This week bears good news for climate change mitigation from China. A group of renowned energy analysts has found, based on Beijing’s ambitious renewable energy expansion programs, that China could reach the peak of its carbon emissions earlier than envisaged in its own climate targets. Instead of 2030, the peak could already be reached in 2025. However, provided that energy consumption does not rise faster than previously predicted. Nico Beckert analyzes which other hurdles China still has to overcome. Since China is the world’s largest carbon emitter, the success of the country’s climate measures is important for all of us.
China is building many of its gigantic wind and solar farms in Xinjiang – a region that otherwise mainly produces bad headlines. For years, reports have been mounting that up to one million Uyghurs and members of other minorities are being detained in re-education and sinicization camps on Beijing’s orders. It now becomes clear that many have either been detained under kin punishment or out of mere arbitrariness. Marcel Grzanna has taken a closer look at a leaked list outlining reasons for internment.
By the way, it is said that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet will “soon” be permitted to tour Xinjiang. It remains to be seen whether the former Chilean president will be able to gain a halfway credible picture of the situation.
Simultaneously the largest consumer of coal and the biggest investor in renewable energies – China’s energy policy is ambivalent. The People’s Republic consumes by far the most coal in the world. But China is also expanding renewable energies faster than any other country. In 2020 and 2021 alone, China will have installed three times more solar and wind power plants than the USA or the EU.
And it seems the People’s Republic could maintain its pace. If all provincial and central government projects are implemented, China will possess about 1,200 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2026. This is according to a new analysis by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). These 1,200 gigawatts would more than double the capacity available at the end of 2020.
Renewables are a key pillar for China to achieve its 30/60 climate targets: Emissions are to peak by 2030 – and fall from there. By 2060, the People’s Republic plans to achieve carbon neutrality. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas in transport, industrial and heating sectors have to be replaced by renewable energy sources. According to Lauri Myllyvirta, China expert at CREA, the expansion of renewables could happen so fast that the additional power demand of the coming years could be completely covered by clean energy sources.
CREA analysts assume that power demand will increase by an average of four percent per year. If the expansion of renewables proceeds according to plan, fossil power generation would no longer need to be expanded. In addition to wind and solar energy, 30 percent of the increase would be covered by nuclear and hydroelectric power and energy from biomass. However, power demand could also rise faster should the government try to boost the growth of its currently Covid-depressed economy by investing in energy-intensive sectors – at least in the short term.
In general, “the period of construction and infrastructure-led growth inevitably comes to an end,” Myllyvirta told China.Table. In the future, more steel derived from scrap will also be available in the construction sector, the energy expert said. Cement production has been declining since 2013 already. Myllyvirta is optimistic: “Emissions will still rise in some sectors, of course, but if clean energy displaces fossil fuels in other sectors, overall emissions may still peak.”
As impressive as the rate of expansion is, it will still not be enough to achieve the long-term climate targets by 2060, the CREA authors believe. To achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, China would have to build 150 to 200 gigawatts of renewable power plant capacity per year. And the potential early emission peak is no reason for excessive climate optimism. After all, an earlier peak is simply “needed to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement”.
A large proportion of China’s new solar and wind power plants are to be built in the deserts of the northwest and on barren land (China.Table reported). Large solar and wind power plants will also be built in coal-rich provinces such as Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi, CREA analysts said. This would be important for the energy transition. “Without carving out a new role in clean energy, the province’s industrial sector would lose out economically from China’s energy transition”.
However, coal mining in these regions provides jobs for between 2.6 to 5 million Chinese, depending on the source. Whether these jobs can be substituted by jobs in the development of renewables is doubtful. According to scientific forecasts, the Chinese solar industry will create around 2.3 million new jobs in manufacturing, assembly and maintenance by 2035 (China.Table reported).
But the expansion of solar and wind power plants alone does not equal an energy transition. To unlock the power of renewables, a functioning energy system is required. This includes greater flexibility in the operation of coal-fired power plants, to ensure that coal-fired power does not block the power grid during the peak times of renewables. But power demand also needs to become more flexible, CREA authors note.
They are optimistic about the expansion of the power grid. “The benefit of China’s top-down model is that transmission and generation are being planned together. Long-distance transmission lines are being built together with the generating capacity,” says Lauri Myllyvirta. He sees the change in grid and power plant operations as the biggest challenge. The operation of coal-fired power plants must become far more flexible, Myllyvirta believes. Coal-fired power plants currently operate too inflexibly and constantly push coal-fired power into the grid. If coal plants and grids were more flexible, there could be more room to pass renewables through. The problem has existed for years.
There are also political pitfalls. At present, China’s provinces often still pursue the goal of maximizing their power production. As a result, they are still building coal-fired power plants. In Zhejiang, for example, a new coal-fired power plant was recently approved: The province reportedly wants to “reduce electricity trade between provinces“. However, according to CREA, this contradicts climate goals and the need for a national energy system. A lot of work is still ahead.
“As a person, history has two attractions for me,” says Elisabeth Kaske, Professor of Society and Culture of Modern China at the University of Leipzig. On the one hand, it lies in the past and you can look at it as an outsider. Also, you know the outcome and can still play with other potential outcomes. “That gives you a great freedom that you don’t have in the present, because you’re always chasing events.”
The second attraction for the historian is that history can be seen as a broken house. “Of the once three million stones, 100,000 are still there, and you have to rebuild the house from them. But you don’t build the whole story, only build part of it. And to build that house, you have to make well-founded assumptions. Analogies from other houses, drawing comparisons. And then you build a hypothesis of what that house might have looked like.” This is how Kaske sums up her view of history as a scientist, but also as a person interested in history.
The focus of Kaske’s research is the history of China. Dealing with the past of a foreign country holds great fascination for her. The big difference between someone who studies the history of their home country and someone who, like herself, is a foreigner who studies Chinese history, is primarily one of alienation. The general rule, however, is that “the past is another country,” which means that one researches each history as if it were another land. If it is an entirely different land at that, it’s a kind of “double alienation,” as Kaske calls it. “I find that intellectually very appealing, even though it’s difficult.”
For instance, a historian would have to familiarize herself with the foreign language and, in the case of China, learn classical Chinese as well. Even as a schoolgirl, Kaske was interested in everything foreign and used her linguistic aptitude to learn classical Chinese as a young adult. It consists, for example, of many more monosyllabic words that also consist of only a single character representing the meaning of the word. Thus began Kaske’s journey, first as a student and later as a scholar, through the history of China. She spent her first extended academic stay in the early nineties – at first with a scholarship from the GDR, and after 1990 financed by student loans.
Over the years, Kaske’s stays in the People’s Republic have tended to be relatively short. Nevertheless, she has been a globetrotter since 2005, when her scientific career took off. In the past decade and a half, she has worked in Boston, Pittsburgh, Princeton and Taipei, among other places. Her scientific focus is primarily on the 19th century.
But one of Kaske’s new projects also centers on the twentieth century. In it, she explores how new professional elites, particularly engineers, visualized the Chinese nation in the twentieth century. “We always think that China is just China. We have this map in mind. But this map is a modern projection, which is the People’s Republic,” she explains. China, she says, has traditionally been bad at cartography. As late as the 19th century, for example, some maps resembled those from the Roman Empire. “They look like children’s drawings. And also the internal idea of the country was really more one of routes. To get from A to B, you have to go through these stations, and it takes so and so many days,” Kaske said.
This changed in the 20th century thanks to modern technology, railroads, roads and telegraph lines. For road planning, it was necessary to accurately survey the land. “Then come these modern ideas that the state must penetrate the territory. You have to reach even the last village,” the professor says. This form of territorialization also helped China increasingly constitute itself as a cohesive nation.
Transposed to today, a different trend of territorialization can be observed. China no longer needs to measure every mountain and valley accurately to build roads. Instead, it now wants to bridge territories transnationally or even transcontinentally. That, at least, is one idea behind the New Silk Road project. “You then suddenly have a world domination vision,” Kaske says. But she expects that project to suffer a setback for now. “I suspect that China thoroughly alienated Eastern Europe. But you never know at the end of the day,” Kaske says. And this uncertainty, or rather chasing after current events, is precisely what the historian loathes. She looks at events when they are already in the past. Constantin Eckner
Experience world history up close: May 18 was International Museum Day. Dinosaur skeletons were on display at the Nanjing Museum in Jiangsu Province.
This week bears good news for climate change mitigation from China. A group of renowned energy analysts has found, based on Beijing’s ambitious renewable energy expansion programs, that China could reach the peak of its carbon emissions earlier than envisaged in its own climate targets. Instead of 2030, the peak could already be reached in 2025. However, provided that energy consumption does not rise faster than previously predicted. Nico Beckert analyzes which other hurdles China still has to overcome. Since China is the world’s largest carbon emitter, the success of the country’s climate measures is important for all of us.
China is building many of its gigantic wind and solar farms in Xinjiang – a region that otherwise mainly produces bad headlines. For years, reports have been mounting that up to one million Uyghurs and members of other minorities are being detained in re-education and sinicization camps on Beijing’s orders. It now becomes clear that many have either been detained under kin punishment or out of mere arbitrariness. Marcel Grzanna has taken a closer look at a leaked list outlining reasons for internment.
By the way, it is said that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet will “soon” be permitted to tour Xinjiang. It remains to be seen whether the former Chilean president will be able to gain a halfway credible picture of the situation.
Simultaneously the largest consumer of coal and the biggest investor in renewable energies – China’s energy policy is ambivalent. The People’s Republic consumes by far the most coal in the world. But China is also expanding renewable energies faster than any other country. In 2020 and 2021 alone, China will have installed three times more solar and wind power plants than the USA or the EU.
And it seems the People’s Republic could maintain its pace. If all provincial and central government projects are implemented, China will possess about 1,200 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2026. This is according to a new analysis by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). These 1,200 gigawatts would more than double the capacity available at the end of 2020.
Renewables are a key pillar for China to achieve its 30/60 climate targets: Emissions are to peak by 2030 – and fall from there. By 2060, the People’s Republic plans to achieve carbon neutrality. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas in transport, industrial and heating sectors have to be replaced by renewable energy sources. According to Lauri Myllyvirta, China expert at CREA, the expansion of renewables could happen so fast that the additional power demand of the coming years could be completely covered by clean energy sources.
CREA analysts assume that power demand will increase by an average of four percent per year. If the expansion of renewables proceeds according to plan, fossil power generation would no longer need to be expanded. In addition to wind and solar energy, 30 percent of the increase would be covered by nuclear and hydroelectric power and energy from biomass. However, power demand could also rise faster should the government try to boost the growth of its currently Covid-depressed economy by investing in energy-intensive sectors – at least in the short term.
In general, “the period of construction and infrastructure-led growth inevitably comes to an end,” Myllyvirta told China.Table. In the future, more steel derived from scrap will also be available in the construction sector, the energy expert said. Cement production has been declining since 2013 already. Myllyvirta is optimistic: “Emissions will still rise in some sectors, of course, but if clean energy displaces fossil fuels in other sectors, overall emissions may still peak.”
As impressive as the rate of expansion is, it will still not be enough to achieve the long-term climate targets by 2060, the CREA authors believe. To achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, China would have to build 150 to 200 gigawatts of renewable power plant capacity per year. And the potential early emission peak is no reason for excessive climate optimism. After all, an earlier peak is simply “needed to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement”.
A large proportion of China’s new solar and wind power plants are to be built in the deserts of the northwest and on barren land (China.Table reported). Large solar and wind power plants will also be built in coal-rich provinces such as Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi, CREA analysts said. This would be important for the energy transition. “Without carving out a new role in clean energy, the province’s industrial sector would lose out economically from China’s energy transition”.
However, coal mining in these regions provides jobs for between 2.6 to 5 million Chinese, depending on the source. Whether these jobs can be substituted by jobs in the development of renewables is doubtful. According to scientific forecasts, the Chinese solar industry will create around 2.3 million new jobs in manufacturing, assembly and maintenance by 2035 (China.Table reported).
But the expansion of solar and wind power plants alone does not equal an energy transition. To unlock the power of renewables, a functioning energy system is required. This includes greater flexibility in the operation of coal-fired power plants, to ensure that coal-fired power does not block the power grid during the peak times of renewables. But power demand also needs to become more flexible, CREA authors note.
They are optimistic about the expansion of the power grid. “The benefit of China’s top-down model is that transmission and generation are being planned together. Long-distance transmission lines are being built together with the generating capacity,” says Lauri Myllyvirta. He sees the change in grid and power plant operations as the biggest challenge. The operation of coal-fired power plants must become far more flexible, Myllyvirta believes. Coal-fired power plants currently operate too inflexibly and constantly push coal-fired power into the grid. If coal plants and grids were more flexible, there could be more room to pass renewables through. The problem has existed for years.
There are also political pitfalls. At present, China’s provinces often still pursue the goal of maximizing their power production. As a result, they are still building coal-fired power plants. In Zhejiang, for example, a new coal-fired power plant was recently approved: The province reportedly wants to “reduce electricity trade between provinces“. However, according to CREA, this contradicts climate goals and the need for a national energy system. A lot of work is still ahead.
“As a person, history has two attractions for me,” says Elisabeth Kaske, Professor of Society and Culture of Modern China at the University of Leipzig. On the one hand, it lies in the past and you can look at it as an outsider. Also, you know the outcome and can still play with other potential outcomes. “That gives you a great freedom that you don’t have in the present, because you’re always chasing events.”
The second attraction for the historian is that history can be seen as a broken house. “Of the once three million stones, 100,000 are still there, and you have to rebuild the house from them. But you don’t build the whole story, only build part of it. And to build that house, you have to make well-founded assumptions. Analogies from other houses, drawing comparisons. And then you build a hypothesis of what that house might have looked like.” This is how Kaske sums up her view of history as a scientist, but also as a person interested in history.
The focus of Kaske’s research is the history of China. Dealing with the past of a foreign country holds great fascination for her. The big difference between someone who studies the history of their home country and someone who, like herself, is a foreigner who studies Chinese history, is primarily one of alienation. The general rule, however, is that “the past is another country,” which means that one researches each history as if it were another land. If it is an entirely different land at that, it’s a kind of “double alienation,” as Kaske calls it. “I find that intellectually very appealing, even though it’s difficult.”
For instance, a historian would have to familiarize herself with the foreign language and, in the case of China, learn classical Chinese as well. Even as a schoolgirl, Kaske was interested in everything foreign and used her linguistic aptitude to learn classical Chinese as a young adult. It consists, for example, of many more monosyllabic words that also consist of only a single character representing the meaning of the word. Thus began Kaske’s journey, first as a student and later as a scholar, through the history of China. She spent her first extended academic stay in the early nineties – at first with a scholarship from the GDR, and after 1990 financed by student loans.
Over the years, Kaske’s stays in the People’s Republic have tended to be relatively short. Nevertheless, she has been a globetrotter since 2005, when her scientific career took off. In the past decade and a half, she has worked in Boston, Pittsburgh, Princeton and Taipei, among other places. Her scientific focus is primarily on the 19th century.
But one of Kaske’s new projects also centers on the twentieth century. In it, she explores how new professional elites, particularly engineers, visualized the Chinese nation in the twentieth century. “We always think that China is just China. We have this map in mind. But this map is a modern projection, which is the People’s Republic,” she explains. China, she says, has traditionally been bad at cartography. As late as the 19th century, for example, some maps resembled those from the Roman Empire. “They look like children’s drawings. And also the internal idea of the country was really more one of routes. To get from A to B, you have to go through these stations, and it takes so and so many days,” Kaske said.
This changed in the 20th century thanks to modern technology, railroads, roads and telegraph lines. For road planning, it was necessary to accurately survey the land. “Then come these modern ideas that the state must penetrate the territory. You have to reach even the last village,” the professor says. This form of territorialization also helped China increasingly constitute itself as a cohesive nation.
Transposed to today, a different trend of territorialization can be observed. China no longer needs to measure every mountain and valley accurately to build roads. Instead, it now wants to bridge territories transnationally or even transcontinentally. That, at least, is one idea behind the New Silk Road project. “You then suddenly have a world domination vision,” Kaske says. But she expects that project to suffer a setback for now. “I suspect that China thoroughly alienated Eastern Europe. But you never know at the end of the day,” Kaske says. And this uncertainty, or rather chasing after current events, is precisely what the historian loathes. She looks at events when they are already in the past. Constantin Eckner
Experience world history up close: May 18 was International Museum Day. Dinosaur skeletons were on display at the Nanjing Museum in Jiangsu Province.
