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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: February 27th, 2024
  • doubtingtammy@lemmy.mltoClimate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.@slrpnk.net•China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing.
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    3 months ago

    While this buildout was driven by Indonesian leaders, and Japan and South Korea have provided significant financing, too, no foreign nation has played a larger role than China.

    “China is a good friend for all the presidents to fulfill their campaign promises,” said Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat, director of the China-Indonesia desk at the Center of Economic and Law Studies, a research and advocacy group in Indonesia. Where lenders from other countries have pledged money without delivering, Rakhmat said, Chinese enterprises provided financing quickly and with few requirements.

    Today, Chinese companies are continuing to build new coal plants in Indonesia, despite a 2021 pledge by China’s president, Xi Jinping, that Beijing would end such financing.

    In an ironic twist, many of the new Chinese-backed coal plants are powering operations that Indonesian leaders say will help transition the world to cleaner energy. These so-called “captive” coal plants are not connected to the grid but instead serve as dedicated power sources for new industrial parks refining nickel, used in electric vehicle batteries, or manufacturing solar panel components. The projects are backed largely by private Chinese companies rather than state-owned enterprises, and their status as captive power plants appears to allow them to flow through a loophole in Xi’s 2021 pledge.

    Beyond these captive plants in Indonesia, China has largely stuck to that promise—only a few other Chinese-backed coal units were newly planned last year, in Kyrgyzstan, Zambia and Zimbabwe, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, an independent research group based in Finland.\

    It’s a good article. You should read it instead of just assuming it confirms all your anti-china bias. Don’t get me wrong, I think building new coal plants is bad even if it’s for nickle that goes into an electric car. IMO the CPC should stop private capital from investing in those “captive” plants as well.