German climate envoy urges China to look beyond coal for energy-secure future

China needs to seek alternative solutions to ensure its energy security, rather than relying on building new coal-fired power plants, according to Germany's climate envoy.

Jennifer Morgan, Germany's state secretary and special envoy for international climate action, told the South China Morning Post in an exclusive interview that she was concerned about China's coal plant development.

"We are concerned. We need to think about energy security and climate security together now," she said in the interview last month. "We hope China would move more into other ways of ensuring its energy security rather than going for coal."

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Morgan said Germany also had energy security concerns but it reacted by building more renewable energy, making the system more efficient and having a flexible grid that could balance power supply and demand.

"That's something that we've learned very much the hard way in the last year with the Russian war of aggression. As we have phased out all of our imports of Russian fossil fuels, our best energy security measure is to build out renewables ... and also [energy] efficiency."

China embarked on a massive expansion of its coal-fired power capacity following power outages across the country in 2021 and 2022 that were mostly caused by economic and weather-related factors.

Before then, China had been looking to reduce its use of fossil fuels to meet its domestic carbon-neutral targets, but the blackouts led to renewed emphasis on coal as a source of energy. President Xi Jinping pledged in September 2020 to reach peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

Last year, provincial governments approved a total of 106 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity to be built - the most since 2015, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor.

Work also started last year on 50GW of coal power capacity, an increase of more than half from a year earlier and six times the total for the rest of the world combined, according to the report.

That pace of construction is only set to continue, with Greenpeace saying provincial governments approved at least 20GW of new coal power in the first quarter of this year, more than was given the go-ahead for all of 2021.

Reducing fossil fuel emissions is central to realising the 2015 Paris Agreement, a commitment by 195 nations to limit global temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius (36 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.

The International Energy Agency said in November that "reducing coal power sector emissions in line with the 1.5 degree Celsius goal means no new development of unabated coal-fired power plants".

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, has forecast that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will require global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 with emissions cut in half by 2030.

Representatives from around the world will meet in Dubai this year to assess just how much progress has been made towards the Paris goals.

One of the bodies that could take a lead in meeting these targets is the Group of 20, whose members are responsible for about 80 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Morgan said the G20 countries - which include China and Germany - should "forge a way forward in increasing their [nationally determined contributions]".

"That's the group of countries that the world is looking at as it should drive forward that transformation, and hopefully under India's leadership of the G20 presidency this year, she said.

"Several countries, including Germany, are very interested in being the leaders in innovation for the zero-carbon technologies that are needed. Having a benign competition for the green future is what the world needs to see."

Morgan said China and Germany had a long history of collaboration on energy and climate change, and climate change is already a focal point in bilateral relations.

The two countries could accelerate the pace and scale of change, building more renewable energy, creating flexible and efficient grids, and developing a circular economy, she said.

"That's good for our own countries, but also can be providing experience and examples for other countries as well."

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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