Authors: Jiong Chen, Fuqiang Yang

The blog is only available in Chinese. For the Chinese version, please click the "中文" button in the upper right-hand corner. The main points are summarized below: 

• The Thirteenth Five Year Plan for Energy Development, approved by the National Energy Committee on November 17, 2016, establishes five mandatory targets for 2020: reducing the share of coal in total energy consumption to 58% or below, increasing the share of non-fossil energy in total energy consumption to 15%, reducing energy intensity (energy consumed per unit GDP) by 15%, reducing the coal consumption for coal power plants to 310 grams of standard coal equivalent per kilo-watt hour provided, and reducing carbon intensity by 18%.

• This is the first time that an energy development five-year plan has set a mandatory control target for coal's share in energy consumption. Like the non-fossil target, the 58% target for reducing coal's share of total energy consumption has great importance. 

• Under the 58% control target, if total energy consumption in 2020 is 4.8 billion tons of coal equivalent, coal consumption will be capped at 3.9 billion tons; this is equivalent to the coal cap project’s reference scenario. If total energy consumption is kept to 4.58 billion tons of coal equivalent, as recommended by the coal cap project, coal consumption will be capped at 3.7 billion tons. And if coal’s share of total energy consumption is reduced to 55%, as recommended by the coal cap project, coal consumption can be further limited to 3.5 billion tons.

• The Energy Development plan also sets a target to reduce the coal consumed to provide a kilowatt hour from 316 grams of standard coal equivalent in 2015 to 310 grams in 2020. It is also important that coal power capacity be limited to 990 GW by 2020, from 900 GW in 2015, in order to cap coal consumption in the power sector at 1.33 billion tons of coal equivalent, or 53% of total coal consumption under the coal cap scenario.