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WIREs Energy Environ.

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Coal power in China: A multi‐level perspective review

Advanced Review

Haonan Zhang, Xingping Zhang, Jiahai Yuan

Published Online: Jul 20 2020

DOI: 10.1002/wene.386

Full article on Wiley Online Library: HTML PDF

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Abstract China's coal‐fired power industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation. From a historical perspective, we conducted a comprehensive assessment of the coal power sector in China, to understand the cause of the transition and where its future lies. Through the interactions among landscape, regime and niches, China's coal‐fired power industry has developed cleaner and more efficient, which positively mitigated the local pollution. Yet the decarbonization in the power sector is unsatisfactory. Due to its dominating role and nature of high‐carbon emitting, the coal power sector has always been a big challenge during China's climate actions. Although the goal of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 demonstrates China's ambitions, expanding coal‐fired power generation capacity hinders climate change mitigation and low‐carbon transition. In this regard, we discuss the guidelines for the future high‐quality coal‐fired power development to provide recommendations for policy‐makers and industry stakeholders. China's coal power sector should commit to the vision of deep decarbonization by 2050. This article is categorized under: Energy and Climate > Economics and Policy Fossil Fuels > Climate and Environment Energy Policy and Planning > Climate and Environment

Dynamical framework of the multi‐level perspective

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Fossil power generation and pollutant emissions in China, 2000–2016

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Coal consumption of coal‐fired power supply in China

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Proportion of coal‐fired power generation units with different size in China

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Power installed capacity in China, 1949–2018

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Growth alignment of economy and electricity consumption

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