Satellite images show "expansion" of coal production in China | News from the world

China's coal-fired power plants, which are said to have been canceled due to government decrees, are still under construction and threaten to "seriously compromise" global climate targets, researchers warned.

Satellite photos taken in 2018 of places in China reveal cooling towers and new buildings that were not present a year earlier in factories meant to stop operations or be postponed on the order of Beijing.

According to the Coalswarm research group, these projects are part of a "coming tsunami" of coal-fired power plants.

The total capacity of the planned coal-fired plants is about 259 GW, higher than that of the US coal fleet and "totally out of the ordinary" with the Paris agreement on climate, the group said in a new report.

"This new evidence that the Chinese central government has not been able to stop the construction of coal-fired power plants is alarming – the planet can not tolerate the construction of another US-sized block. said Ted Nace, executive director. CoalSwarm, which is funded by international green groups and private donations.

Many of the power plants date from 2014-2016, when the construction licensing scheme was transferred from Beijing to the provincial authorities. This led to a threefold increase in permits issued between 2013 and 2015. In response in 2016 and 2017, the Chinese government ordered that projects be slowed, postponed or canceled.

But satellite photos analyzed by Coalswarm show that many power plants have continued to be built, including the Huadian Nanxiong station in southeastern China. Although the government ordered the plant 's suspension in January 2017, two cooling towers were launched in March 2018.

Other photographs show the water vapor that emerges from cooling towers where there was none before, such as the Zhoukou Longda Power Station in central China, which indicates a power station using coal and producing electricity.

Some factories seem to have been built but are not connected to the grid, which, according to Coalswarm, appears to be a "sleight of hand" to avoid breaking the government-imposed coal ceiling.

China's five-year plan provides that there should not be more than 1,100 GW of coal by 2020, but the 259 GW increase through new plants is 993 GW of existing capacity.

Coalswarm said that if China had about half of the world's coal mining capacity, "the country's coal policy has a huge effect on the global climate outlook." The group called on China to act quickly to cancel the projects.