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The world’s biggest polluter is also the world’s top generator of renewable energy.
Ahead of President Biden’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco on Wednesday, the U.S. and China released a joint statement that represents a breakthrough in the two countries’ climate change negotiations. Most notably, the Asian superpower has finally agreed to set concrete targets to reduce emissions across its economy.
The statement asserts that the U.S. and China will work together and with other parties at the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Abu Dhabi, known as COP28, to “rise up to one of the greatest challenges of our time for present and future generations of humankind.”
Underlying the summit is a stark reality: The world will not be able to limit global warming to internationally agreed-upon levels if China, the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, does not increase its ambition. The country is now responsible for about a third of annual global carbon emissions. China’s combustion of coal alone accounts for 25% of all energy-related emissions in the world.
Yet China is also the world’s top generator of renewable energy and the foremost manufacturer of much of the technology undergirding the transition. Come with me on a tour of the complex, contradictory state of China’s energy transition in eight eye-popping charts.
China’s climate pledges to date have been vague. The country has said its carbon emissions will peak before 2030, for instance, but has not set a firm target for when or at what level — and the target does not apply to other planet-warming gases like methane. But according to an analysis by Climate Action Tracker, under current policies, China’s annual emissions will peak around 2025 and then plateau for the rest of the decade. That’s primarily due to a projection that the country will continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels as its total energy demand grows. But as we’ll see, this is also one of the key uncertainties around China’s transition.
The biggest source of emissions in China is the power sector. More than 60% of its electricity generation came from coal-fired power plants last year. At COP26 in Glasgow, China said it would “phase down coal consumption” beginning in 2026, but unlike the U.S., which hasn’t built a large coal plant in 10 years, China is growing its coal fleet. Last year, the country greenlit the construction of two new coal plants per week on average, according to Global Energy Monitor, and the trend continued into 2023.
China’s coal permitting spree is the result of rising anxieties among leadership over energy security in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, and now the Israel-Hamas war, Kevin Tu, a non-resident fellow at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. He said China “undoubtedly” overemphasized security in its energy decision-making and that these plants were at risk of becoming stranded assets.
But as Cornell University professor and Heatmap contributor Jeremy Wallace wrote earlier this year, China’s coal plants haven’t even been running at full capacity, and are “shifting to a role of backing-up renewables.” The International Energy Agency predicted last month that China will “gradually use its coal-fired power more to provide flexibility and less to deliver bulk energy.”
China may also begin trying to capture the carbon emitted from its coal plants, with the help of the U.S. One of the points of agreement reached this week was an aim to “advance at least 5 large-scale cooperative [carbon capture, utilization, and storage] projects each by 2030.”
Even though China is building coal plants like there’s no tomorrow, the proportion of its overall energy consumption coming from fossil fuels is actually dropping quite rapidly — at a much faster rate than in the U.S. The country has reduced fossil fuels to about 82% of its energy mix, and plans to get no more than 75% of its energy from fossil fuels by 2030.
The analysis by Climate Action Tracker shows China “significantly overachieving” that goal, primarily because the country is building wind and solar farms at a truly wild pace.
China will build more solar generation this year than the U.S. has built, period. The country’s 2023 additions of low-carbon resources — solar, wind, nuclear, and hydroelectric — are enough to meet the annual electricity needs of the entire United Kingdom.
Critics of China’s climate commitments look at the country’s unbelievably fast progress on renewables and argue it could easily raise its ambition. The country will most certainly exceed the 1,200 gigawatts of wind and solar it has outlined in its current policy plans.
China is even doing what has become impossible in much of the Western world and growing its nuclear fleet. “This will be the largest expansion of nuclear capacity in history, by far,” Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, told CNBC recently.
China has already won the race when it comes to manufacturing clean technologies. Even though the U.S. is pouring billions of dollars into building up its own manufacturing capacity, it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever put a real dent in China’s market dominance for lithium-ion battery and solar module production.
It’s much more likely that the U.S. and other developed countries will continue to rely heavily on China for their own energy transitions. Earlier this year, Group of Seven leaders admitted as much when they described their approach to relations with China as “derisking, not decoupling.”
China’s manufacturing prowess could also benefit a far wider swath of the globe. “China has an opportunity to leverage such capabilities to facilitate deploying clean energy globally,” said Gang He, an assistant professor of energy and climate policy at Baruch College, in an email. “Especially in the world's least developed and most vulnerable countries.”
That’s not happening yet. In September 2021, China committed to ending its overseas financing of coal-fired power plants and to support renewable energy development abroad. But while its coal finance came to an abrupt halt, its investment in wind and solar has not gone up accordingly, according to the World Resources Institute.
But in the new joint statement with the U.S., China agreed to “pursue efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030” in addition to accelerating the “substitution” of renewables for fossil fuels in their own countries.
How to make sense of all of this?
Earlier this week, CarbonBrief had quite an optimistic take on the data. It found that China’s rate of low-carbon energy expansion is on track to outpace the annual increase in electricity demand — telling a different story than Climate Action Tracker projected about that first key uncertainty I mentioned. This could push emissions “into an extended period of structural decline,” the authors wrote. But it all depends on whether wind and solar interests can overcome China’s powerful coal lobby.
“What China really needs is to conduct some serious institutional reform to make its power system more friendly toward renewables,” Tu told me. “The problem in China is that the coal interest group makes such reform very difficult.”
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While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.
It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.
Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.
But for clean energy and environmental advocates, the Naperville city council results represent an encouraging, if overlooked, victory. On Tuesday, voters in the suburb elected four candidates — incumbents Benjamin White and Ian Holzhauer, and newcomers Mary Gibson and Ashfaq Syed — all of whom oppose the city signing a new contract with the Prairie State Generating Station, the state’s largest and youngest coal-fired plant and the seventh-dirtiest electricity provider in the country.
Naperville is one of 30 municipal investors in the Prairie State plant whose contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a public power agency and one of the nine partial owners of Prairie State, has it locked into coal through 2035. Recently, IMEA approached the municipal investors with the promise of favorable terms on a new contract if the cities and towns were willing to re-sign a decade early — by April 30 — and commit to another 20 years of coal power. Most municipalities took the deal, which will run through 2055; Naperville, along with the towns of St. Charles and Winnetka, are still debating the decision, with the deadline looming.
“IMEA’s proposition for communities is, ‘Hey, instead of paying Wall Street and shareholder dividends, we don’t have any of that because we’re a nonprofit, so you get lower energy costs,’” Fernando Arriola, the community relations chair for Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, which opposes the deal with IMEA, told me. “But the way I look at it is, it’s a deal with the devil because you’re locked in for 30 years. And it’s like Hotel California — you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
In a statement to Heatmap, Staci Wilson, the vice president of government affairs and member services at IMEA, told me that the contract it offered to Naperville is “designed to help … secure more future green resources to serve our member communities for the long term. IMEA is the only power supplier to allow the city to have a direct voice in procuring their wholesale power supply and make reliable, economical, and sustainable resource decisions for the future.”
While it’s true that IMEA allows its municipal members a voice in its future planning, those in Naperville who oppose the new contract point out that the community has just one vote in the process despite making up 35% of the utility’s market.
The pending contract decision became one of the major themes of the city council race in Naperville — attention that caused some locals to grumble about the injection of partisan politics and outside interest in the campaigns. But Syed, a newly elected city council member and a recent immigrant from Dubai, told me that learning that his city relied on coal for 80% of its energy needs was what ultimately galvanized him into running. “Naperville has been a leader in many things, but in this area, we were not doing good,” he said. “So I stepped up.”
Illinois has one of the nation’s most aggressive decarbonization timelines, requiring coal and gas plants to close by 2030. But there is a carve-out for plants owned by public entities like municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, and Prairie State fits that bill. Instead, the power plant has to reduce emissions by 45% by 2038, a goal IMEA says it can reach by installing multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage technologies. Energy experts have been widely skeptical of the proposal. “The people I’ve talked to say that’s unproven and it doesn’t necessarily work, and it’s a high price,” Arriola said.
Still, cost concerns related to transitioning away from coal had “definitely been a conversation in town” leading up to Tuesday’s election, Arriola told me. “A lot of people are seriously concerned about pricing, and there are also concerns about the reliability.” Syed told me that was one of the objections he heard the most when talking to constituents during his campaign. “Some of the Republicans who were against [exporing alternative energy options] were trying to influence people, saying we need to think about the cost,” he said. “My standard answer to these people was that I am not going to compromise clean energy just for the cost purpose.”
Perhaps most interestingly, unlike many communities that oppose power plants, Naperville is located almost 300 miles north of the Prairie State Generating Station and is unaffected by its immediate pollution. Naperville voters who opposed renewing the contract did so on the merits of finding cleaner energy sources and on the objection to dirty electricity that is otherwise out of sight and out of mind. As Amanda Pankau, the director of energy and community resiliency at the Prairie Rivers Network, an environmental nonprofit in the state, told me, “From a climate perspective, we should all care about the Prairie State coal plant.” She noted that the emissions from the plant — around 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — are “impacting every single Illinoisan and every single person that lives on planet Earth.”
Despite those existential stakes, it could be tempting to wave away the results in Naperville as being on trend for a relatively affluent and liberal-leaning town. Compared to the Wisconsin supreme court election, where the Democrat-backed candidate overcame enormous spending margins to trounce her Republican-backed opponent, it does not necessarily indicate the same momentum for the party heading into 2026’s midterms. (Nor does it even have the biggest climate-related election headline of the night: Tesla is suing Wisconsin for a law preventing car manufacturers from owning car dealerships, which the state’s high court will likely decide.)
But at a time of little good news in the climate sphere, the Naperville election is an encouraging and invigorating reminder that there are candidates who believe in cleaner technologies, and that the battles can still — or especially — be won at the local level. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the IMEA contract we signed for that time was okay,” Syed said. “But it’s not okay today. We cannot have this $2 billion contract until 2055 because the next generation will ask us this question: ‘What have you people done for us this time?’”
The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.