Coal power

Capital suggestion

January 16: China’s National Energy Administration announced that “104 planned and under-construction coal power projects – with a total capacity of 120 gigawatts – have been suspended”. The Chinese “government is taking dramatic steps in order to comply with the coal capacity target laid out in its latest Five Year Plan”. For the record, this has happened in just 13 provinces and more suspensions are being undertaken in the other 11 provinces.

January 18: China’s National Energy Administration cancelled 103 coal-fired projects that were “planned or under construction, eliminating 120 gigawatts of future coal-fired capacity. That includes dozens of projects in 13 provinces, mostly in China’s oil-rich north and west, on which construction had already begun. Those projects alone would have had a combined output of 54 gigawatts, more than the entire coal-fired capacity of Germany”.

January 27: The Sahiwal Coal Power Project was connected to the grid. Federal Minister for Water, Power and Defence Khawaja Muhammad Asif said that the Sahiwal power plant “will generate 1,320 megawatts from June after its testing has been completed”.

February 22: State Minister for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali announced that “80 percent of work of [the] Port Qasim coal-fired power plant was completed”. The Port Qasim Power Project is a 1,320 megawatt comprising two 660-megawatt power projects that has been under construction since May 2015.

March 5: The premier of the People’s Republic of China publicly announced that “2017 would see an additional 50 gigawatts or more of coal-fired power capacity closed-down, halted or postponed”.

March 5: China’s government “pledged to dramatically slow a coal-power building binge that is threatening its environment”. The government further promised to “shut down dozens of coal-power plants and stop some new construction”.

March 18: The Huaneng Beijing Thermal Power Plant, which “produced 845 MW of power-more than a tenth of the power created by all power plants near Beijing-was closed down”. The Huaneng Beijing power plant was Beijing’s “last big coal-fired power station which dominated the skyline of the city’s outskirts for 18 years”.

March 22: China began the construction of a $2 billion coal power plant in Balochistan, the second major project after Gwadar port under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal performed the ground-breaking of the “$2 billion Hubco coal-fired power plant in the presence of Chinese guests and diplomats”.

March 22: Beijing’s “deadly air pollution has forced it to close all of its large coal-power plants”. In 2013, Beijing’s “city administration swore to stop using coal in the large power plants that supply electricity to the capital and its 21 million inhabitants. By 2015, three of its four coal-fired power plants had been shut down”.

March 22: Greenpeace, a non-governmental global environmental organisation, reported that “China’s clampdown on new coal projects and a reluctance by backers to provide further funds in India and mainly responsible for last year’s drop in the amount of coal-powered generation capacity under development”. The report further states that the “construction planning of coal plants fell [by] 48 percent and new construction starts dropped [by] 62 percent last year compared with 2015”.

Fact 1: Pakistan is planning to add several thousand megawatts of Chinese-backed coal-fired power plants. Fact 2: China is shutting down its own coal-fired power plants.

The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com Twitter: @saleemfarrukh