The photo os sourced from thermofisher.com
The accelerated pace of bringing coal-fired facilities online goes against the trends of recent years, with the capacity of coal-fired TPPs newly launched in China going from 66.1 GW in 2015 to 48.9 GW in 2019 to 27.6 GW in 2022. The investments in the development of coal-fired power generation were on decline as well: the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that they went down from $43 billion in 2015 to $36 billion in 2019 to $25 billion in 2022. The trend change could be partly due to the increased availability of raw materials in the domestic market caused by the ramping up of investment in domestic coal mining (from $70 billion in 2019 to $96 billion in 2022). An indirect sign of this is that the production of power-generating coal in China rose by an impressive 10.1% (up to 3,723 million tons) in 2022 and by another 1.5% (to 3,780 million tons) in 2023.
In addition to supply growth, this was caused by the spread of clean coal technologies, which makes it easier to obtain permits for new facilities from regulators. This refers to the introduction of the so-called ultra-supercritical TPPs equipped with steam boilers, which operate at a pressure of 320 bar and a temperature of 600–610 degrees Celsius. These conditions provide for higher efficiency of converting thermal energy into electricity: the efficiency of ultra-supercritical TPPs ranges from 44% to 46%, which is higher than the same figure for supercritical thermal power plants (from 37% to 40%), whose steam boilers operate at a pressure of 243 bar and a temperature of no more than 565 degrees. Lagging behind are subcritical TPPs, the efficiency of which hovers below 37%, including due to the difference in the operating conditions of the boilers (pressure under 221 bar and temperature under 550 degrees Celsius).
Ultra-supercritical TPPs account for 32% of China’s existing coal-fired generation facilities and for 93% of those under construction. The higher the efficiency of coal-fired TPPs, the less coal is required to generate a certain amount of electricity and the lower the carbon dioxide emissions. This largely explains why the capacity of coal-fired TPPs, which entered construction in 2023 reached 68.3 GW (which is 1.5 times higher than the capacity of facilities connected to the grid last year).
In addition to China, new coal-fired power generation capacities were launched in countries such as India (5.5 GW), where coal accounts for over 70% of power generation; Indonesia, where a longstanding record was broken in 2022 and 2023 regarding the pace of connecting new coal-fired power plants to the grid (6.1 GW and 5.9 GW, respectively); Vietnam (2.6 GW), which continues to develop its coal-fired power generation despite the recent adoption of an ambitious renewable energy program; Japan (2.5 GW) and South Korea (1 GW), which are among the few OECD countries that continue to build coal-fired power plants; Pakistan (1.7 GW) and Bangladesh (1.9 GW), which would have difficulty in meeting new demand from population increase without coal-fired TPPs; and, finally, Greece (660 MW) and Zimbabwe (335 MW), where the pace of bringing new facilities into operation was the lowest among the countries listed.
Overall, the total capacity of coal-fired TPPs brought into operation worldwide reached 69.5 GW, the highest figure since the pre-Covid year of 2019, when the global capacity stood at 77.7 GW.
