This doesn't mean what you think it does:

- China is also decommissioning older plants.

- These new coal plants aren't running 24x7

- Peak coal usage is likely to be very soon in China (this year even according to some); after that coal usage flatten and start declining; all the way to a planned net zero in the 2060s.

The newer plants are designed to be more efficient, more flexible, and less polluting than the older ones. They are better at starting/stopping quickly/cheaply. Older coal plants used big boilers that had to heat up to build up steam before being able to generate power. This makes stopping and starting a plant slow and expensive. Because they consume a lot of fuel just to get the plant to the stage where it can actually generate power. The more often plants have to be stopped and started, the more wasteful this is. With the newer plants this is less costly and faster.

This makes them more suitable to be used in a non base load operational model where they can be spun up/down on a need to have basis. This is essential in a power grid that is dominated by the hundreds of GW of solar, wind, and battery.

In 2024, well after Covid, 88% of new electric capacity added in China came from renewables.

https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn

Their existing grid uses coal because they have coal, just like the US uses gas because it has gas. And obviously as old coal plants are retired they're going to build new ones. They don't use the new plants for additional capacity. As they add more solar and storage, which they're building a lot of, they're going to absolutely crush the coal burning too. It's literally a national security issue for them.

An EV running half on coal is better than a gasoline car for carbon emissions. A similar story for heat pumps.

China is more electrified than most Western nations and getting more so faster than Europe or the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-as-a-share-of...

As other posters below you have pointed out, it's not as simple as you make it out. You can't just stop building power plants overnight. The population and demands of China are growing and those needs need to be met immediately. There is no simpler, more understood way of rolling out new energy than building coal & gas power plants.

But look at the data. They are building clean energy solutions at a faster rate than any other country on the planet - by a huge margin. Scaling clean energy solutions is what we need, and it has to be done alongside the gradual phase-out of coal and gas.

Coal is a lot cheaper and easier than modern energy sources when your goal is modernizing rural areas. Meanwhile, urban centers are decommissioning old emissive power plants and shifting to renewables. It's a fine way to do green transition and rural development.

As other comments already point out, chinese coal power plants do not always operate under full load. They also decomission older more polluting ones.

Setting that aside, China has also dramatically pushed the electrification of their transportation sector like no one else. Considering BEVs and other electric modes of transport require less primary energy than fossil fuel equivalents, this checks out.