Picture coal production and most people would think of power plants in either U.S. or India. The U.S. has had a long-standing reputation since it’s the country burned more coal than anybody else for most of the 20th century, an era that’s basically shaped the history of America’s power grid. India is also thought of pretty often since it’s enormous, growing fast, and known for leaning on the stuff. However, neither country burns the most coal in the world right now.

According to Global Energy MonitorChina is actually the country with the biggest coal habit in the world, running running roughly 1,195 coal-fired power stations as of July 2025. To put things into perspective, that’s more than four times India’s total. Counting buildings only paints part of the picture, though, since Chinese plants also skew large. At any given moment, China’s coal fleet can generate around 1,194 gigawatts of electricity, five times America’s capacity. India also has more capacity than the U.S., at roughly 250 gigawatts, which rounds out the top three. Behind them sit Japan, South Korea, Russia, Germany, and Poland, each of which has genuinely large coal fleets. China hasn’t always led this list, though. Its lead was reportedly built across the 2000s and 2010s. In comparison, coal generation in U.S. peaked in 2007 and began tapering off afterward. Since then it’s fallen by two thirds.

China’s electricity demand arguably shot up too quickly for its own good, fueled by rapid urban growth. Over the decade up to 2025, its electricity demand roughly doubled, reaching about a third of the world’s total. Coal power plants ended up doing most of the heavy lifting — they’re cheap to build, and they tend to get approved pretty quickly. One of the fastest periods of coal production growth in recent times came after the winter of 2021. It was particularly hard, with shortages badly rattling Beijing and factories in parts of China even going dark temporarily. Provincial officials responded by waving through new coal projects at a pace of roughly two plants every single week across 2022 and 2023.

If China continues its reliance on coal for the foreseeable future, it’ll have plenty of fuel left to burn too. The country sits on roughly 173 billion tons of proven coal reserves, the third-largest reserve on the planet. Proven here means that geologists have confirmed that the coal is down there and that pulling it out makes financial sense. At the rate China was mining in 2023, that works out to something like 36 years of supply. Researchers at Shenzhen University are separately chasing a coal battery that could ease the world’s current fuel crisis, pulling electricity out of coal through electrochemistry. Sitting on that much fuel makes new plants very easy to justify. China closed out 2025 with more than 500 gigawatts of coal capacity either proposed, permitted, or already under construction.