- Global Energy Monitor released its annual review of global coal use, saying power generation dropped slightly in 2025.
- While its overall use decreased, the amount of coal-fired power capacity rose by 3.5%, primarily due to new projects in China and India.
- In the EU, nearly 70% of planned retirements of coal plants for 2025 failed to materialize, partly due to concerns over energy disruptions.
- The U.S. was a major outlier, with policy interventions leading to a 13% increase in coal electricity generation.
Coal use across the world continued to drop in 2025, but there was an increase in the capacity to burn it, according to an annual report by data analysis group Global Energy Monitor. Overall power generation from coal declined by 0.6% last year, but the amount that was on call if needed for power grids rose by 3.5%.
Most of that growth was concentrated in China, where additional coal capacity is increasingly considered a backup option to ensure energy security. While China added 78.1 gigawatts of coal power capacity in 2025, its actual use of coal power fell by 1.2%.
This decline was notable as it came amid an overall rise in Chinese energy demand. According to the report, more than 90% of that increased demand was met not with coal, but with wind and solar. While China remains far and away the world’s largest user of coal, more of its energy needs are being met with renewables.
India added the second-highest coal power capacity in 2025, but it also showed movement toward a cleaner grid. Along with record solar and wind power additions, renewables made up more than half of the country’s overall power capacity for the first time.
Christine Shearer, lead researcher of the report on the global coal power fleet, said most of the new coal capacity added in India and China was commissioned years ago, before the market dynamics around renewables had changed.
“By the time all these coal plants began operating in 2025, cheaper alternatives like solar and wind had undercut them in both China and India,” she said. “So, you’re seeing the tail end of an older investment wave arriving into a market that has already moved on. The key question is how quickly policymakers and utilities acknowledge that shift and begin planning around it.”
China still maintains 1,243.3 GW of coal power capacity — more than the rest of the world combined — but renewables make up an increasing share of its overall power makeup. According to Shearer, while coal accounted for 55% of its total electricity generation in 2025, renewables like wind, solar and hydro provided 35%.
But the capacity of “new and reactivated” coal-fired power plants in China reached a record high in 2025, reflecting concerns over the reliability of renewable energy sources even as the country transitions toward increased usage of them.
The report painted a mixed picture of coal reliance across the world, with variations by region. The number of countries either constructing or proposing new coal plants dropped from 38 to 32 in 2025. After Brazil and Honduras pledged to end their use of coal, Latin America now has no new coal power proposals in the works.
The European Union’s steady transition away from coal is also continuing. Last year, coal represented only 10% of the bloc’s total power capacity, down from 30% in 2000, and for the first time more electricity was generated by wind and solar than by fossil fuels.
However, close to 70% of planned coal power plant retirements in the EU scheduled for 2025 failed to materialize, reflecting a broader global trend. Disruptions in energy markets caused first by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran have made some governments hesitate to get rid of their coal capacity, fearing that it could be needed in case of fuel shortages.
Shearer said the overall impact of higher prices for coal and other fossil fuels caused by the war in Iran will be to spur greater adoption of renewables.
“The crisis is reinforcing the underlying lesson that dependence on internationally traded fossil fuels creates economic and geopolitical vulnerability. That is likely to accelerate investment in renewables over the longer term,” she said.
While coal usage dropped at the global scale, a major outlier was the United States, which saw coal electricity generation rise by 13%. The U.S. was the only major economy to post an increase in coal usage — a direct result of policy intervention by the Trump administration and part of its larger rollback of clean energy incentives.
In 2025, the U.S. federal government ordered five coal plants in four states to continue operating despite plans to retire them. More than $600 million in public funds were directed toward modernizing and extending the life of coal facilities in the U.S., a decision the report said is contributing to rising household electricity prices.
Outside of China and India, proposed coal projects in 2025 were often for “captive” plants to power industrial activities like mining or minerals processing. In Indonesia, captive coal capacity rose to 20 GW last year, primarily to service the nickel and aluminum industries, and an additional 14 GW is currently in the development pipeline.
While African nations overall represent a tiny fraction of global coal usage, Zimbabwe and Zambia announced a combined 5.2 GW of new planned coal capacity, primarily intended to power their mining industries.
Overall, Zimbabwe has the fourth-largest amount of coal capacity under development in the world, at 8.6 GW.
“Both governments, when it comes to industry, have a very agnostic approach to the type of energy they’re using,” said Kudakwashe Manjojo, just transition adviser at the Kenya-based climate and energy think tank Power Shift Africa. “So basically, any energy is good energy.”
Zimbabwe is one of the world’s top lithium producers. Manjojo said it’s ironic that as it exports material for renewable energy sources, it’s forced to use coal for its own industrial activities. While climate-related drought has reduced the amount of hydropower available to Zimbabwe, he said the increased production at Chinese-owned coal mines is a bigger factor in the country’s use of the fossil fuel for electricity generation.
“About four or five years ago, China said it wouldn’t be building new coal mines in Africa, but that didn’t negate them increasing production in the already existing coal mines,” he said.
In the long run, Manjojo said he worries the reliance on coal will become a constraint for Zimbabwe.
“Coal is dying, oil and gas are dying, we all know renewable energy is cheaper, but [coal-mining] towns will become sacrifice zones for the transition, and that will be dangerous,” he said.
Banner image: The Mill Creek coal-fired power plant in the U.S. state of Kentucky is owned and operated by Louisville Gas & Electric. Image by Willian Alden via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Credits
