Two headlines ran in 2026, and both were accurate:
- Coal plant construction hits near-record high
- Coal-fired generation falls
They describe the same year. They are not in tension, and the reason they are not is worth understanding, because capacity and generation are different quantities and treating them as interchangeable produces confident, wrong conclusions in both directions.
Global Energy Monitor's own summary puts it plainly:
In 2025, the world built more coal and used it less. New coal power capacity additions increased by 3.5% to reach one of the highest levels on record, even as coal-fired electricity generation declined by 0.6%.
Source: Global Energy Monitor, Boom and Bust Coal 2026, published May 2026.
The 2025 figures
| Metric | 2025 value |
|---|---|
| Coal capacity commissioned globally | 97.4 GW (second-highest on record) |
| — China | 78.1 GW (decade high) |
| — India | 10 GW |
| — Rest of world | 9.2 GW |
| Capacity under development, end-2025 | 710 GW (up 12% from 633 GW in 2024) |
| Change in capacity additions vs 2024 | +3.5% |
| Change in coal-fired generation | −0.6% |
All figures from Global Energy Monitor, Boom and Bust Coal 2026. The report is authored by GEM with 20+ partner organisations; no open licence is stated on the report page, so quote and attribute rather than redistribute.
Why both can move in opposite directions
Capacity is what is installed. Generation is what is produced. The bridge between them is the capacity factor — the fraction of its theoretical maximum output a plant actually delivers over a year.
If capacity rises 3.5% while generation falls 0.6%, the average capacity factor of the global coal fleet has fallen. New plants are being commissioned into systems where something else is meeting the marginal demand.
GEM identifies where this is happening:
This gap was particularly pronounced in China and India, where wind and solar met most or all new demand, driving down coal generation even as coal plant commissioning reached decade highs.
So the mechanism is not that coal plants are being built and left idle out of miscalculation. It is that new coal is increasingly being added to systems where renewables take the incremental demand, which pushes the coal fleet toward a balancing and peaking role rather than baseload.
What this means for how the fleet runs
This is the part that matters to anyone specifying equipment for these plants, and it is the reason a conveyor manufacturer is looking at this dataset at all.
A coal plant designed for baseload runs its fuel handling near-continuously at a stable rate. A plant that has moved toward balancing duty does something different: longer idle periods, then ramps, then sustained full-rate running, repeated. The tonnage over a year may be lower while the duty on the handling system becomes harsher in specific ways.
For coal handling conveyors that shift has practical consequences:
- Start-stop cycles increase. Every start puts peak tension through the belt and the drive. A system that starts twice a day and one that starts twenty times has very different fatigue exposure at the same annual tonnage.
- Idle time is not free. Belts sitting loaded or partially loaded, material left in transfer chutes, and standing water all cause problems that continuous running does not.
- Peak rate does not fall with utilisation. A plant running fewer hours still needs to fill its bunkers quickly when it does run. Sizing the handling system on average annual tonnage rather than peak instantaneous rate is a design error that this shift makes easier to commit.
None of this is an argument about energy policy. It is the observation that a fleet whose capacity factor is falling is not the same engineering problem as a fleet running flat out, even where the annual tonnage looks similar. Belt tension calculations should be run against the real duty cycle — our belt tension calculator covers the steady-state case, and starting conditions need to be checked separately.
If you are citing coal figures
The same discipline the cement emissions data needed applies here:
- Say whether you mean capacity or generation. They moved in opposite directions in 2025. A claim about "coal growth" is ambiguous until this is specified.
- Distinguish the pipeline stages. Announced, permitted, under construction and operating are four different numbers. The 710 GW "under development" figure is a pipeline, not installed plant, and a substantial share of pipelines historically never gets built.
- Give the year and the report vintage. GEM publishes annually; figures move materially year to year.
- Attribute to the tracker, not to a news article about it. The Global Coal Plant Tracker is the underlying dataset; press coverage frequently compresses the capacity/generation distinction that the report itself is careful about.
What we did not verify
- Total global operating coal capacity. A figure of 2,175 GW, up 259 GW since 2015, appears in secondary coverage. We did not confirm it against the tracker itself, so it is not presented as established here.
- 2025 retirements. GEM notes a slowdown in retirements but the report page we consulted did not give a 2025 retirement figure, so no net-change calculation is offered.
- Capacity factor values. We infer that the average capacity factor fell, because that follows arithmetically from capacity rising while generation falls. We have not sourced a published global coal capacity-factor series and are not quoting one.
If you have the primary figures for any of these, send them over and we will update with attribution.
Sources
- Global Energy Monitor (May 2026). Boom and Bust Coal 2026 — all 2025 capacity and generation figures quoted above.
- Global Energy Monitor, Global Coal Plant Tracker — the underlying unit-level dataset behind the report.
Figures as published in the 2026 report edition covering calendar year 2025. Corrections welcome.
Related engineering reading: Coal Mining Conveyor Belts: Complete Selection Guide covers belt selection for surface, underground and prep-plant duty, including the FRAS and MSHA requirements that apply underground.
