Lots of confusion about how China is able to cut seaborne oil imports so drastically. I think a significant blind spot in most analysis is China's stockpiles of refined products. These are reported in China's official energy data. 🧵
x.com/JavierBlas/sta… x.com/JavierBlas/sta… China looks set to cut seaborne oil imports by 34% and net imports by 38% in May, year on year. There are lots of wild theories about how such a drop is possible.

China's power generation from coal and gas increased 3% on year in March, the 4th month of increase in a row, due to underperformance of wind, solar & nuclear. Wind conditions in March-April have been extraordinarily bad, solar bad too; nuclear has seen long refueling outages. Unfavorable weather doesn't account for all of the weakness in clean power generation this year - grid congestion due to inflexible operation of coal plants and transmission lines plays a role too, especially in Jan-Feb when weather conditions were actually better than last year.

Lots of questions and muddled thinking about whether the impending fossil fuel crisis will benefit coal. Key thing to understand: Fossil fuel demand will fall; fuel-switching between coal and gas is temporary, while accelerated clean energy investments are structural.
Just look at the 2021-2022 fossil fuel crisis. When Russia throttled gas supply to Europe and fuel prices skyrocketed, there was a deluge of headlines about countries, especially Europe, "going back to coal".

China's official statistics report a 0.3% drop in CO2 emissions from energy&industry in 2025, the third time that annual emissions have fallen this century and the first fall predominantly driven by clean energy growth. Coal consumption grew 0.1%, oil consumption 3.6% and gas consumption 2%, while non-fossil energy use grew 14%. Yet, after subtracting non-energy use, total fossil energy consumption fell 0.4%, showing how chemical industry demand drove fossil fuel use.

NEW from us: current clean energy targets and trends enable China, India, and Indonesia to peak power sector emissions by 2030. This would be a global breakthrough given that these nations have been the largest growth markets for coal in the decade since the Paris Agreement. China, India and Indonesia used 73% of the world's coal in 2024. Without their emissions growth, global energy sector CO2 would have peaked before 2020. Coal use grew 15% in China, 42% in India, and 150% in Indonesia 2015-2024, while consumption in the rest of the world fell 23%.

A key point I always try to convey to policymakers and business folks in the west is that China's competitiveness in manufacturing is underpinned by unrivaled scale and ecosystem. The stereotype far too often is that it's all about subsidies and cheap labor, which...

https://twitter.com/kyleichan/status/1969956985526169657

...causes people to drastically underestimate the challenge of building alternative supply chains and the scale of the resources required to do it.

NEW from us: Last year, China started construction on an estimated 95 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity, enough to power the entire UK twice over.

We explain why China's still building new coal power plants, and when and how it might stop and begin phasing out. We address several persistent myths and misconceptions about coal power in China. These are the key points we make:

Important data drop that I've been waiting for on China's massive solar installations in H1:
🌞 solar power capacity additions doubled year-on-year to 212 gigawatts, with total capacity at the end of H1 increasing a whopping 54% year on year Distributed solar accounted for 53% of new additions.
👉 This implies plenty of centralized solar projects are still on the way, many aiming to finish before the end of China's current 5-year plan in December.

Jaw-dropping: while most everyone has been projecting a slowdown in China's wind&solar deployment, the State Grid Energy Research Institute expects 380 GW solar and 140 GW wind added to the grid this year. It's been clear that clean (and dirty) power capacity additions numbers would be buoyed by the end of the five-year plan period, when a lot of projects race to complete. But I have not seen anyone predict anything this big.

We knew China's rush to install solar and wind was going to be wild but WOW😮. The solar panels & wind turbines installed in May alone, in a single month, will generarate as much electricity as:
-Poland
-Sweden
-Norway
-the UAE
-North Carolina&Maryland or
-Washington&Wyoming
In the first five months of the year, China added 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of wind. Those turbines and panels will generate as much electricity as:
-Indonesia
-Turkey
-Any U.S. state except for Texas or
-California, Arizona and New Mexico put together
-and much more than the UK

I didn't have time for a hot take on the Spanish power outage a few days ago so here's a bit more of a measured take, and a hot take on the hot takes making the rounds. First of all, the outage wasn't "caused by solar" or any other power plant or technology anymore than the rupture of this pipe was "caused by" water inside the pipe.

Xi Jinping just made his first climate-focused, internation speech in several years. While he said little that is new in substance, Xi's speeches are always important signals of the leadership's priorities. 🧵 Significantly, Xi is taking credit for the growth of China's clean energy industry: "Since I announced China's carbon neutrality goal five years ago, we have built the world's largest and fastest-growing renewable energy system as well as the largest and most complete new energy industrial chain."

China's power generation from coal&gas fell 2% on year in March, as growth in solar, wind and nuclear power generation more than covered all demand growth. Increase in hydropower generation, which is more related to seasonal variation, came on top and helped push fossils down. Solar cell production grew a whopping 24% from a very high base, showing the rush to install solar power capacity before the June 1 deadline when new pricing rules for solar and wind kick in.

How will Trump’s trade war affect global CO2 emissions, fossil fuels and clean energy? Initial thoughts. The obvious initial impact will be a drop in emissions for two reasons: falling factory output in export hubs such as China’s coastal provinces and Vietnam; and because of the overall impact on the economy and jobs, leading to lower consumer spending.

New from us: clean energy technologies contributed more than 10% of China’s GDP in 2024 for the first time ever, with sales and investments worth $1.9tn.

Clean energy sectors drove a quarter of the country’s GDP growth and have overtaken real estate sales in value.

https://twitter.com/CREACleanAir/status/1892001404526481567

Clean energy sectors grew three times as fast as the Chinese economy overall, accounting for 26% of all GDP growth in 2024.

China would have missed its 5% target for GDP growth without the growth from clean technologies, expanding by 3.6% instead of the 5.0% reported.

NEW from me: Half of all China’s exports of solar and wind power equipment and electric vehicles (EVs) now go to the Global South. Emerging and developing countries have driven most of the recent growth in export volumes. A lot of media and policymaker attention is focused on possible US and European tariffs on China’s cleantech exports, with the perception that these could be a major blow to the industry.

The IEA is now saying that global coal demand isn't expected to fall in the next three years, after predicting a fall last year.

What changed? THREAD Three things changed in the IEA's coal demand projections: China's expected to plateau in 2024-27 (to grow at 0.3%/year but given uncertainties it might just as well be -0.3%), the U.S. and the EU are expected to fall more slowly, and in non-EU Europe and in Russia to increase instead of plateauing.

How is China's EV boom affecting gasoline demand and electricity demand? It has been hard to find precise data on this so here's a thread working out some numbers. China now has 30 million EVs on the road, approaching 10% of registered vehicles, and approaching 50% of new vehicle sales with over 8 million EVs sold this year.

NEW from me: Clean energy generated a record-high 44% of China’s electricity in May 2024, pushing coal’s share down to a record low of 53%. Coal lost seven percentage points compared with May 2023, when it accounted for 60% of generation in China. China’s electricity demand in May 2024 grew by 49TWh (7.2%) from a year earlier.

Clean power generation grew by a record 78TWh, including 41TWh (78%) from solar, a recovery from earlier drought-driven lows for hydro of 34TWh (39%) and a modest rise for wind of 4TWh (5%).

BREAKING: China's CO2 emissions fell by 3% in March, after a surge lasting 14 months that followed the lifting of zero-Covid controls, showing the country has the ability to peak emissions imminently.
carbonbrief.org/analysis-month…
This is just one month of data, but it's based on structural drivers - I predicted six months ago that emissions would begin falling in March due to last year's record clean energy capacity additions:
carbonbrief.org/analysis-china…

Why did China's CO2 emissions surge during the Covid-19 pandemic? The emission increase has put the badly country off track to its climate targets but understanding of the causes is weak even among experts. I break the drivers down in a new article. China’s energy-consumption growth almost doubled to 4% per year, from 2.4% per year during the preceding five years. CO2-emissions growth accelerated from 0.1% per year to 3% per year, and electricity-consumption growth increased slightly from 5.5% to 6.3%.