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And if it doesn’t, that’s very good news, indeed, for global emissions.
First it was the reservoirs in China’s massive network of hydroelectric dams filling up, then it was the approval of 11 new nuclear reactors — and it’s all happening as China appears to be slowing down its approval of new coal plants, according to a research group that closely follows the Chinese energy transition.
While China is hardly scrapping its network of coal plants, which power 63% of its electric grid and makes it the world’s biggest consumer of coal (to the tune of about half of global coal consumption), it could mean that China is on the verge of powering its future economic growth non-carbon-emitting energy. This would mean a break with decades of coal-powered growth and could set the table for real emissions reductions from the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
It is true that many researchers consider it necessary to essentially halt approvals of new, unabated fossil fuel assets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and hold global temperatures rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. But any world where emissions are falling will have gone through a transitional period where Chinese coal construction first slows down.
The report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that in the first half of this year, China has approved just 9 gigawatts of new coal plants, an 83% drop from the first six months of 2023; in 2022 and 2023, the country approved 100 gigawatts of new coal. For scale, the United States added a total of 40 gigawatts of new capacity in 2023 across all sources of energy, including non-emitting ones like solar and lower-emitting ones like natural gas.
CREA attributes this slow down to “the rapid development of clean energy, which is now being installed at levels sufficient to meet China's electricity demand growth.” But China’s power mix is changing on the demand side, as well. If the government continues to shift from a strategy of rapid urbanization and massive new construction projects that depend on huge amounts of steel and cement (both of which require coal to produce) to high-value manufacturing like (electric!) automobiles, the demand for coal will likely plateau and fall, with emissions following.
The report adds to a growing body of data that shows China may have hit its emissions peak already, well before its 2030 goal. Even late last year, some experts speculated that peak emission would come by 2026. “If renewables continue to cut into coal generation then a peak in China’s CO2 emissions — pledged to happen before 2030 — is on the horizon, if not already here,” CREA said in a release accompanying the report.
But the report cautioned that the coal sector in China is hardly down and out. There were over 40 gigawatts’ worth of coal construction projects started in the first half of this year. And even if its emissions have peaked, 30% of the global total still comes from China, according to CREA, and the country is responsible for 90% of emissions growth since the signing of the Paris Agreement.
China has no issue deploying non-carbon-emitting power on a gargantuan scale — it makes up almost a third of the world’s hydropower and is installing roughly the electricity consumption of France in new, non-emitting power generation on an annual basis — but still, meaningful emissions reductions won’t come until these capacity additions can at least match the country's economic growth without the help of new coal.
Now, the trends may finally be pointing in the right direction. “If China maintains the trend of increasing renewable power capacity observed in [2023 and the first half of 2024], it will lead to a 20% reduction in coal power generation and a 35% reduction in overall coal consumption by 2035,” the CREA report argues.
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SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
The company will use the seed funding to bring on more engineers — and customers.
As extreme weather becomes the norm, utilities are scrambling to improve the grid’s resilience, aiming to prevent the types of outages and infrastructure damage that often magnify the impact of already disastrous weather events. Those events cost the U.S. $182 billion in damages last year alone.
With the intensity of storms, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires growing every year, some utilities are now turning to artificial intelligence in their quest to adapt to new climate realities. Rhizome, which just announced a $6.5 million seed round, uses AI to help assess and prevent climate change-induced grid infrastructure vulnerabilities. It’s already working with utilities such as Avangrid, Seattle City Light, and Vermont Electric Power Company to do so.
“With a combination of utility system data and historical weather and hazard information, and then climate projection information, we can build a full profile of likelihood and consequence of failure at a very high resolution,” Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mish Thadani told me.
While utilities often have lots of data about the history of their assets and the surrounding landscape, there’s no real holistic system to bring together these disparate datasets and provide a simple overview of systemic risk across a range of different scenarios. Utilities usually rely on historical data to make decisions about their assets — a practice that’s increasingly unhelpful as climate change makes previously rare extreme weather events more likely.
Rhizome aims to solve both problems, serving as an integrated platform for risk assessment and mitigation that incorporates forward-looking climate modeling into its projections. The company measures its success against modeled counterfactuals that determine avoided power outages and the economic losses associated with these hypothetical blackouts. “So we can say the anticipated failure rate across the system for a Category 1 hurricane was X, and after you invest in the system, it will be Y,” Thadani told me. “Or if you’ve made a bunch of investments in the system, and you do experience a Category 1 hurricane, what would have been the failure rate had those investments not been made?”
This allows utilities to provide regulators with much more robust data to back up their funding requests. So while Thadani expects electricity prices to continue to rise and ratepayers to bear the burden, he told me that Rhizome can ultimately help regulators and utilities keep costs in check by making sure that every dollar spent on risk mitigation goes as far as possible.
Rhizome’s seed round, which came in oversubscribed, was led by the early-stage tech-focused venture firm Base10 Partners, which aims to automate traditional sectors of the economy. Additional funders include climate investors MCJ and CLAI, as well as the wildfire-focused venture firm Convective Capital. In addition to its standard risk assessment system, Rhizome has also developed a wildfire-specific risk mitigation tool. This quantifies not only how likely a hazard is to occur and its potential impact on utility infrastructure, but also the probability that an equipment failure would spark a wildfire, based on the geography of the area and historical ignition data.
Thadani told me that he considers evaluating wildfire risk “to be the next step in a sequence” as a utility evaluates the threats to its system overall. So while customers can choose to adopt either the standard product or the wildfire-specific product, many could gain utility from both, he said. The company has also developed a third offering specifically tailored for municipal and cooperative utilities. This more affordable system doesn’t provide the same machine learning-powered cost-benefit metrics, but can still help these smaller entities evaluate their infrastructure’s vulnerability.
Right now, Rhizome has a “lean and mighty” team of just 11 people, Thadani told me. With this latest raise, he said that the company will immediately hire five or six engineers, primarily to do further research and development. As Rhizome looks to onboard more and larger customers, it’s planning to incorporate more advanced modeling features into its platform and operate it increasingly autonomously, such that the model can retrain itself as new weather, climate, and utility data becomes available.
The company is out of the pilot phase with most of its customers, Thadani said, having signed multiple enterprise software contracts. That’s big, as utilities have gained a reputation for showing an initial appetite for testing innovative technologies, only to balk at the cost of full-scale deployment. Thadani told me Rhizome has been able to avoid this so-called “pilot purgatory” by making a point to engage with senior-level stakeholders at utilities — not just the innovation teams — to “graduate from that pilot ecosystem more quickly.”
Add it to the evidence that China’s greenhouse gas emissions may be peaking, if they haven’t already.
Exactly where China is in its energy transition remains somewhat fuzzy. Has the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases already hit peak emissions? Will it in 2025? That remains to be seen. But its import data for this year suggests an economy that’s in a rapid transition.
According to government trade data, in the first fourth months of this year, China imported $12.1 billion of coal, $100.4 billion of crude oil, and $18 billion of natural gas. In terms of value, that’s a 27% year over year decline in coal, a 8.5% decline in oil, and a 15.7% decline in natural gas. In terms of volume, it was a 5.3% decline, a slight 0.5% increase, and a 9.2% decline, respectively.
“Fossil fuel demand still trends down,” Lauri Myllyvirta, the co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, wrote on X in response to the news.
Morgan Stanley analysts predicted Friday in a note to clients that this “weak downstream demand” for coal in China would “continue to hinder coal import volume.”
Another piece of China’s emissions and coal usage puzzle came from Indonesia, which is a major coal exporter. Citing data from trade data service Kpler, Reuters reported Friday that Indonesia’s thermal coal exports “have dropped to their lowest in three years” thanks to “weak demand in China and India,” the world’s two biggest coal importers. Indonesia’s thermal coal exports dropped 12% annually to 150 million tons in the first third of the year, Reuters reported.
China’s official goal is to hit peak emissions by 2030 and reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060. The country’s electricity grid is largely fueled by coal (with hydropower coming in at number two), as is its prolific production of steel and cement, which is energy and, specifically, coal-intensive. For a few years in the 2010s, more cement was poured in China than in the whole 20th century in the United States. China also accounts for about half of the world’s steel production.
At the same time, China’s electricity demand growth is being largely met by renewables, implying that China can expand its economy without its economy-wide, annual emissions going up. This is in part due to a massive deployment of renewables. In 2023, China installed enough non-carbon-emitting electricity generation to meet the total electricity demand of all of France.
China’s productive capacity has shifted in a way that’s less carbon intensive, experts on the Chinese energy system and economy have told Heatmap. The economy isshifting more toward manufacturing and away from the steel-and-cement intensive breakneck urbanization of the past few decades, thanks to a dramatically slowing homebuilding sector.
Chinese urban residential construction was using almost 300 million tons of steel per year at its peak in 2019, according to research by the Reserve Bank of Australia, about a third of the country’s total steel usage. (Steel consumption for residential construction would fall by about half by 2023.) By contrast, the whole United States economy consumes less than 100 million tons of steel per year.
To the extent the overall Chinese economy slows down due to the trade war with the United States, coal usage — and thus greenhouse gas emissions — would slow as well. Although that hasn’t happened yet — China also released export data on Friday that showed sustained growth, in spite of the tariff barriers thrown up by the Trump administration.