Cranes and diggers busily prepare land beneath the red and white striped chimneys of the Mengtai Group coal-fired power plant at the northern city limits of Ordos, in northern China’s Inner Mongolia. Privately owned Mengtai will soon add another two smoke stacks to the sprawling complex in an expansion that is the group’s biggest investment in its 20-year history. The new unit will burn coal to provide heating to nearby neighbourhoods as part of a regional policy unveiled in March that will add 5 gigawatts of coal power to western Inner Mongolia this year.
The resource-rich region, a swath of grassland, desert and forest that spans most of China’s northern border with Mongolia, is trapped between China’s heavy industrial past and the bold low carbon future vision of the nation’s leaders.
Mengtai’s proposal for a new plant was agreed by the local energy bureau in May, one of 17 units recently given the go-ahead by authorities in Inner Mongolia – six have won approval this year alone as part of efforts by local governments to stimulate their pandemic-hit economies. The region has the most pending facilities of any province in China, according to data from the Global Energy Monitor, a non-governmental organization that tracks global fossil fuel projects.
So at a time when the world is shifting away from coal – and Beijing has indicated that it will eventually do the same – China still accounts for the vast majority of newly commissioned projects globally.
“Coal is just so important in China from an energy supply and security point of view, and local governments don’t believe it is possible to get rid of coal immediately,” says Yang Yingxia, a senior fellow at the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy. “I don’t think the Chinese government has a crystal clear sense of how to get to carbon neutrality by 2060.”