Proposals to build coal-fired plants in China reached a record high in 2025, finds a new study.
The report, released by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM), says that, in 2025, developers submitted new or reactivated proposals to build a total of 161 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power plants.
The new proposals come even as China’s buildout of renewable energy pushed down coal-power generation and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2025, meaning many coal plants are already running at just half of their maximum capacity.
The co-authors argue that while clean-energy growth may limit emissions from coal power in the short term, the surge in proposals could lock in new coal assets, “weaken…incentives” for power-system reform and help keep coal capacity online in spite of China’s climate goals.
The high rate of new proposals, the study says, likely reflects a “rush by the coal industry stakeholders” to develop projects before an expected tightening of climate policy in the next five years.
In addition, “misaligned” payment mechanisms are encouraging developers to propose large-scale coal units, which – if developed – could impact the transition of the coal sector from playing the central role in electricity generation to flexibly supporting a system built on clean power.
Significant additions pushing down running hours
The report finds that the amount of new coal-fired power proposals by Chinese developers, including reactivated applications, hit a new peak in 2025, at 161GW. This is equal to 13% of the coal capacity currently online in China.
The country is continuing to add significant coal-power capacity, with a record 95GW added to the grid last year and another 291GW in the pipeline – meaning units that have been proposed, are actively under construction or have already been permitted.
Moreover, around two-thirds of coal-power capacity proposed in China since 2014 has either been commissioned – meaning it has been completed and started operating – or remains in the pipeline, Christine Shearer, report co-author and research analyst at thinktank Global Energy Monitor, tells Carbon Brief.
She adds that this is the “reverse of what we see outside China, where roughly two-thirds of proposed coal capacity never makes it to construction”.
Coal remains a significant part of China’s power mix, making the nation’s electricity sector one of the world’s largest emitters. Indeed, the power sector emitted more than 5.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) in 2024 – meaning that if it were its own country, it would have the highest emissions of any country except China itself.
But emissions from the power sector have been flat or falling since March 2024, according to analysis for Carbon Brief by CREA lead analyst Lauri Myllyvirta.
This is largely due to China’s rapid installation of renewable power, which is covering nearly all of new electricity demand and pushing coal generation into decline in 2025.
Some parts of the coal-power pipeline are reflecting this shift. In 2025, construction began on 83GW of new coal capacity – down from 98GW in 2024.
In addition, new permitting fell to a four-year low, at 45GW, which could point to tighter controls on coal-plant approvals in the future, says the report.
The chart below shows the amount of new coal-power capacity being proposed in China each year, in GW.
The shift from new power demand being met by coal to being met by renewable energy means any “additional coal power capacity would face structurally low utilisation”, the report says, referring to the number of hours that plants are able to operate each year.
This reduces coal-plant earnings needed to cover the cost of investment and makes instances of “stranded [coal] assets and compensation pressures” more likely.
A previous analysis for Carbon Brief finds that “larger additions of coal capacity are often followed by falling utilisation” – meaning that the construction of new coal plants does not necessarily increase emissions.
Utilisation rates for coal-fired power plants have hovered around 51% since 2025, according to the CREA and GEM report.
Shearer argues that while low utilisation rates would “dampen the immediate impact on annual CO2 emissions”, in the long-term the buildout “locks capital into fossil fuels” and “weakens incentives to build the cleaner forms of flexibility” needed for a renewables-centred system.
Low utilisation has also not led to coal plant capacity being retired in any notable way, the report notes, with generators instead supported by the coal “capacity payment” mechanism and extending the life of older units.
Delayed retirement of older coal plants causes “persistent overcapacity” and adds to calls for further compensation and policy support, the report says.
Coal generation has “no room to expand” under China’s international climate pledge for 2030, it adds, with utilisation rates for coal units likely to fall to 42% if renewables continue to meet all additional demand and if all of the plants currently under construction or permitted are brought online.
Crunch-time for coal
The surge in new proposals reflects a “rush” by the coal industry to ensure their projects are approved before the policy environment tightens, according to the report.
China is expected to introduce absolute emissions targets over the next five years. While these are expected to be aspirational for the first five years – alongside binding targets for carbon intensity, the emissions per unit of GDP – from 2030 they will be binding.
The current five-year period until 2030 will also likely see most of China’s energy-intensive industries pulled into the scope of its national carbon market.
In the power sector, government officials have said that coal is expected to shift from playing a major role in power supply to supporting “flexibility” operations.
This would require coal plants to shift between varying load levels and respond quickly to changes in demand and other system needs.
However, the report finds, the approvals for coal power “continue to reflect expectations of high operating hours”, instead of flexible operations.
For many of these proposals, planned annual utilisation was stated to be more than 4,800 hours, or 55% of hours in the year. This is greater than the 4,685 utilisation hours (53%) logged in 2023, the year in which the most coal power was generated over the past decade, according to data shared by the report authors with Carbon Brief.
In addition, the report says that many of the new coal-power proposals in 2025 were for “large-scale units”, each representing at least 1GW of power, as shown in the figure below.
These larger units are designed for “stable, continuous operation” and are “poorly suited to the type of flexibility increasingly required in a power system dominated by wind and solar”, says the report.
This suggests that “project developers still anticipated base-load style operation”, it adds, “sitting uneasily” with the fact of higher clean-energy generation and falling coal plant utilisation.
Reliance on sales and subsidies
This persistence in developing large-scale units could be explained by the financial incentives that govern the coal-power industry.
Coal power plants are cheap to build but risk low profits and high costs, with many current operators already facing losses at recent utilisation rates.
In 2024, the government established a capacity payment mechanism for coal-fired power plants. This mechanism rewards developers for adding “seldom-utilised, backup” capacity to the grid.
These capacity payments, as well as regulated pricing and implicit government backing “can make plants viable on paper even if utilisation and operating margins are weak”, Shearer tells Carbon Brief, which may explain the continued appetite for new coal from developers.
More than 100bn yuan ($14bn) in capacity payments were made to coal plants in 2024, although it has not yet had a discernable impact on utilisation.
Large-scale units, the report says, are “particularly well positioned” to benefit from the policy, as it rewards maximising capacity and does not favour plants that are more suited for flexible operations.
(The Chinese government recently announced plans to adjust the mechanism, confirming that in some cases capacity payments could be more than the initial expected threshold of 50% of a benchmark coal plant’s total fixed costs.)
Meanwhile, the report adds that coal-fired power plants continue to earn most of their revenue from selling electricity, with only 5% of total income coming from capacity payments.
As such, these “misaligned incentives” encourage producing power and installing significant new capacity, despite the government’s aim to shift coal to a supporting role in the system.
Shearer tells Carbon Brief that a better approach to flexibility would be to “adopt technology-neutral flexibility standards”, rather than focusing on “flexible coal”, which would mean coal would have to “compete directly with storage, demand response, grid upgrades and other clean options”. She adds:
“The risk of coal-specific flexibility policies is that they lock in capacity rather than solve the underlying system need.”
The post ‘Rush’ for new coal in China hits record high in 2025 as climate deadline looms appeared first on Carbon Brief.
‘Rush’ for new coal in China hits record high in 2025 as climate deadline looms
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The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.
For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.
The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.
This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.
This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.
The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.
Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.
In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.
(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high
Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.
Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.
As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.
This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).
At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)
The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly
The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.
However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.
Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.
Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.
Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.
But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.
As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.
It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.
The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).
Global temperature rise
The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.
We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface
temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.
While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.
We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.
This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.
Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system
While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.
Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.
For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.
Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.
Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).
Sea level rise and the energy imbalance
Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.
It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.
Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.
This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.
Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.
This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.
(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)
The bigger picture
Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.
A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.
These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.
This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.
However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.
Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.
This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.
The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.
Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.
The post Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming
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