In 2021, when Beijing finally pledged to stop building and financing new coal power plants overseas, Western governments and climate advocates rejoiced. John Kerry, US climate envoy at the time, said he was “absolutely delighted to hear” of the decision.
It is “a key topic of my discussions during my visit to China”, Alok Sharma, a member of the British House of Lords, wrote on social media, suggesting it was a result of pressure from the West.
But now, from Chile to Spain to Portugal, country after country is grappling with major blackouts. A troubling question is emerging: has this major climate victory over China backfired?
Because while China agreed to halt coal power exports under intense international pressure, at home it took the opposite approach.
Far from abandoning coal, China doubled down on advanced, ultra-efficient coal units that acted as grid stabilisers, backing up its massive expansion of wind and solar power.
In effect, China developed a dual strategy: export pure green energy to the world while keeping the stabilising backup systems and tech largely for itself.
Today, as renewable-heavy grids in Europe and Latin America face strain, and extreme weather exposes the vulnerabilities of intermittent power sources, the irony is hard to ignore: while nations are embracing that green future, they are confronting power failures that may have been tempered with the very technologies that they asked China not to export.
“China’s pledge to stop financing coal power plants overseas does not directly clash with its domestic energy-security narrative, but it highlights a clear tension,” said Qiu Chengcheng, a China policy analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
Qiu said the 2021 pledge had become “a key part of China’s climate diplomacy and global cooperation strategy”, with cancelled overseas coal projects avoiding an estimated 6.1 billion tonnes of lifetime carbon dioxide emissions – around twice the annual emissions of the 27 member states of the European Union.
Despite this, the overseas coal ban has yet to be fully implemented, with 5.6 gigawatts of coal power projects still moved to construction, and another 31.4GW of proposed projects not formally cancelled or in limbo, she added.
“Domestically, coal is increasingly framed as a backup during the renewable transition,” Qiu said, adding that new coal approvals and construction were surging ahead of China’s 2030 emissions-peaking deadline, despite coal’s share in power generation dropping to record lows.
China aims to meet dual carbon goals of peaking its emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.
Renewable energy sources now account for over 60 per cent of total installed energy capacity in China, compared to 34 per cent for coal, according to a report by CREA in August.
Despite this, the share of coal in China’s total energy consumption still accounted for 53.2 per cent in 2024, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
“By 2060, we will have a large amount of renewable energy connected to the grid, especially wind and solar power,” Lu Qinggang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, said in 2022 during a talk at a forum organised by the academy.
China began to position coal as a necessary source of stable power for the renewable transition following massive power outages in 2021 and 2022 that impacted a number of Chinese provinces.
Lu said that in 2021, power shortages in certain regions of China reached 10 to 20 per cent, causing widespread power rationing.
“Especially in Liaoning in northeast China, under extreme conditions, wind power generation plummeted for several days, and there was almost no power at all,” he said.
“The volatility and intermittency of renewable energy sources are very severe. This is not only manifested in having electricity during the day and not at night, but also in the frequent occurrence of periods with abundant electricity and periods with scarce electricity, and even situations where there is no electricity for several days.”
Debates over whether widespread renewable energy adoption and a shunning of fossil fuel power sources play a role in blackouts have also arisen after an unprecedented blackout in the Iberian Peninsula in April that affected Spain and Portugal.
In 2022, renewables made up 55.5 per cent of total power generation in Portugal, and just over 42.7 per cent in Spain, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Similar debates sprang up after the February 2025 blackout in Chile, which impacted over 90 per cent of the country’s population of 20 million. According to the IEA, renewables made up 55.3 per cent of total power generation in Chile in 2022.
“Large-scale outages can occur in any power system and are often the result of system-level failures rather than the specific generation mix,” Qiu said. “What matters most is how well generation, grids and system operations are integrated and managed.”
She said that in the case of the Iberian Peninsula blackout, “preliminary assessments suggest the outage was linked to grid operation and voltage control issues, rather than an inherent problem with wind or solar generation”.
“Similarly, the blackout in Chile has been reported to stem from a malfunction in a high-voltage transmission line, pointing again to grid-related causes rather than renewable intermittency,” Qiu said.
A study by Princeton University researchers published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications last March said: “Climate extremes, such as hurricanes, combined with large-scale integration of environment-sensitive renewables, could exacerbate the risk of widespread power outages.”
Using a climate-energy model for cascading power outages, the team captured the impacts of climate extremes on renewable generation and validated it using the 2022 system-wide blackout in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Fiona.
The researchers said that wind turbines shut down during extreme weather, while large clouds associated with incoming hurricanes could reduce solar power generation even before landfall.
They found that as a region goes towards a 100 per cent renewable grid, it “may greatly increase the risk of climate-induced cascading power outages, primarily due to enlarged energy imbalances resulting from substantial reductions in renewable generation that further challenge the grid inertia and system flexibility”.
The team emphasised that their work did not advocate against adopting renewable energy, but rather highlighted the importance of risk mitigation strategies, including the use of energy storage systems.
Qiu also pointed to Puerto Rico, where distributed renewable energy, combined with storage and microgrids, can support faster power restoration when centralised systems fail, such as after extreme weather events.
“This underscores that renewables, with appropriate system design, can enhance resilience rather than undermine it,” she said.
Qiu said that underdeveloped grid infrastructure remained one of the key limits to expanding renewable energy in many developing countries.
Half of China’s exports of wind and solar power equipment, as well as electric vehicles, now go to the Global South, with emerging and developing countries driving most of the recent export volume growth, according to a report by CREA last year, citing United Nations Comtrade data.
“The five largest importers of wind power technology from China are all developing countries – South Africa, Egypt, Chile, Brazil and Uzbekistan – as are the five largest growth markets for solar: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia and India,” the report said.
Qiu added: “Clean energy represents the most durable pathway to genuine energy self-sufficiency. Resources such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower are domestically available and can help buffer countries against global fuel price volatility and geopolitical disruptions.
“Rather than turning back to fossil fuels, the solution lies in integrated investment plans that combine a shift from coal to renewables with upgrades to grid infrastructure and the deployment of energy storage systems.”
Qiu said international energy cooperation could play a role in this transition, including China supporting climate finance and applying its expertise in energy storage and grid development to help countries connect resources with demand centres.
While China has positioned coal as an important piece of its renewable transition, the country is simultaneously expanding its research and implementation of technology aimed at making coal power more efficient and less polluting.
Lu has helped to develop coal with better efficiency by heating and partially gasifying the coal, causing its combustion rate to be 20 times that of conventional coal.
This technology allows coal power plants to actually provide peak shaving power by operating at a high load during the day and a low load at night.
Other technologies include fitting coal power plants with carbon capture technology to reduce their carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Qiu said one rationale behind why China may not be exporting its “clean coal” technologies and instead imposing the coal plant ban is that these technologies were “costly and highly capital-intensive”.
“Options such as carbon capture are typically applied only to strategically important projects and scaling them up would impose significant financial burdens on host countries while locking in long-lived coal assets,” Qiu said.
“More fundamentally, China’s overseas coal ban reflects a global collective recognition that replacing the emissions source is more effective than relying on end-of-pipe solutions.
“Directly shifting to renewable energy delivers deeper and more durable emissions reductions, while enabling earlier investment in the infrastructure needed for a clean-energy system, such as grids, storage and renewable supply chains.”
In September, during a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Xi said China would work with SCO countries to increase the installed capacity of solar and wind power by 10 million kilowatts each over the next five years.
According to a report by CREA in July, China’s clean-energy footprint spans almost the entire world, with exports going to 191 out of 192 United Nations member states.
“China’s exports of clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles are increasingly helping to cut emissions in other countries. Such exports in 2024 alone are already shaving 1 per cent off global emissions outside of China,” the report said.
“The largest emission reductions are associated with direct clean-technology equipment exports – particularly solar panels – followed by manufacturing at Chinese factories overseas, with overseas projects financed by Chinese investors a distant third.”
There has been a surge in overseas investing by Chinese green technology manufacturers into sectors like solar, wind, batteries, green hydrogen and new energy vehicles, with investment across 54 countries surpassing US$220 billion since 2022, according to a report by the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University.
“China’s pledge to stop financing coal power plants abroad matters because of the scale of its influence on the global energy system,” Qiu said.
As the world’s largest public financier of power infrastructure, China’s 2021 pledge and similar announcements from Japan and South Korea “marked a turning point that accelerated the global shift away from coal”, though its impact depends on implementation.
“Beyond coal, China’s dominance across renewable supply chains makes it a central actor in enabling the next phase of the global energy transition,” Qiu said.
“By providing cost-competitive clean-energy technologies and best practices, such as integrating on-site renewables and grid-ready solutions in industrial parks, China can help lower barriers to clean-energy deployment in developing economies.” -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
