Oct 19, 2026
Jim Warren is a recovering academic as retired adjunct professor and lecturer in environmental sociology at the University of Regina.
Solar panels. Storyblocks image.
 
When debating with emissions cutting environmental zealots, fans of fossil fuels frequently use China as a bad example to compare against Canadian emissions. Canada’s 1.5 percent share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions pales in comparison with the CO2 belched from China’s huge fleet of coal-fired electrical power plants.
In 2023, China generated 13.260 billion tonnes of CO2 making it the world’s largest emitter accounting for 34 percent of global emissions. Canada emitted just 575 million tonnes of CO2 in 2023. That’s 23 times less than China.
Canada doesn’t even make the top 10 list for emitters. First place China is followed by the US with 4.78 billion tonnes. Our one-half billion tonnes puts us way back in 12^th place.
The environmentally virtuous are irritated that supporters of conventional energy use China as a handy whipping-boy. They believe China has provided the friends of oil with an excuse for not getting on the green transition bandwagon. Our counterargument goes like this: “Our emissions are extremely low when compared with China’s, even if we cut them in half tomorrow it wouldn’t make much of a dent in climate change.”
 
Late this summer climate crusaders were taking a victory lap. They claimed China’s capacity to produce electricity using solar energy has exceeded the capacity of its coal-fired electrical generating plants. Therefore China’s role, as an excuse for our lack of emissions cutting enthusiasm, has presumably come to an end.
Not so fast tree huggers. It turns out that China’s alleged solar success is a statistical trick—a mirage based on a misleading interpretation of what “power generating capacity” means in relation to actual production.
It is possible that some environmentalists and climate crusaders were misled into thinking solar power had passed coal given a Reuters headline that ran on September 1 that reads: “Solar overtakes coal as China’s largest source of power capacity.”
The South China Morning Post ran a similar headline on September 2, “Beyond Coal: China’s installed solar capacity crosses historic threshold.” Albeit the following story includes a qualifying line of fine print stating it will require a multi-trillion yuan investment to actually make all that solar work. But, the article fails to explain why this is the case.
Climate crusaders want people to believe a solar generating installation’s nameplate capacity is the same thing as the total amount of electricity it produces in a given period.
According to climate alarmist math, if the total nameplate “capacity” of  China’s entire inventory of solar power generating installations is X, it means China is generating X times 365.25 days’ worth of solar power.
 
The calculation is faulty because it assumes that solar generating stations operate 24/7. It assumes the systems work in the dark of night. The total is additionally incorrect because it fails to account for China’s grid management problems.
A story identifying the calculation errors/deceptions being made by environmentalists and environmentally-sympathetic journalists appeared last week in the online weekly newsletter published by the Corporate Knights organization. According to the article, China’s electrical grid lacks the system switching technology and battery storage capacity required to balance the ups and downs of on-and-off-again solar and wind power generation. As noted, solar stations don’t produce at night. Similarly wind farms don’t produce when the wind doesn’t blow, and the windmills have to be shut down when winds become too strong. Renewables simply do not provided steady and reliable electricity on a year round 24/7 basis.
According to Corporate Knights, during the first six months of 2026 this meant that over one-quarter of China’s wind and solar power facilities went unused. That translates to 360 terawatt-hours of potential wind and solar power which could not be plugged into the grid. The amount of power that went unused in just six months is more “than the U.K.’s entire electricity use last year.”
The reality is that coal is still king in the competition with solar power. China’s coal-fired electrical generating plants beat solar power by miles. The burning of coal accounts for nearly 50 percent of the electricity consumed in China. Less than 13 percent of the electricity consumed in China is produced using solar power.
 
We’ve seen this before
Remember back in the 2010s when central planners from China’s Communist government decided China was in need of a housing boom? There were huge incentives for municipalities that facilitated new construction and easy credit was made available to real estate developers.
There was indeed a national housing shortage, but the problem was largely limited to China’s large fast-growing cities. Nevertheless, the incentive programs were extended to mid-sized communities on the Tibetan plateau and to entire new cities created by developers in locations that included the wilds of the Gobi Desert.
Thousands of apartment buildings that were built in places nobody wants to live have sat empty for years. The busted boom left a legacy of massive financial losses and a fiscal crisis for the government. Clearly, the builders had overbuilt.
We don’t know if the Communist government central planners who launched the real estate boom still have their jobs. However, Hui Ka Yan, founder of Evergrande, a bankrupt company that was formerly China’s biggest real estate development business, was sentenced to life in prison in 2025 for doing what the government told him to do.
Obviously, the planners did the same thing when it came to adopting green energy. The overbuilding of solar and wind facilities means the wasting of approximately 720 terawatts of potential electrical power annually. Presumably the losses will decline in conjunction with improved grid management and battery storage technology. But how long will that take? And what will be the condition of solar and wind installations that have gone unused for what may be decades?
 
One of the takeaways for supporters of conventional energy production on the Prairies is that we’ve been correct to suspect that climate crusaders will knowingly or unknowingly make use of weakly supported claims to attack conventional energy. The Chinese solar capacity fantasy is similarly employed in their assault on emissions. The misinformation has already appeared in analysts assessments of the crude oil supply shortfall caused by the US war with Iran.
There are energy market analysts who claim that one of the principal reasons the world prices for crude has not yet risen to the $120 per barrel range is because China has been able to reduce its crude imports by 40 percent. Some of oil’s environmentally-friendly detractors have claimed that China’s recently increased solar and wind power electrical generation has helped make its reduction in crude imports possible. That might be correct were it not for the fact China is unable to plug its unused solar and wind potential into the power grid.
China has been able to reduce its imports because it had large oil reserves in place prior to the war in the Persian Gulf and also because it has been able to amp up its coal-fired electrical production capacity.
The claim that Chinese renewables have saved us from higher gas and diesel prices contributes to another bit of mythical hyperbole—the claim that wind and solar are supporting permanent demand destruction for crude oil. That argument doesn’t ring true given the time and expense required to build wind, solar or nuclear capacity. An additional challenge would be the electrification of enough of the country’s electrical vehicle fleet to significantly reduce long-term demand for oil in the short-term.
No less challenging is trying to sort out what is actually happening with energy production in a country like China which is liable to fudge the numbers. It is difficult to put much faith in the data supplied by a country that jails journalists for writing reports that embarrass the government.
 
Editor’s note: SaskPower’s system map webpage lists 30 megawatts of grid-scale nameplate solar capacity for this province. SaskPower’s Where Your Power Comes From webpage shows the 24 hour average output for each type of power generation. On Oct. 7, a very sunny day in southern Saskatchewan, that average was 13 megawatts. If you go to X account @SkElectricity, you can find a log of these reports, including a regular summary on “Solar Saturday” of solar output. Here’s Sept 5 edition. It shows a solar capacity factor over the last year of 22.5 per cent.
Solar Saturday 🌞
(Only grid-scale facilities, not self-gen solar) pic.twitter.com/raxIhoEO3b
— Saskatchewan Electricity Mix (@SkElectricity) September 5, 2026

 
 
 
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