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China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
China reaffirmed climate stance
TRUMP WITHDRAWS: A government spokesperson said China’s “resolve and actions to actively respond to climate change will remain unchanged” at a press conference on 21 January. Asked by the New York Times to respond to president Donald Trump withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement again, foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said China was “concerned” and that “China will work with all parties to…promote a global green and low-carbon transition for the shared future of humanity”, state-supporting Global Times reported. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, China’s vice premier Ding Xuexiang reiterated that the world needs to “jointly tackle global challenges”, including climate change and energy security, said the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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BYE BYE BIDEN: Before leaving the White House, outgoing US president Joe Biden urged his successor to “tackle China’s ‘overcapacity’ and dominance in clean-energy supply chains, calling it a competition the US ‘must win’”, SCMP reported. Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s energy secretary, wrote in the New York Times that “it is no secret China wants to dominate the global market” for electric vehicles (EV) under the headline: “China will be thrilled if Trump kills America’s green economy.” One of the Biden administration’s last moves was finalising rules that will “effectively bar nearly all Chinese cars and trucks” from the US, said Reuters. He also barred five Chinese solar companies – allegedly using forced labour in Xinjiang – from entering the US market, reported the New York Times. The move has led to criticism from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which denied the forced labour claims, said BJX News. BBC News reported that tariffs from the US, Canada and the EU could force China to turn to “emerging markets”, but as the new markets “don’t have the same levels of demand…that could impact Chinese businesses that are hoping to expand, in turn hitting suppliers of energy and raw materials”. A comment for Dialogue Earth by analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) said emerging markets in the global south are already driving China’s export growth.
New UK, EU-China geopolitical situation
REEVES IN BEIJING: UK chancellor Rachel Reeves visited China between 10-13 January and “secured benefits worth up to £1bn for the UK economy”, reported the Guardian. According to a UK government document, both sides agreed to “deeper cooperation across areas such as financial services, trade, investment and the climate to support secure growth”, while also agreeing on “strengthening the existing UK-China clean energy partnership”. An unbylined comment piece in China’s state-supporting Global Times said that “China-UK relations have shown signs of warming up”. It added that Reeves responded that the UK would “make decisions in our national interest” when asked whether it would follow the US and EU in imposing tariffs on Chinese EVs. Meanwhile, Zheng Zeguang, the Chinese ambassador to the UK, called on both sides to “maintain the momentum and focus on cooperation” at an event in London attended by Carbon Brief.
EU-CHINA TENSIONS: Just before Reeves’ arrival, China had “concluded that the EU’s recent [anti-subsidies] investigations into Chinese enterprises…were ‘unfair and non-transparent’”, SCMP reported. However, Beijing did not confirm whether it would “take any retaliatory measures in light of the probe’s findings”, added the newspaper. Bloomberg reported that the EU was “set to warn” that the bloc is “facing stiffening pressure” from nations including China. China’s president Xi Jinping, nevertheless, told European Council president Antonio Costa that “China has always regarded Europe as an important pole in a multipolar world”, reported Xinhua. In her own Davos speech, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen noted concerns over “a second China shock – because of state-sponsored over-capacity”, but said “we should…strive for mutual benefits in our conversation with China”.
Analysts debate China’s oil demand peak
OIL PEAKING?: As much as 10% of China’s oil-refining capacity could be closed in the next 10 years due to “an earlier-than-expected peak” in oil demand, Reuters reported. Chinese oil imports in 2024 fell 1.9% to 11.04m barrels per day, the “first annual decline in two decades outside of pandemic-induced falls”, another Reuters article said. A Financial Times “big read” – titled “Has China already reached peak oil?” – attributed the decline to China’s property crisis and rising electrification of transport. It quoted the head of oil giant Saudi Aramco claiming plastic and petrochemical demand could sustain demand going forward, but also quoted an International Energy Agency analyst saying the decline in transport oil use would outweigh this. The sale of petrol-powered cars in China “plunged” last year, as sales of all types of EVs rose more than 40%, according to the Associated Press.
COAL POWER-UP: China’s thermal power generation – largely coal – rose 1.5% in 2024 to 6,340 terawatt-hours (TWh), Reuters reported, “defying “expectations that coal generation was peaking”. However, the aggregate data mask a “very significant breakpoint”, it quoted CREA lead analyst Lauri Myllyvirta saying, as an 11% “spike” in coal-fired power growth in January and February was followed by a plateau from March to November. Total power consumption reached 9,852TWh, up 6.8% year-on-year, BJX News reported. On Twitter, David Fishman, senior manager at consultancy Lantau Group, said growth in power consumption in the past six months of 2024 “was considerably slower than in the [first] half of the year”.
RENEWABLE RECORDS: China has broken its “own records for new wind and solar power installations again” in 2024, reported Reuters. Solar capacity grew to nearly 890 gigawatts (GW), up 45% – or 277GW – year-on-year, Jiemian reported, while wind capacity grew 79GW to around about 520GW. The news outlet added that thermal power “is still the largest source of electricity” in China overall. To “keep pace with surging renewable generation”, China’s State Grid Corporation will spend 650bn yuan ($89bn) – a record amount – on upgrading the nation’s power infrastructure this year, Bloomberg said. It added that most of this would likely go to “ultra-high-voltage power lines” and “smaller networks linking rooftop solar panels”.
Annual environment conference
MEE CONFERENCE: China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) confirmed eight “key tasks” for 2025, including expanding the national carbon market and promoting “green, low-carbon and high-quality development”, at its annual work conference on 14-15 January, reported Shanghai-based media outlet the Paper. The ministry also announced that “approximately 80% of the nation’s crude steel production capacity has undergone either comprehensive ultra-low emission transformations or targeted upgrades in key segments of their production processes”, according to the Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily. At a separate press conference, MEE said it has approved environmental investments worth 980bn yuan ($133bn) in 2024, while pledging to “refine the conviction and sentencing standards for falsifying environmental assessments” within the legal system in China.
EMISSIONS ACCOUNTING: Meanwhile, China released its first “national database of emission factors” for “improving the accuracy” of greenhouse gas emission calculations, Science and Technology Daily reported. It also released the “first batch of carbon footprint accounting rules”, covering steel, cement, EV batteries and 12 other “industrial products”, said China Energy Network.
Spotlight
Q&A: How China became the world’s leading market for energy storage
China is the world’s largest market for energy storage, followed by the US and Europe, according to BloombergNEF. The storage industry has attracted investments worth hundreds of billions of yuan and rapidly developed in recent years.
However, rapid growth has caused other problems, such as “temporary structural overcapacity” and low utilisation.
In this issue, Carbon Brief explores how China has been driving the sector forwards and how it fits into the nation’s wider energy transition. The full article is available on Carbon Brief’s website.
Soaring battery deployment
China is experiencing a renewable energy boom, adding a massive 301 gigawatts (GW) of renewable capacity, including solar, wind and hydro, in 2023 alone – more than the total renewable generating capacity installed in most countries over all time.
However, the country’s power system still struggles to absorb all of the generation, making energy storage – which bridges temporal and geographical gaps between energy supply and demand – a key tool for the country to improve its renewable energy integration.
Pumped hydro storage is the most common utility-scale storage system and has a long history in China. As of 2023, pumped hydro storage surpassed 50GW, making up more than half of the country’s overall storage capacity.
The remaining half is comprised primarily of batteries and emerging technologies, such as compressed air and flywheels, as well as thermal energy.
These technologies, known as the “new type” energy storage in China, have seen rapid growth in recent years. Lithium-ion batteries dominate the “new type” sector.
The deployment of “new type” energy storage capacity almost quadrupled in 2023 in China, increasing to 31.4GW, up from just 8.7 GW in 2022, according to data from the National Energy Administration (NEA).
This means that China surpassed its target of reaching 30GW of the “new type” energy storage by 2025 two years earlier than planned. The goal had been set by the NEA and China’s top economic planner the National Development and Reform Commission, under the 14th “five year plan”.
(Read Carbon Brief’s Q&A: What does China’s 14th ‘five year plan’ mean for climate change?)
High deployment, low usage
To promote battery storage, China has implemented a number of policies, most notably the gradual rollout since 2017 of the “mandatory allocation of energy storage” policy (强制配储政策), which is also known as the “new energy plus storage” model (新能源+储能).
Under the mandate, which applies in dozens of provinces, renewable companies are required to include a certain amount of energy storage capacity alongside new solar and wind generation projects, with the storage allocation rate ranging between 5% to 20%.
Cheaper costs led by technology innovation have also helped the market’s increasing adoption of batteries, Sun Yongping, researcher of emissions trading and vice-dean of the Institute of State Governance at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, told Carbon Brief.
Despite its positive intentions, the mandatory storage policy has had unintended consequences. Notably, a significant portion of the installed storage capacity remains underutilised.
In regions covered by the State Grid – the government-owned operator that runs the majority of the country’s electricity transmission network – more than four-fifths of the storage systems operate less than 10% of the time, with many used only once every two days, according to a Bloomberg report.
Another challenge, according to Guo, is the additional project costs and lack of effective incentives, as many storage facilities were built or rented to fulfil government requirements, but went unused afterwards.
Both Guo and Sun argue that China needs a deeper level of electricity market pricing reforms to create incentives to use storage.
Guo said: “We still hope that each place deploys new energy storage according to its needs and understands its own situation instead of adopting a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.”
‘New driving force’ for economy
Earlier this year, the NEA named the energy storage sector as a “new driving force” for the country’s “new quality productive forces ” (NQPF).
(Read more on Carbon Brief’s Q&A: “What China’s push for ‘new quality productive forces’ means for climate action.”)
Regional governments also saw the economic opportunity in energy storage. Guangdong, for example, aimed to make energy storage a “strategic pillar industry” by 2025.
Meanwhile, Zhejiang, Anhui and Guangdong also have ambitious targets of installing local storage capacity of 3GW each by 2025, according to a recent tally by Greenpeace East Asia, based on government documents.
The booming market has attracted more than 100bn yuan ($14bn) since 2021.
But risks of market turmoil also exist. According to battery industrial information provider Gaogong Industrial Institute, last year China saw more than 70,000 newly registered companies in the sector, which indicated that the market – already seeing fierce competition – may now be undergoing an “overcapacity” period.
Guo said this period of “overcapacity”, however, is “temporary”. She adds:
“There exists a temporary structural overcapacity, as the current expansion of new type energy storage is outpacing the market needs.
“However, if the regional governments could provide more policy support for the application of storage projects, this ‘excess capacity’ due to insufficient market demand could be avoided.”
This Spotlight was written by freelance climate journalist Yuan Ye for Carbon Brief.
Watch, read, listen
CARBON ‘SPIRIT’: Zheng Shanjie, head of China’s top planner National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), wrote a comment for People’s Daily about the “spirit” of the Central Committee of the Communist party, including insisting on the “dual-carbon” goals.
PARIS ‘THREATS’: Caixin published a speech by former Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan arguing that the Paris Agreement faces “mounting threats”, with funding for climate change initiatives “remain[ing] critically insufficient”.
CBAM SOLUTION: A comment for the 21st Century Business Herald by Lin Boqiang, dean at the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy of Xiamen University, discussed developing China’s carbon market as a response to the EU’s carbon border tariff (CBAM).
US-CHINA CLIMATE: US thinktank the Brookings Institution released a video recording of a panel discussion on the “evolving dynamics of US-China relations on climate change and green technology”.
New science
Maximum carbon uptake potential through progressive management of plantation forests in Guangdong province, China
Communications Earth & Environment
Harvesting young planted forests and then replanting over a 20-year period could sequester 2.5 times more carbon than simply preserving forests, according to new research on China’s Guangdong province. The authors used satellite data, forest growth models and machine learning to identify “key drivers of carbon accumulation”. The study found that the optimal scenario for carbon sequestration, described above, “could yield a potential carbon stock of 0.5 gigatonnes of carbon by 2060, without expanding forest cover”.
Evaluation and future projection of compound extreme events in China using CMIP6 models
Climate change
A new study evaluated the simulation performance of CMIP6 climate models for “six types of compound extreme event” in China. The research found four major results including “the performance of general circulation models (GCMs) in the simulation of extreme temperature indices is better than that for extreme precipitation indices, and positive biases exist in extreme precipitation indices for most models”. It added that the frequency of warm extremes may increase in the future, while cold extremes showed a decreasing trend.
China Briefing is compiled by Wanyuan Song and Anika Patel. It is edited by Wanyuan Song and Dr Simon Evans. Please send tips and feedback to china@carbonbrief.org
The post China Briefing 23 January 2025: China’s climate ‘concern’ over Trump; Peak oil debate; China’s energy storage lead appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
<“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
