Ye Huang is a senior researcher at Global Energy Monitor (GEM), where she tracks and analyses global renewable energy developments. Christine Shearer is project manager of GEM’s Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT).
As batteries redefine how power systems handle peak demand in the United States, a central question for the global clean energy transition is whether China can follow a similar path and move beyond coal-based backup power.
Batteries now regularly provide roughly one-quarter of California’s peak demand during high-load periods following rapid growth in the US in recent years. In contrast, power generation from natural gas-fired plants fell by 17% year-on-year during the spring and summer of 2025.
Highlighting the strides made in the country’s most populous state, the battery fleet of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), the state power system, set a new record on August 6, 2025 – discharging 11.2 gigawatts (GW) during the evening peak.
California’s experience mirrors a wider national shift. US battery storage has grown at an annual rate of more than 60% for the past five years, increasing its share of the power mix and reducing dependence on fossil fuel-powered “peakers” – plants which operate for brief periods to avert outages at times of high demand.
Clean alternative to polluting peakers
The US had 999 peaker units in 2021, most fuelled by natural gas. Peakers typically run fewer than 100 to 400 hours per year, usually for short intervals of less than four hours.
As well as being costly to operate due to low efficiency, frequent cycling and rising maintenance costs, the peaker units also emit disproportionately high levels of air pollutants. The Clean Energy Group has found that more than 4.4 million Americans live within one mile (1.6 km) of a peaker plant, largely low-income and historically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, exposing them to worse air pollution and increased health risks.
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But with about 150 GW of peak capacity expected to retire in the US over the next 15 years, battery storage is emerging as a viable alternative.
Compared to the peakers, batteries offer a faster response, greater efficiency and significant environmental benefits. Technological advances are expanding the range of services batteries can provide, making medium-duration storage (less than 12 hours) an increasingly viable option to meet the integration needs of high-renewable systems.
Trump leaves battery incentives alone
Federal policy has laid the foundation for the transition to battery storage in California and elsewhere.
FERC Order 841 allows energy storage to participate directly in wholesale electricity markets, enabling batteries to compete with conventional generators for energy and grid services, as well as receive capacity payments in the same way as fossil peakers.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 further accelerated deployment by extending the Investment Tax Credit to standalone storage, supporting private-sector investment. Unlike incentives for wind and solar, those for battery storage have been largely preserved under the Trump administration.
States are increasingly leveraging storage to replace peakers. California, for instance, explicitly targets battery storage to meet reliability and emissions goals, planning to add 15.7 GW of four-hour batteries and 2.8 GW of eight-hour batteries while cutting natural gas use by 70% by 2035.
China’s critical clean energy juncture
China is facing growing flexibility needs due to its recent record-breaking solar and wind capacity additions.
It has been heavily promoting the use of “flexible” coal-fired power to back up its growing variable power sources and meet peak demand. “Flexible” coal power in China refers to retrofitting coal-fired units so that their minimum output can fall to 35% or lower of rated capacity. At present, nearly half of China’s coal fleet (600 GW) is categorised as dispatchable for flexibility needs.
Global renewables goal slips off course after Trump, China moves
However, this reliance on coal is problematic. As historically base-load units, coal plants inherently have slower response times and generate significant pollution, making them ill-suited for frequent ramping. Even with generous and guaranteed capacity payments, many of these coal units struggle to operate profitably. Additionally, the “flexible” coal power policy has been used to justify the continued large buildout of coal power in China, which hit a 10-year record for construction in 2024.
China is already the world’s largest market for battery storage, and installations are accelerating rapidly. Battery storage and demand response could together provide nearly 60% of China’s short-term flexibility needs by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The US shows what is possible when policy, markets and technology align. China needs to take swift, decisive action to shift from “flexible” coal to battery storage. If batteries are to play a central role, strengthening market mechanisms is a key step.
China risks emissions rebound amid policy shifts, experts warn
China is on track to establish provincial electricity spot markets in which battery storage will be formally recognised as a market participant for grid peak regulation services. Additionally, establishing capacity mechanisms, including implementing capacity payments for battery storage, would further incentivise deployment. Increasing utilisation is also essential: recent policy explicitly calls for higher dispatch levels of battery storage and prioritising its use in system regulation.
Encouraging battery storage to replace fossil peaker plants is not only an effective way to accelerate China’s “dual-carbon” goals, but also helps China to consolidate its global leadership in the battery storage industry. China has the resources, the market momentum and the industrial know-how to leapfrog “flexible” coal and make batteries the backbone of its clean and flexible grid. The question is not whether it can, but how quickly it will do so.
The authors are grateful to Xing Zhang for helpful discussions that informed this article.
The post To break its coal habit, China should look to California’s progress on batteries appeared first on Climate Home News.
To break its coal habit, China should look to California’s progress on batteries
In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.
As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.
After Yıldırım spoke of Türkiye’s plans to pursue “zero waste”, one journalist asked why the sugar cubes for the tea were individually wrapped in plastic and why water had been served in single-use plastic pots.
Yıldırım accepted that this kind of packaging is a problem and glass or porcelain is preferable. He added that legislation to ban single-use packaging has been introduced to parliament, but is not yet finalised.
The situation symbolised what Turkish experts and environmental campaigners flag as a contradiction between the “zero waste” image that the government – represented by First Lady Emine Erdoğan – presents to the world and the reality of rising Turkish waste generation, significant climate-wrecking methane emissions from landfills and a politically influential industry producing plastics from oil and gas.
International campaign lacks domestic punch
Türkiye’s Zero Waste initiative – which is a vague plan to reduce waste generation and increase recycling, rather than a specific goal to reach zero waste by any specific date – was launched in 2017.
It came at a time when the Turkish government was under fire for its coal mines, its refusal to ratify the Paris Agreement and its brutal response to protests against plans to turn Gezi Park in Istanbul into a barracks and shopping mall.
Ümit Şahin, climate lead at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the Turkish government saw then, and still sees, the initiative as “a way to build its international reputation on environmental issues”.
“Recycling gives the government something visible to point to,” he said. “It can promote the campaign without taking on powerful fossil fuel interests or changing its development priorities in mining and energy.”
The campaign has been led by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Türkiye’s long-time president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2022, she convinced countries at the UN General Assembly to create an annual International Day of Zero Waste on March 30.
COP31 President Murat Kurum has picked up on the theme, saying that zero waste is “one of the main pillars” of Türkiye’s COP31 presidency. In September, he reminisced at a press briefing in the northern city of Trabzon about old-fashioned Turkish rural life where food waste would be given to animals, ripped clothes would be mended, and new attire was only for religious festivals.
President Erdoğan told leaders at September’s UN General Assembly in New York that an “incredible desire for consumption” was fuelling a “culture of waste”. “We cannot speak of justice in a world where tonnes of food are thrown into the garbage on one side while hundreds of millions of people collect food from garbage containers on the other,” he railed.
Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and environmental researcher at Türkiye’s Çukurova University, told Climate Home News that zero waste is a worthy concept. But when it comes to putting words into action at home, he said, the government has failed. Official statistics show the amount of waste each person in Türkiye generates has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 and the total annual amount has increased by 15%.
Single-use plastics ban
To help fix this, an European Union-style ban on single-use plastics – like plastic cutlery, cups and stirrers – was reported by state media in March to be working its way through parliament and expected to come into effect on September 1.
But PAGEV, a Turkish plastics industry trade association, argued that such “restrictive” policies had failed in the EU and would damage the Turkish economy and take away jobs.
Despite COP31 shining an international spotlight on the Turkish waste sector, the ban has yet to be approved by President Erdoğan. Gündoğdu and Greenpeace Türkiye campaigner Berk Butan fear that, if it is approved, it will be watered down so that Turkish companies can make single-use plastics in Türkiye even if they can no longer sell them in the country.
The latter restriction, Gündoğdu argued, would be “meaningless” because it cannot be enforced. Similar measures in Germany and Italy have failed, he said, because manufacturers just relabelled single-use products like plastic straws as multiple-use straws.
To close these loopholes, he said, strict definitions and design criteria are needed, which the Turkish legislation does not have. Butan added that single-use plastics could still be made in Türkiye, and then exported, used and dumped abroad, causing the same environmental damage somewhere else.
Türkiye’s other flagship waste prevention measure is a tax on plastic bags, which led to an immediate drop in usage when introduced in 2019. But, despite rampant inflation, the tax has risen from 0.25TL in 2019 to just 1TL ($0.02), meaning it’s several times less in real terms than in 2019.
“You can’t even buy chewing gum with one lira,” said Gündoğdu. “If you see one lira on the ground, you will not take it. So that’s why it’s meaningless.” Butan added that the government did not invest in creating behavioural changes among the public, such as encouraging them to shop with reusable textile tote bags. “They just put in the tax and they didn’t do the rest,” he said.
Landfills tidied up but still leaking methane
While the amount of waste generated keeps rising, there has been progress in dealing with the waste so that it is at least out of sight. Official statistics suggest more and more of it is being collected and, while the vast majority is still sent to landfill rather than recycled, those landfills are now covered and more advanced than they used to be.
On the outskirts of Ankara, waste management company ITC gave Climate Home News a presentation showing one such transformation. A before image shows what the nearby Mamak landfill looked like in 2006 – a huge open pile of garbage known in Türkiye as a “wild landfill”.
Another image shows what the site looks like now with the rubbish covered up with soil. ITC says that Ankara’s garbage is brought to them on trucks, and sorted into recyclables and biodegradable waste, which is then turned into compost or burned for energy. Waste heat is used to grow blueberries, tomatoes and lavender or to warm shoppers in a nearby branch of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
But despite this progress, satellite observations from Carbon Mapper shows the site is still leaking methane – a particularly potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Exactly how much is unclear from Carbon Mapper’s limited observations but the nearby Sincan landfill leaks about 1,200 kilogrammes of methane an hour into the atmosphere. Climate Home News analysis suggests this does similar damage to the climate as 73,000 petrol cars. ITC did not respond to a request for comment.
In October, a Guardian investigation showed these methane leaks were happening at landfills across Türkiye and are some of the worst in the world. Researchers from the University of California (UCLA) said they were “mind-boggingly large”. Aside from the climate damage, local residents near one Istanbul landfill report a smell so bad they told the Guardian they have to sleep with their windows closed even on hot summer nights.
Waste imports from Europe
Dealing with its own growing waste is difficult enough, but Türkiye also imports mountains of plastic from its European neighbours too. Ever since China restricted waste imports, the European Union has exported more plastic waste to Türkiye than to any other nation by far.
Despite European Commission concerns about how well Türkiye deals with the waste, the trade is expected to grow as an EU ban on exports to non-OECD countries – a category that does not include Türkiye – comes into force on November 21.
The export of waste to Türkiye has seen European countries accused of waste imperialism. Butan and Gündoğdu said Türkiye should ban waste imports. But COP31 President and Turkish environment minister Kurum pushed back on this during a press conference in Trabzon in September.
“You called it waste imperialism,” he said through a translator, but “nobody is forcing anyone” to import waste. He added that handling the waste creates jobs in Türkiye and that it doesn’t matter to the environment where the waste is recycled as long as it is.
But most of Türkiye’s municipal waste is currently not recycled. Turkish official Yıldırım said that the country’s recovery rate is currently around 30%. The most recent statistics available from the EU suggest Türkiye in 2020 had a recycling rate of 12%. The EU country average in 2024 was about 50%.
At the zero waste centre in Ankara, Yıldırım said Türkiye is improving its recycling rate and wants to do even more. The aim, he said, is to reach a rate of 70% by an unspecified date, up there with global frontrunners like Germany.
To achieve that, he said Türkiye is raising awareness of the importance of recycling including through cartoons for children and initiatives for football supporters to collect and redistribute unwanted toys.
As he spoke to journalists, a portrait of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ made from buttons, a sultan made from old plastic straws and a horse and wolf made from metal cogs and screws looked on. “The world is something that has been entrusted to us, and waste is something you steal from the future,” said Yıldırım.
Climate Home News’ travel and accommodation for the trip on which much of this article was reported was funded by the Turkish government.
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https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/11/11/turkiye-pushes-zero-waste-at-cop31-but-is-it-delivering-at-home/
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