“China is Building the [Renewable] Future … building coal-fired power stations, … because it has to …” – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Building communist coal power stations is apparently OK and necessary, but it is very wrong when President Trump does it.

As Trump turns his back on renewables, China is building the future

By Alan Kohler

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The data centres that operate both AI and cryptocurrency are already massively increasing electricity demand and investors are obviously expecting them to keep doing so — exponentially.

Meanwhile, the BRICS summit in Brazil last week — it stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — went in the opposite direction to the United States on climate change, committing to “intensify global efforts to contain global warming”.

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Let’s join the dots: America is pivoting back to fossil fuels and pulling out of renewable energy while the rest of the world continues to do the opposite, China is grappling with too much renewable energy while investors are bidding expectations to record highs for the new industries whose data centres are eating the world’s electricity.

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In his Independence Day speech, Trump declared: “Coal is back. You can’t use the word ‘coal’ unless you precede it by saying ‘clean beautiful coal.’”

China is also building coal-fired power stations, but only because it has to; the idea of saying “coal is back” and calling it clean and beautiful at the same time as more than one hundred people were dying in a Texas flood is insane.

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Xi now more important than Trump

The result of all this is that China — a ruthless autocracy — appears destined to take global leadership from the US, in trade, the means of producing energy and, possibly, in “soft power”, or moral leadership, as the US withdraws from foreign aid and multilateralism.

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So, it’s entirely appropriate that Anthony Albanese is meeting Xi again before he meets Trump for the first time. …

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-14/trump-us-xi-china-trade-renewables-tariffs/105526196

If China is “grappling with too much renewable energy”, why do they “have to” build any coal plants? Is it because the renewables China built are useless for meeting China’s energy needs? Sadly Kohler didn’t expand on this point, let us know why he thinks new coal plants are necessary in an environment of excess renewable capacity.

Of course we already know renewables are not fit for purpose. Researchers commissioned by Google admitted no known renewable technology could solve the world’s energy needs, way back in 2014. They even considered hypothetical radical improvements to current technology such as self erecting wind turbines, and still came up short.