The rise of renewable energy puts China on track to end its CO₂ emissions growth

Since China became the country that emits the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in the mid-2000s, the gap with the United States and the European Union – the main historical culprits of global warming – has been widening as the Asian giant grew economically. To the point that China is currently responsible for around 30% of all emissions in the world. The commitment that this power has made within the Paris Agreement to combat climate change is that before 2030 its emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main gas that overheats the planet, will reach a ceiling. But several groups of international analysts point to the possibility that this peak has already been reached thanks, mainly, to the massive installation of renewable energies.

“If the current rapid development of wind and solar power continues, China’s CO₂ emissions are likely to continue to fall, making 2023 the year in which the country’s emissions peaked,” he said. a recent article “There is a possibility that China has already passed its peak, but no one can be sure yet,” Dave Jones, a member of the group of expert analysts on energy and climate, told EL PAÍS. Ember“There are signs, but we have to wait four or five months to see if they continue to fall as they have in the last three months and to know if the peak has really been reached. I am reasonably optimistic,” adds Rafael Salas, professor of Economic Analysis at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Talking about greenhouse gases in China means talking about its electricity sector, and coal. “40% of all emissions in the country come from the electricity sector, which is a lot; in Spain it is between 10% and 15%,” explains Salas. This is because electricity generation has been dominated by coal: last year 60% of the country’s electricity came from burning this polluting fossil fuel. But in May that share fell to 53%, a historic low, according to data from Carbon Brief.

“Solar and wind are now meeting the bulk of China’s electricity demand growth,” Jones said. By May, 12% of the country’s electricity came from solar – up from 7% just a year ago – 11% was generated by wind and 15% by hydro. The remaining 10% was shared between nuclear, gas and biomass.

But to get the full picture of what’s happening, you have to look beyond the huge advances in renewables—China is installing photovoltaic power at breakneck speed. Pep Canadell, CEO of Global Carbon Projectan international benchmark in monitoring global emissions, refers to three components in the slowdown in the growth of emissions in this country. On the one hand, the aforementioned reduction in the use of coal linked to the rapid growth of wind power and, above all, solar power. On the other hand, the halt in the use of oil linked to the advance of the electrification of transport. And, thirdly, a decrease in the production of cement and steel linked to the slowdown in construction.

It is on this last point that there is perhaps the most uncertainty. “China has constantly used the construction sector when it has needed to revive the economy in the face of a slowdown,” Canadell recalls. “We have seen it many times in the last 20 years, and it can happen again.” However, the director of the Global Carbon Project adds: “We know that in the long term the great boom Construction is not sustainable and as China’s service economy grows, the role of construction, and its emissions, will decline.”

Along the same lines, Jones says the Asian country’s economy “is moving away from building more infrastructure, after having built so many apartments, roads and railways in recent decades.” “This means that the use of cement and steel is declining,” he adds.

In the third part of this story, transport, there are fewer doubts if we look at the evolution of sales of electric vehicles in China, as Salas points out. “In terms of transport electrification, it is one of the most advanced countries in the world. In June, 45% of passenger cars sold were electric or plug-in hybrids. By the end of the year, the forecast is that this will be 50%.”

Therefore, what happens in the electricity sector is crucial to knowing whether the peak of emissions has really been reached, something that is only really possible to know when we gain perspective, that is, time.

Latent risk

Canadell prefers to be cautious when it comes to certifying whether China has really reached that ceiling: “It is not the first time that analysts have talked about the peak of emissions in China and then seen them rise again; we also talked about the peak of coal emissions for the first time in 2013, but it lasted only a few years and we saw growth again.” In addition, this expert reminds us that there is a latent risk: the park of coal plants that China has already built, which is now underused due to the boom in renewables, but which could cause emissions to rise quickly again.

However, Canadell is clear that the growing renewable power will increasingly push coal out of the Asian country’s electricity mix, as is happening in Europe: “There are structural changes taking place that will make the peak a reality, if not now, then soon.”

It is not enough to stop growing

But it is not enough to just peak and stop there. Canadell believes that several years of “small decreases and small increases” are now likely. “This could easily last until the end of this decade before we see a consistent decline in their emissions,” he says. Scientists warn that what is needed to keep warming within the less catastrophic bounds is for global emissions to fall sharply already this decade.

The same analysis applies to the rest of the world, where peak emissions are also close to being reached. “If governments are able to meet their commitments to triple global renewable capacity and double energy efficiency improvements by 2030, we will be in a new era of declining CO₂ emissions,” says Jones. But that moment has not yet arrived. “This is because massive price falls have occurred so recently, especially for electric cars, solar panels and batteries, that governments have not yet come to grips with how quickly and cheaply these technologies can be rolled out,” concludes the Ember analyst.

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