This analyst note forms one in a series of reporting on government launched energy transition initiatives. These are not drafted to include any form of political opinion, or bias, and as such represent a clear reporting of the facts known at the time of publication. Any suggestion of political leanings in unintentional.
The challenge to get to carbon neutrality for China cannot be underestimated. This is a country that has an energy consumption per capita of only 99 gigajoules (GJ) per head, well below that of the USA (288 GJ per capita), Australia (254 GJ per capita) and Germany (157 GJ per capita), but produces over a third more carbon dioxide emissions than these three countries combined. In 2019 China emitted 9,825 million tonnes of CO2.
With the energy mix so heavily dominated by coal, renewables are facing significant headwinds locally from geography (point of generation and point of consumption being very different) and embedded stakeholders. In short this means there will be no simple inversion of renewables replacing coal as the dominant energy source.
