By Colleen Howe
BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s climate goals made public on Wednesday promise the continued expansion of renewable energy, which it has already added at a rapid pace, but make no specific commitment to increase its share in power generation or scale back coal.
In announcing the country’s first carbon reduction goals, President Xi Jinping said China would increase its wind and solar power capacity, already the world’s largest, by six times from 2020 levels to 3,600 gigawatts by 2035.
Last year, China reached a target to bring total wind and solar generating capacity to 1,200 GW six years ahead of schedule, reflecting what analysts said is its penchant for setting goals it knows it can meet.
Yao Zhe, global policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia, said this week’s updated targets from the world’s largest carbon emitter were again unambitious.
“If wind and solar expansion continues at its current pace, total installations will exceed 3,000 GW by 2030 and reach 4,500 GW by 2035,” Yao said.
CURTAILMENT, NOT CAPACITY IS THE ISSUE
Anders Hove, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said China’s renewables challenge is not capacity but surging curtailment rates.
Curtailment occurs when grid managers limit the power coming onto the grid to maintain a balance with demand or due to infrastructure constraints.
Hove said China should focus more on ensuring that renewable power goes into the grid, displacing electricity from coal and gas.
Xi said China would aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 7%-10% from the peak, a level it has not yet defined but that analysts expected to happen earlier than the official 2030 goal.
The targets announced on Wednesday were the first since China in 2020 said it would hit peak carbon emissions by 2030 and bring the economy to carbon neutrality by 2060.
Although the new goals, including the renewable target, were expected to provide a clearer roadmap to achieving progress, the headline number fell short of the 30% emissions cut observers said is needed to keep China on track for carbon neutrality by 2060.
Even so, the measured targets were a contrast to the speech made by U.S. President Donald Trump, who dismissed climate change as a “con job”.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty around demand growth in China and the need to allow for continued growth from traditional users as well as new users, like data centres and others,” said Michael Davidson, a University of California, San Diego, professor who researches renewable energy systems and carbon neutrality in China.
“China will be very hesitant to put any caps on what that demand growth could be,” he said.
Xi stopped short of setting new targets for coal or reiterating a target from 2020, when China said it would “phase down” coal use between 2026 and 2030. It has continued to build and permit new coal mines.
(Reporting by Colleen HoweEditing by Tony Munroe and Barbara Lewis)
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