China’s thinking around the energy transition shifted drastically in 2020 after president Xi Jinping pledged to reach carbon neutrality before 2060.
Despite a series of major policy developments since then, however, it is still not clear what the new energy system will look like and which pathways are the most efficient for China to reach its carbon neutrality goal.
Our latest research models three scenarios for China’s energy transition: one in which China develops a net-zero emissions energy system before 2055; one in which it achieves this around 2055; and a baseline scenario that extrapolates current development trends.
We find that a combination of energy efficiency measures, electrification of end-use consumption and a low-carbon power supply based on various renewable energy sources – such as solar and wind – can greatly help the country to achieve its decarbonisation goals by 2055.
In the most ambitious scenario, China’s power sector will be fossil fuel-free by 2055, while some industries will continue to use a small amount of coal and gas. However, this will be balanced by negative emissions from biomass power plants fitted with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
- How the dual carbon targets changed the game
- Three scenarios for China’s energy transformation
- Three phases in China’s energy transformation
- Coal power plants become flexibility providers
- Managing a grid dominated by variable wind and solar
- Visions for the future
How the dual carbon targets changed the game
When Xi began his speech at the UN General Assembly in September 2020, few had expected him to deliver such a ground-breaking announcement.
In his words: “We aim to have CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”
This policy is now more commonly known as the “dual carbon” goals.
That one sentence changed the whole understanding of the energy transformation in China.
Until then, China’s target was to “promote a revolution in energy production and consumption, and build an energy sector that is clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient”, as Xi had said at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in China (CPC) in October 2017.
Xi’s 2020 speech shifted China’s priorities from reaching “low-carbon” to reaching “carbon neutrality”, from an energy sector that includes at least some fossil fuel consumption, to an energy sector which leaves little room for coal, oil and gas once carbon neutrality is reached.
The difference required a genuine change of mindset throughout China’s political system and stakeholders within the energy system, such as major power producers.
China started this immediately after the announcement: the State Council, China’s top administrative body, introduced the 1+N policy strategy, which is comprised of an overarching guideline for reaching the “dual carbon” goals (the “1”) and a number of more concrete guidelines and regulations to implement the strategy (the “N”).
So far, the policies have mainly focused on reaching the carbon peak before 2030 – but the long-term goal of carbon neutrality by 2060 is ever-present.
The National Energy Administration (NEA) has launched a blueprint for a new type of power system. At a broader level, several government departments have outlined efforts to transform the entire energy system, as opposed to just the power system, in the effort to reach carbon neutrality.
Hence, the foundation for China’s energy transformation is much more solid and precise today than it was before Xi’s announcement. The question now is: what will the new type of energy system look like and how will China reach it?
Three scenarios for China’s energy transformation
To answer these questions, our programme modelled three scenarios for China’s energy transformation: one in which China develops a net-zero emissions energy system before 2055; one in which it achieves this around 2055; and a baseline scenario that extrapolates current development trends.
The analysis is based on a detailed bottom-up modelling approach, while, at the same time, using visions for a “Beautiful China” – an official initiative for “the nation’s green and high-quality growth” – as guidelines for the transformation.
In our modelling, the overarching strategy for the energy transformation consists of three intertwined actions:
- Increase energy efficiency throughout the supply chain.
- Electrify the end-use sectors as much as possible.
- Transform the power sector into a “green”, fossil-free sector with solar and wind power as the backbone of the system.
(The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment report showed that these are key elements of all global pathways that limit warming to 1.5C or 2C.)
A consequence of following this strategy would be that the Chinese energy system would be able to provide energy for sustainable economic growth in China with net-zero carbon emissions, improved air quality and a high level of energy security.
In the most ambitious scenario, the Chinese power system would be carbon-neutral from 2045 – and the whole energy system before 2055.
Compared to today, total primary energy consumption would be lower in 2060 despite economic growth. Moreover, coal, oil and gas would be practically phased out of the system – and dependence on imported fossil fuels would be eliminated.
The figure below shows the energy flowing through China’s economy in 2021 (upper panel) compared with the energy flow in 2060 under this most ambitious scenario (lower panel).
On the left, each panel shows sources of primary energy flowing into the economy such as coal (black), gas (pink), oil (shades of grey) and non-fossil fuels such as nuclear (brown), hydro (dark blue), wind (light blue) and solar (yellow).
The centre of each panel illustrates the transformation of primary energy into more useful forms, such as electricity or refined oil products. Much of the primary energy contained in fossil fuels is wasted at this stage (“losses”) in the form of waste heat.
On the right, the users of final energy are broken down by sector.
Most notably, fossil fuels – particularly coal – are the largest sources of energy in 2021, whereas in the ambitious 2060 scenario, below, low-carbon sources dominate.
Three phases in China’s energy transformation
Our study suggests the transformation pathway will have three main phases. The first phase is the peaking phase until 2030.
During this period, the deployment of wind and solar power would continue to increase, while electrification of the industry and transport sectors would gain momentum.
However, coal and oil would remain the dominant energy sources in terms of total primary energy consumption.
Next is the “energy revolution” phase, from 2030 to 2050. During this phase, solar and wind power would become the main energy sources for electricity supply, and the electrification of the end-use sectors would be substantial.
The shift away from fossil fuels minimises the loss of waste heat in electricity generation and refining. Meanwhile, “green hydrogen” made from renewable power would become increasingly important in the industrial sectors.
The third phase is the consolidation phase, from 2050 to 2060. Decarbonisation occurs in sub-sectors that are challenging to electrify, such as the steel and chemicals industries, the old solar and wind power plants are replaced by new solar and wind power, and remaining fossil fuels in the energy mix are nearly phased out.
Coal power plants become flexibility providers
Although the Chinese government plans to “phase down” coal from 2025, based on the current policy guidelines and market situation, we estimate that coal power capacity would not be rapidly removed in any of our three scenarios.
Instead, coal power plants would gradually become providers of energy security and capacity to meet peaks in electricity demand, and not generate large amounts of electricity.
By the time they reach the end of their expected lifetime of around 30 years, the plants would be shut down and not replaced with new coal capacity. In our most ambitious scenario, the last coal power plants are closed in 2055, as shown in the figure below.
The upper panel in the figure shows the installed capacity of coal power plants and the lower panel their electricity production from 2021 to 2060.
Meanwhile, gas does not play a significant role in the power sector in our scenarios, as solar and wind can provide cheaper electricity while existing coal power plants – together with scaled-up expansion of energy storage and demand-side response facilities – can provide sufficient flexibility and peak-load capacity.
Managing a grid dominated by variable wind and solar
An energy system that relies on solar and wind power as main suppliers of power requires special flexibility measures to match production and demand.
The figure below shows a modelled example of an hourly electricity balance in a week in the summer of 2060 under our more ambitious scenario of achieving carbon neutrality before 2055.
The top panel shows electricity production on the supply side. In the daytime solar power (yellow) dominates the production of electricity, while wind power plants (light blue) have a more stable output throughout the 24-hour period.
In the evening and at night, electricity storage is discharged (purple) and hydropower production (dark blue) is higher than in the daytime.
The lower panel shows electricity use on the demand side. Storage (purple) is charged in the daytime and electric vehicle (EV) smart charging (blue) provides flexibility throughout the week.
As a backup, vehicle-to-grid supply plays an important role – not necessarily as a significant energy provider but as a last-resort capacity that can be activated if necessary, when wind and solar output is low. This solution is a cheap and efficient way to ensure sufficient capacity in the power system.
Before 2055, coal power plants could be equally reliable and affordable providers of capacity for the power system, even though they would not generate much electricity on average, as mentioned earlier.
This way of creating flexibility might seem complicated to manage in terms of daily dispatch (the process of managing supply and demand). However, an efficient and well-functioning electricity market, including consumers and producers, can do the job.
Removing the barriers to electricity trading among provinces and constructing a unified national electricity market would be a key enabler of this.
Visions for the future
The scenarios from our China Energy Transformation Outlook give a range of quantified visions of the long-term future in a net-zero energy system.
Our detailed model of the power system and other energy end-use sectors make it possible to link the development of this new energy system with policy measures that could bring about this transformation.
One key insight from our work relates to the timing of the different phases of China’s energy transformation, mentioned above. Our modelling suggests that successful coordination of these phases will be crucial, in order to maintain energy security while avoiding unnecessary investments in energy infrastructure.
Other key enablers in our scenarios are the investments needed to expand the electricity grid, the development of a national electricity market and support for energy system flexibility.
Even with the best visions, and insights from pathways such as ours, there will be many challenges and barriers ahead to overcome if China is to reach its 2060 goal.
Our scenarios show, however, that there are feasible and cost-efficient pathways which can be implemented without waiting for new technological breakthroughs.
The post Guest post: How China’s energy system can reach carbon neutrality before 2055 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How China’s energy system can reach carbon neutrality before 2055
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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