China is constructing new coal power and steel-making facilities at an alarming rate, with the amount of carbon produced by projects begun in 2021 set to match Florida’s annual emissions, according to a report by climate researchers released on Thursday.

China started building coal-fired power plants last year that will generate a total of 33 gigawatts of electricity, the most since 2016 and almost three times more than the rest of the world plans to add, according to the report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor. It follows the addition of 25 GW of coal power to the grid last year.

The ramp-up was triggered by the power shortages that wracked the economy in the second half of 2021, which have been “utilized by pro-coal interests to rewrite the country’s energy policy,” the report said. 

Top officials have made the shift in policy evident in recent months, culminating in President Xi Jinping’s comments to the Politburo in January. Xi told China’s core leaders that the nation’s climate goals shouldn’t clash with other priorities including securing adequate supplies of energy and materials, and that oil and gas output need to “grow steadily.”

China also added 74 million tons of coal-based steel capacity in 2021, the report said. That’s nearly as much as total annual output in Japan, the world’s third-biggest producer. Including its electricity usage, the sector accounts for almost a quarter of China’s total emissions, according to the report. 

The new investments in steel fall under China’s policy on capacity swaps, which requires that more existing capacity is retired for all the new capacity that’s added. That should mean total capacity falls year by year, although enforcement failed in 2020 when reported output “far exceeded the amount of capacity that was supposed to exist,” the report said.

Tougher Rules

Tougher rules on carbon emissions in 2021 helped cut steel output from the prior year’s record levels. But earlier this year, the government delayed its deadline for the steel sector to hit peak emissions by five years to 2030, highlighting its importance to the nation’s broader economic goals as China prepares to stimulate the economy with infrastructure spending.      

In sum, there’s “no space for this new capacity to be utilized under the goals of the Paris Agreement,” the researchers wrote. New coal-based power plants and integrated steel facilities have a typical lifetime of 20 to 40 years that “will lock the sectors further into coal dependency.” 

China’s parallel effort to combat global warming is a massive build-up of renewable energy, including 97 GW of wind and solar to be housed in the deserts of northern China, and submissions for a second batch that reportedly exceed 400 GW. 

Still, the country needs to accelerate those investments as current targets aren’t enough to meet its electricity demand, said the report. The increases in wind, solar, nuclear and hydro-power capacity from 2020 to 2025 would cover annual demand growth of approximately 3.5%, while the China Electricity Council projects actual growth at 6%.

China needs to “direct all new power generation investments into clean energy, and increase the scale of these investments to match the projected growth in electricity demand,” said the researchers. “Given that China’s power sector has been the main source of increases in global fossil emissions in the past two years, this would be a crucial contribution to meeting the goals of the Paris agreement.”