China goes gangbusters building 52 big coal plants in 2025
By
Joanne Nova
|
February 22nd, 2026
It’s almost like China doesn’t give a toss about climate change, eh?
Just quietly, while everyone was gushing tears over a two year extension to a fifty year old Australian plant, China added a gargantuan number of brand new coal plants.
Australia’s total coal fleet stands at 26 gigawatts in capacity. Yet China added three times that capacity in a single year.
Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor.
The graph below represents how many gigawatts were added, but only in the largest turbines size. China added 52 gigawatts of energy from one gigawatt units. Presumably the rest of the 78GW came from smaller sized turbines. And here’s the thing, while everyone will pretend this is the peak and tell us “it will decline soon”, another 83 gigawatts of coal plants has already started construction, and another 161GW is newly proposed or applied for.
https://www.cfact.org/2026/02/22/china-goes-gangbusters-building-52-big-coal-plants-in-2025/
