China’s leader Xi Jinping announced at the United Nations General Assembly late last month that the country would be carbon neutral, or zero net carbon emissions, by 2060. Energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie said Thursday that China may need to invest more than $5 trillion to reach that goal.
The firm estimates that China would need to increase its solar, wind and storage capacity 11 times over this year’s levels to exceed 5 trillion watts by 2050 in order to reach that goal. Not only that, but China would need to halve its coal-fired power generation by then, and gas-fired power generation would need to be the same as last year.
Still, an analyst at the institute said, the biggest challenge facing the Chinese government is not the huge investment or the dramatic increase in renewable energy generation capacity, but the social transformation that will result.
He said that halving coal-fired generation would result in the disappearance of a large number of coal mining jobs, which would affect provinces that rely on coal mines for income generation and entrepreneurship.
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