BEIJING — China commissioned seventy-eight gigawatts of new coal-fired electricity in 2025, the largest annual addition the country has put on its grid in a decade, according to a joint review by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the Global Energy Monitor reported this week by Inside Climate News. Construction starts on new coal capacity hit 94.5 gigawatts in 2024, the most since 2015. Another twenty-four gigawatts went online in the first quarter of 2026, with a record 161 gigawatts of fresh proposals submitted across the calendar year. By comparison, only about three gigawatts of old coal plants were retired in 2025.
The numbers sit alongside an electricity story that is, on its face, the opposite. China’s solar capacity reached 1.2 terawatts by the end of 2025, the country added a record 647 gigawatts of solar worldwide in the same year, and clean energy met all of China’s net electricity demand growth. As Eastern Herald reported on Friday, Asian solar generation overtook gas-fired power for the first time in recorded history in the twelve months to April. Inside that growth story is another one. The country building the world’s solar fleet is also building the world’s coal fleet, and the second pipeline is the larger.
“The situation is alarming,” Qi Qin, the China analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the report’s lead author, told Inside Climate News. “It is more likely that China has commissioned too many new coal-fired power plants since 2024.” The official rationale, Qin said, is the one provincial planners have been giving for two years: the new plants are a backup for the variable renewable fleet. The arithmetic does not always agree. Clean energy met one hundred percent of growth in electricity demand in 2025, and coal generation as a share of the mix fell. Yet the build-out continued.
What the build-out actually answers, according to Beijing’s National Energy Administration, is fuel security. China imports roughly forty percent of its natural gas and seventy-five percent of its oil. It produces more than ninety percent of its own coal. After the May 2025 U.S. strikes on Iranian targets and the Iranian threats to mine the Strait of Hormuz that followed, Chinese crude imports fell twenty percent year-on-year in April 2026. The five-year plan that begins in 2026 was written, in part, against that backdrop.
Daniel M. Kammen, an energy professor at Johns Hopkins University who has advised both U.S. and Chinese officials on grid decarbonisation, said the security argument is wearing thin. “The arguments to say we need this because of what’s happening with the U.S. attacking Iran, those arguments are just old,” he told Inside Climate News. “This has made everybody’s job more difficult.” The phrasing matters. Kammen’s complaint is not that Beijing should not protect its grid; it is that nearly every dollar of coal capex now committed is a dollar that the cheaper-by-the-month solar fleet would have replaced inside a decade.
The political weight of the coal build sits in the provinces. Shanxi, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang collectively account for most of China’s coal output and a significant share of its mining employment. Provincial governments rely on coal royalties for budgets, and on coal-fired generation to keep local steel mills and aluminium smelters running. State-owned generators have been told to keep retirements slow. The result is a planning system in which national targets point at decarbonisation and provincial spreadsheets point the other way.
The climate accounting follows from the megawatts. The International Energy Agency calculates that an average new Chinese coal plant emits roughly one and a half million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and runs for roughly forty years. Seventy-eight gigawatts of new commissioning, at the average plant utilization Chinese state planners assume, locks in approximately five gigatonnes of carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the 2025 cohort alone. The figure is comparable to a year of total emissions for the European Union.
The bill does not stop at the Chinese border. The 1,200-year megadrought drying out the Colorado River basin, the same drought that has Lake Mead within roughly fifteen feet of cutting off seventy percent of the Hoover Dam’s hydropower, is driven by the same atmospheric heat trapping that the new Chinese coal fleet will help extend. The Horn of Africa drought that Kenya is using the UN’s Loss and Damage Network to count is the same physical phenomenon viewed from the receiving end. The historic share of emissions belongs to the rich economies. The marginal share, for the rest of this decade, belongs to whichever Asian power chooses coal for its grid.
Qin’s report frames the 15th Five-Year Plan, which Beijing is expected to release in late 2026, as the inflection point. The plan will set provincial coal limits, retirement schedules and the trajectory for the national emissions trading scheme. If the central government accepts the provincial argument that the new plants are flexible backup, the country’s emissions peak — already officially expected before 2030 — slips further into the decade. If it does not, the question becomes which provinces absorb the cost of stranding capacity that has just been built.
For the rest of Asia, the immediate consequence is competitive. Chinese coal plants run on cheap domestic fuel and produce industrial electricity at a tariff that no neighbouring economy can match without subsidies. Pakistani, Vietnamese and Indonesian planners watching China’s dual-track build-out are being told two stories at once: solar is the cheap answer for new capacity, and coal is the political answer when the grid is asked who will keep the lights on at three in the morning. Beijing’s 2025 numbers say the second story has, for now, the louder voice.
