And some countries in the European Union are considering keeping coal and oil-burning plants open past their closure dates to avoid similar power cuts. Last month, the UK fired up an old coal plant to meet electricity demands. In the face of this crisis, European leaders are signaling that fossil fuels are hard to quit. But its flurry of coal plant building and increased production makes that even harder a goal to imagine.Ĭhina is not alone. It has since come under pressure, however, to do more to wind down coal at home.Ĭhina has said it plans to peak its emissions sometime before 2030, and hit carbon neutrality by 2060. But as the crisis grows and global demand for Chinese goods soars, Beijing switched tack, telling coal miners to add a whopping 100 million metric tons to production, state media reported Thursday.Ĭhina was already powering its economic return with dozens of new coal plants, but the more recent increase in production is a problem for COP26 - China was just starting to show signs it was ready to play a part in putting an end date on the fossil fuel.Ĭhinese President Xi Jinping announced just two weeks ago that his country would stop financing coal projects abroad, removing the world’s biggest financial backer of fossil fuel internationally. Some provinces experienced blackouts in homes as supplies were cut. That has only added to the power shortage in the country.Ĭhinese officials told companies in the country’s industrial heartlands last month to limit energy consumption to reduce demand for power, state media reported. Gazprom denied the accusation to CNN last month, but on Thursday, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said explicitly that gas prices would cool if Berlin certified the project.Ĭhinese authorities have kept mountains of coal imported from Australia sitting at docks for months, refusing to show Australia it is willing to take its exports as the two countries remain cold over Canberra’s calls for an investigation into the origins of Covid-19. On top of that, Russia has been accused of slowing gas supplies to Europe to encourage a faster approval process for its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that runs under the Baltic Sea to Germany. In China, lower rainfall meant less energy from the country’s hydropower plants. Power from renewables has been below expectations - in the UK and continental Europe, the summer was less windy than usual, so wind power under-delivered. There are several reasons for the energy crunch, beyond the rebound from the pandemic. Throwing more money at fossil fuels is not a solution, she said, and some short-term solutions are contradictory to longer-term sustainable goals.Ī better response would be to “turbocharge” funding for deploying renewable and energy efficiency programs, including getting infrastructure projects that were hampered by the pandemic, off the ground.Īnd there entails the dichotomy of the crisis - the world can either “turbocharge” efforts in renewables, or slow it down, and lean more on fossil fuels, as is happening now. “A lot of decision-makers are sort of panicking in some ways about the social response,” said Lisa Fischer, program leader at the European climate think tank E3G. The infrastructure that exists to harness energy from renewables like wind and solar simply isn’t enough to meet demand. With winter fast approaching and the global economy rebounding from the Covid-19 pandemic faster than the world had prepared for, governments are being forced to reach for sources of energy that are readily available. “The worry with China’s power crunch is that it appears to be strengthening the argument of pro-coal interests there that the transition to renewables is happening too fast,” said Christine Shearer, Global Energy Monitor’s program director for coal, which tracks the use of fossil fuels around the world. Momentum was building for putting an end date on coal and speeding up the global transition from climate-altering fossil fuels to renewables before the crisis hit.īut a rush back to fossil fuels is worrying some experts that this moment in time could slow down that transition, particularly on the phaseout of coal, now in closer reach than at any other time in history. In just three weeks, leaders and negotiators will meet for the COP26 international climate talks in the Scottish city of Glasgow.