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It’s raining again in China. Reservoirs are filling, and the country’s massive hydropower complex is generating power at closer to normal capacity after years of drought. This could mean that China’s emissions of greenhouse gases — the largest in the world — may be peaking, or even already have peaked. And as goes China’s emissions, so go the world’s.
Hydro generation has grown 16% through May of this year compared to January through May of last year, according to a Reuters analysis of Chinese government statistics. “Hydro storage is about as good as it’s ever been” in China, Alex Turnbull, an investor and energy researcher based in Singapore, told me.
China produces almost 30% of the world’s hydropower, but output in the country has fallen in recent years due to declines in rainfall. China produced some 1,226 terawatt hours of hydro power in 2023, according to the 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy, down about 5% from 1,298 in 2022 and down substantially from the recent maximum output of 1,322 in 2020. From 2013 to 2023, Chinese hydro output grew by about a third, a 3 percent annual growth rate, during that same period, wind output has grown by over 500%. Solar output, meanwhile, increased by nearly a factor of 70.
Even in spite of this phenomenal growth in wind and solar capacity, hydropower is still China’s largest source of clean energy, according to the clean energy think tank Ember, responsible for 13% of its electricity generation. Almost two-third comes from fossil fuels, largely coal.
The country’s 2022 drought wreaked havoc on China’s economy, with factories going idle for want of power and cities shutting off lights in order to conserve. Globally, hydropower output hit a five-year low in 2023, according to Ember, largely on the back of China’s slump. This meant increased global coal usage, driving up overall power sector emissions by 1% and preventing what would have otherwise been a fall in global power emissions.
“The expectation with more hydro coming back on line is much less coal generation,” Jeremy Wallace, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Heatmap contributor, told me.
The water level in the Yangtze River has risen in the past few weeks due to heavy rainfall, Reuters reported, which is not an unalloyed good — it could also mean more flooding and landslides throughout the summer, government meteorologists projected. Floods in the Yangtze and its tributaries are recurring and tremendous risks in China. Floods in 2011 caused by heavy rain following a drought killing around 200 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.
China accounts for about 26% of global emissions, so if its emissions have indeed peaked, that would be very good news for the rest of the world. “China’s economy is growing and it’s using more electricity,” Wallace told me, “but almost all of that electricity growth has been from clean sources.”
China’s carbon dioxide emissions fell slightly in March of this year after rising steadily following the end of its zero-Covid policy in 2022, according to an analysis for CarbonBrief by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute and lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. That is due in part to the government’s investments in non-emitting energy — 423 terawatt hours per year installed in 2023 alone, “equal to the total electricity consumption of France,” per Myllyvirta’s analysis — and in other part to a transformation in its industrial balance.
Over the past few years, China’s economic engine has shifted from urban construction, dependent on emissions-heavy steel and cement, towards relatively less carbon-intensive manufacturing, Wallace said.
Turnbull shared a similar take. “All the sectors which comprised all the ferocious power demand growth” are “going down” or are “flat to down-ish,” he said, referring to industrial sectors like steel. Meanwhile, “the demand side doesn’t look like it’s growing anywhere near like it is before.”
“I think this is it,” Turnbull said. “This is the peak.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.