It's impossible, until it happens.

Two weeks ago the Guardian ran a story that had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief. In the first five months of 2025, China had added 198 Gigawatts (GW) of solar electric capacity and 46 (GW) of wind. That’s 244 GW in total, as you might have already worked out in your head.

Victoria’s largest coal-fired power station, Loy Yang A, has a capacity of 2.2GW, while the total capacity of the state’s three coal-fired stations is under 5 GW. In other words, China, in five months, added renewable energy capacity equal to 48 times Victoria’s coal-fired stations.

But wait. This is not quite as amazing as it seems, because wind and solar have a lower capacity factor than coal. The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. But anytime is a good time to burn some fossil fuels. But even if wind and solar have a capacity factor only one quarter that of coal, China still added 12 times as much real capacity in five months as Victoria’s coal-fired stations.

But wait. China has about 200 times more people than Victoria, so of course they’re adding more renewables than we are. But let’s do the sums. If China added 12 times our coal-fired capacity in five months, then in about eight years they could have completely replaced our coal-fired stations, allowing for the great difference in our population.

So, if China could do this in eight years why are we still even talking about whether we can “afford renewables”?

I first remember serious public debate about global warming in 1988. Having grown up near the La Trobe Valley’s infinite supplies of brown coal, the news disheartened me. That coal provided family members with well-paying jobs. And now we were meant to just leave it in the ground? But, as the seriousness of the issue sank in, I let go of the idea of endless coal and thought that saving the planet instead would be a good idea.

Since 1988, when the alarm started sounding, annual global emissions of greenhouse gases have increased from 36.64 billion tonnes to 53.33 billion tonnes. As China has just shown us, in that time we might have replaced all of our coal-fired power stations four or five times over instead of driving the Earth to catastrophe.

Let’s all think about roads not taken and of things being impossible until they’re not.