A former professor of mine writes, regarding the popular notion that “China is building a new coal power plant every week” (see here and here). He turns to the China Energy Databook (available for free on CD from these kind people): in 2006, China added 92.44GW of Thermal Electric capacity. Assuming this was all coal, and that each coal-fired plant produced 500MW, the weekly average would be approximately 1.78GW (1.78GW / .5GW) = 3.56 500MW power plants opening per week on average (thanks to WP). 

Three and a half power plants a week – where are all of these? I’ve not seen any under construction. There is a lot of construction, especially for somewhere that is supposed to have a real estate bubble. 

It will be interesting to see how the numbers continue through this year, given that electricity demand has actually been falling in recent months. Certainly there are expectations of 8-9% growth built into things like capital investment – expect a lot of good deals on apartments / office space in the coming year.