Coal Continues to Dominate China's Energy Landscape

Coal is still king in China despite the renewables boom with record additions of solar and wind power generation.   Thermal power generation, which is overwhelmingly dominated by coal, rose by 1.5% in 2024 from a year earlier, to a record high of 6.34 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh), data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed.  Growth in thermal power generation was the weakest in nearly a decade, excluding the pandemic years 2020-2022 when China was under lockdowns. Nevertheless, coal consumption in the electricity…