To put things into perspective, China gets half its energy from coal, and about 10% from natgas (increasing to 15% by 2030) and about 20% from oil. China is rapidly increasing natgas use, primarily by building out new pipelines to get more natgas from Russia.
China is also increasing oil consumption as well as exploration, particularly starting with the 14th 5 year plan as well as a special seven year action plan to increase oil production, doing deep water drilling, unconventional (e.g. fracking) drilling as well as a massive shale oil boom. Over the course of that 5 year plan, China discovered more than 225 oil fields and oil production increased from 3.8 million barrels per day to 4.6 mbpd as a result of a ~500 billion CNY investment to increase production. Still China imports about 10 mbpd, so it has developed a massive 1.5 billion barrel strategic reserve, which allows China to weather disruptions in global oil supply even as it races to increase domestic production.
And China is also investing in battery capacity, with installed capacity now at 140 GW or 5% of their energy usage.
The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand. Both coal and natgas are reliable forms of energy and are unaffected by battery capacity; you need batteries for unreliable energy such as wind or solar so that you can turn the variable output into something stable that a grid can consume.
[–] tialaramex 16 hours ago
[–] lazide 15 hours ago
Contaminants in the coal (due to it being a solid mineral) also means it burns with a lot often toxic ash that is hard to deal with.
On the plus side, you can often literally use an excavator to dig it up and put it in the back of a train and then burn it with minimal other capital equipment.
It all makes sense.
[–] pixl97 14 hours ago
That might be understating the issue. The excavators we use to dig coal have been, and are monstrous. Thousand ton beasts requiring a fleet of support vehicles around them and the ever increasing depth of overburden.
Also the fly ash leftovers tend to get piled up and occasionally break lose in human and ecological disasters at massive scales.
[–] tialaramex 13 hours ago
This is the same kind of scale as those fictional "Spice Harvesters" in Dune. Look around for a photo where there's a person or a familiar object you know the size of in the same frame as the Bagger 288
[–] lazide 11 hours ago
You can try it yourself - you can literally harvest/mine coal with a shovel yourself in many areas, and burn it in a fireplace if you don’t mind how dirty it is.
[–] jmyeet 15 hours ago
There has been an uptick in coal this year to replace oil imports, which have fallen off a cliff because of the Iran war [2]. The real story of 2026 is how China essentially saved the world economy by doing this [3].
China is dependent on oil and gas imports but clearly sees the writing on the wall. All of these projects are an effort to wean themselves off of oil. So is a lot of domestic policy like the electrification of vehicles. This has had a global impact, reducing global oil demand by almost 2% in the last 5 years [4].
I agree with you on your point that I don't see the connection between batteries and gas vs coal either. If anything, batteries are to stabilize energy demands when the Sun is down.
[1]: https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...
[2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/crude-oil-imports
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/10/china-crude-oil-iran-hormuz-...
[4]: https://www.intellinews.com/china-led-ev-boom-cuts-global-oi...
[–] tialaramex 14 hours ago
Because spinning a coal plant up or down is slower, the batteries let you make the gradient more gentle.
Suppose Alice's gas plant can go from 100MW output to zero in ten minutes. So if Sam's solar farm goes from zero to 100MW over ten minutes in early morning Alice's plant can mirror, between them Alice and Sam produce 100MW of power smoothly. Obviously real life is more complicated but this gets the point across
Now, Charlie owns a coal power plant, it can ramp from 100MW to zero, but it takes about an hour. This doesn't directly mirror the solar farm, Charlie and Sam can't really just work together to smoothly produce the same power
Bill's 100MWh BESS fixes this. An hour before the sun comes up, Charlie's coal plant begins shutting down, Bill's BESS puts out 100MW while consuming the gradually reducing coal power output and some of the gradually increasing additional power from the solar farm as that increases.
[–] carefree-bob 13 hours ago
This is true only in the sense that fossil fuels, as a percentage of total energy consumption, are stable or in slight decline. That is because total energy consumption is rapidly increasing, specifically as new forms of energy are added to the mix.
Fossil fuels in absolute terms are, however, increasing.
China is burning more coal today than ever before. Coal use is going up. Coal use as a percentage of total energy is going down.
China is burning more oil and natgas than ever before. It is increasing. But as a percentage of total energy, it is decreasing.
This also matches China's CO2 targets. China's plan is not to decrease CO2 emissions, those emissions will keep increasing. The targets are to decrease the emissions required to generate a dollar of GDP. By 2060, they want the ratio of emissions to GDP to be 60% lower than it was in 2020. If you look at historical trendlines, that is an easy target to meet, just with improvements in technology and energy efficiency, particularly when you are starting from such a high base. But people look at that goal and think that China wants to cut emissions by 60%. GDP in 2060 will be 10x what the GDP was in 2020, so a 60% cut in that ratio is still a 400% increase in total emissions. Everything is measured in terms of ratios, not absolute numbers. Ratios where the base is always rapidly growing.
This confuses a lot of people who see that the ratio of fossil fuel in the entire energy mix is decreasing, and think this means that actual fossil fuel use is decreasing. The charts, report, graphs that people cite, if you look carefully, are always ratios. Ratios with the denominator growing as the denominator is something tied to GDP, whether total output or total energy output.
It's more accurate to say that there are limits to how much additional fossil fuel capacity China can bring online, as these are mature industries, whereas nuclear, solar, etc, are young industries and there is a lot of capacity to bring online since you are starting from a low base. China's approach to energy is always "we want more of it, of any kind." The only reason that China's oil production is not increasing by 10% per year is because it's not possible for China to increase oil production that quickly. Same for coal. China is increasing all forms of energy as fast as possible.
[–] tialaramex 13 hours ago
In terms of electricity production, that does not seem to be the case
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
It's possible that China's metallurgical coal burning increased so much that it offsets power generation decline, but I wouldn't expect so.
> China is increasing all forms of energy as fast as possible.
This does not match the observed reality.
[–] rini17 12 hours ago
Observed by whom? For example this shows no change in overall trend.
[–] tialaramex 12 hours ago
[–] carefree-bob 7 hours ago
Here is longer term data also: https://www.worldometers.info/coal/china-coal/#history
China is using more coal than ever before. But it's not monotone up, there is such a thing as a business cycle as well as global commodity price swings that add noise. Certainly when there is a contraction in manufacturing or high coal prices, firms will substitute away to other goods, or similarly when we have the oil shortages now, you can bet that coal use is increasing to compensate.
But despite all that there is a marked upward trend.
> This does not match the observed reality.
It matches the observed reality, yes. China spent half a billion Yuan to increase oil production, which it did. China increased coal production. China increased nuclear production. China increased wind and solar.
Name one form of energy that China is not increasing?
[–] tialaramex 5 hours ago
But it turns out by "today" you meant not literally today, or this month, or even as perhaps we might anticipate this year, but decade or so.
Decades is completely the wrong scale in this conversation. You won't be able to see anything until it's too late to matter.
[–] maxglute 6 hours ago
Literally coal considering latest data, i.e. not historic data that caps at 2024. 2025 potential tipping point, total coal generation TWh down in absolute terms, during record export year. 2026 on trend for another ~1% YoY decline. Peaking coal for energy generation part of 2026-2030 15th 5Y plan, we're in the _planned_ plateau phase, and decline after. Of course planned / projected, but we're edging to 2 consecutive years of declining absolute coal generation. Full trend is line goes up suddenly stops. Now to be completely fair, there was 2 years of coal decline 10 years ago when PRC was fighting war on pollution and stalled a bunch of factories and shuttered coal plants i.e. total electric generation stalled. Current structure shift from construction (less steel / less concrete), but total electric generation also growing.
That's just for power generation, you're right coal use set to increase for petchem, i.e. replace oil for industrial inputs since coal feedstock cheaper than oil at current prices. But in terms of energy, coal is not increasing despite new coal infra is increasing to more efficiently use coal for peaking instead of baseload. You're also right PRC doesn't "hate" coal, I mean it would probably love to have ample cheap oil/ng, but unlimited coal is good consolation / contingency at least until renewable share becomes dominant. PRC loves domestic coal for energy security, but not enough to burn it forever especially when the economics don't make sense, but enough to have insurance infra to burn in ample amounts just in case.
In thermal electricity plants it takes a lot longer to go from cold & dark to generating electricity with coal than with either Combined-Cycle gas or especially the Open-Cycle "peaker" gas plants. Both types of gas plant also AIUI have a lot better ability to "throttle" their power output.
This means if you have a bunch of CCGT like Britain, you can use those directly to "top-up" the power from your fleet of solar PV and wind turbines, whether that's 1GW of top-up or 20GW of top-up. The change from weather (sun goes down, wind picks up, clouds appear, etc.) is relatively slow compared to what a gas plant can do, whereas it's too fast for coal to keep up as I understand it.