announced in its latest five-year plan. Although some have complained that the plan is not ambitious, China has achieved almost every goal set in previous five-year plans, often years ahead of schedule.

Wang said the country will “significantly increase” its non-fossil energy supply by 2030 and double it by 2035 compared to 2025 levels. He pointed out that Tibet’s large-scale hydropower projects and desert-based renewable energy hubs will help boost clean energy generation. China also announced the construction of a 50MW concentrated solar power facility to be built at an altitude of 14,900 feet in Tibet. This is the highest such facility in the world.

Wang’s comments clarify the meaning of the 10-year action plan to double non-fossil energy, included in the 15th Five-Year Plan. The mention was brief and some details were unclear, such as when the start and end dates were and whether the doubling referred to capacity or generation. bloomberg I will report it. Wang’s announcement appears to have revealed some of these details.

Doubling clean energy consumption in 10 years is likely to be a more ambitious goal than China’s previous goal of making non-fossil energy sources account for 25% of total consumption by 2025 and 30% by 2035. bloomberg I will report it. If total energy demand grows at about 2.5% per year (which seems modest considering the race to build data centers that support artificial intelligence) and consumption doubles, the share of non-fossil energy will reach 29% by 2029, according to analysts Lauri Milivirta and Belinda Schoepe of the Center for Energy and Clean Air Research.

“If this means doubling total non-fossil energy use from 2025 to 2035, that could be significantly more ambitious than China’s existing goals,” the analysts said in a note dated March 6 after announcing the five-year plan.

Last fall, Chinese President Xi Jinping told the United Nations that his country would reduce greenhouse gas emissions across its economy and expand renewable energy sixfold over the next few years. new york times He called it “a globally significant moment for a country that is currently the world’s biggest polluter.”

There is little doubt that China is the world’s largest exporter of solar and wind technology. Thanks to Chinese-made solar panels, Pakistan was able to avoid much of the economic pain inflicted on the world by America’s reckless and completely unnecessary war against Iran. Previously, the country relied entirely on LNG supplies from Qatar, which canceled 20 LNG shipments months before the Hormuz disaster began.

bad news

Author Yale University Climate 360Isabel Hilton writes: “In 2021, Xi Jinping made two important commitments aimed at demonstrating China’s determination to fight climate change. At the Leaders’ Climate Change Summit in April of that year, he announced that China would “tightly manage” coal power generation until 2025, when it would begin phasing out coal power. Also in the same year, China pledged to reduce the energy intensity of its economy (the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP) by less than 65 percent. “We will reach 2005 levels by 2030. This month, China announced its plans for the next five years, but both commitments appeared to be on the rocks.”

In 2015, coal generated 69% of China’s primary energy, falling to 56% in 2024, well above the 8% in the United States. However, actual coal consumption was higher than before. This is simply because China’s electricity demand continues to increase. Despite efforts to reduce coal use, four years after President Xi’s pledge, China was consuming 40% more coal than the rest of the world combined.

It would have been even bigger had China not installed a record 300 gigawatts of solar power and 100 gigawatts of wind power in 2025. This has ensured that China’s growing electricity demand is primarily met by clean energy. But while China’s decades-long investment in renewable technology manufacturing has been a major industrial policy success, China’s obsession with coal means this success has not translated into commensurately large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, Hilton said.

China is currently the largest installer of renewable energy, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the largest user of coal. One explanation for this challenge is national concerns about energy security. Coal is the only fossil fuel that China does not have import obligations on. The only fuel China’s planners know is that it will continue to be available in abundance, no matter what a mentally unstable strongman somewhere in the world might someday do.

Coal and national security

Coal provides China with an alternative position when challenges such as Covid-19 and reduced hydropower generation due to drought strain power supplies. In 2024, China began construction of 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants. This represented 93% of all new coal construction worldwide in the same year. More than 50 large-scale coal-fired power plants began operating in China last year. As a result, many of these coal-fired facilities have operating rates far below those needed to be economically viable, yet the drive to build more coal-fired facilities continues.

The 15th Five-Year Plan provided an opportunity to correct these negative trends and get China’s climate ambitions back on track, but the government appears to have missed this opportunity. The plan promises continued efforts towards renewable energy production and installation, and China installed more renewable solar and wind power last year than any other region of the world, but other signs were less encouraging, Hilton said.

China’s energy demand continues to increase. Until recently, China has maintained that its status as a developing country meant it did not need to set emissions limits and instead focused on energy density targets emphasized by Xi Jinping. When measuring the energy required to produce a unit of GDP, these are essentially measures of efficiency. As long as energy consumption grows slower than GDP, energy intensity will decline.

energy density

China set its first energy density target in the 11th Five-Year Plan in 2006, and it has been a key goal in all subsequent plans, and China’s energy use efficiency has steadily improved. However, increased efficiency does not necessarily mean lower emissions. As China’s energy demand continues to grow, emissions are increasing despite efficiency improvements. Emissions have declined slightly over the past 18 months, but that trend is expected to reverse as energy density gains slow.

Over the past five years, China’s dramatic demand growth appeared to be primarily met by an equally rapidly expanding supply of renewable energy. But on the downside, China missed its energy density target for the first time. We aimed for a 17% improvement over the past five years, but the achievement rate was only 12.4%. Taking GDP growth into account, emissions would have increased by 13% over the same period.

That would send the country’s hopes of meeting its Paris commitments and Xi Jinping’s promise to reduce China’s carbon intensity by 65% ​​below 2005 levels by 2030 to a significant degree off track. Planners could have supplemented this with new ambitions in the 15th Five-Year Plan. Instead, it changed the way it calculates energy intensity and set looser targets for the next five years, perhaps to hide Xi’s failure to meet his goals. To put it less politely, Hilton says that China is cooking books.

vested interest

If one aspect of China’s reluctance to abandon coal is related to energy security, another major obstacle is vested interests within the system. Coal-producing states want to preserve jobs and local economies, and a reliable supply of electricity is more important to local governments than curbing emissions. These concerns may conflict with national climate goals.

The Chinese government continues to insist that coal is needed to balance the power grid and fill supply gaps when demand peaks or renewable energy production declines. But that’s not the best or most efficient use of coal-fired power plants, which are designed to operate consistently rather than sporadically.

It may take several hours for the coal facility to become operational. Once it’s fully online, you can’t say no even if demand decreases. To get around this problem, many operators seem to be running their plants in the background, ready to provide energy on short notice. This condition is known in the industry as “reserve reserve.” Plants simply keep running, using fuel and emitting CO2, making them inefficient both in terms of energy use and carbon emissions.

There have been a number of attempts to reform systems to give preferential treatment to renewable energy, and the government has pointed out in its 15th Five-Year Plan that it will continue to work on expanding the renewable energy field as a key to climate change policy. But Hilton argued that no matter how successful this industrial policy is, it will not reduce emissions on its own if coal continues to play an important role in the power sector.

bright spot

The tug-of-war between renewable energy and coal in China may be resolved by the fact that the cost of grid-scale battery storage has recently fallen sharply, and pumped hydro energy storage has also recently increased in China. Battery storage alone has increased 20x in just four years. These forms of storage are cheaper, more efficient, and more climate-friendly than keeping coal fleets on standby, and as they grow, the case for continued use of coal, let alone expansion, seems certain to weaken further.

“The concern for investors is that the cost of China’s coal buildup of long-stranded assets could reach trillions of dollars. The climate costs are a concern for everyone,” Hilton concluded.