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Datong, ChinaThe sides of the roads surrounding this city in northern China are coated in a thick layer of coal dust. It falls off trucks hauling the black rocks to power plants, steel factories, and chemical plants across the nation. Here in Shanxi, the largest coal-producing province in a country that accounts for half the world’s coal burning, mines have been dug under one-eighth of the land’s surface.

Yet the landscape in Shanxi is changing. Since a 250-acre solar power plant shaped like a panda opened five years ago, the hills around Datong, Shanxi’s coal-mining center, have been blanketed with solar panels. Solar capacity in the province has been expanding at 63 percent per year, wind power at 24 percent. Seemingly everywhere one looks outside Datong there are either mines or expanses of solar panels, sometimes in quick succession.

The striking alternation illustrates Shanxi’s latest role: China has tasked its coal powerhouse with modeling the transition to clean energy. Besides building out clean energy sources—including in particular the infrastructure to use hydrogen as a fuel—the province is supposed to conduct large-scale tests for upgrading factories and power plants and retraining fossil-fuel workers.

In general, it is supposed to figure out, for itself and China, how to rid itself of its reliance on coal.

President Xi Jinping announced last year that China’s coal use would peak by 2025. But so far there is no national roadmap for how to phase it out—even though ending coal burning is essential for meeting the country’s commitment under the Paris Agreement to peak its total carbon emissions by 2030 and to become carbon neutral by 2060. In its latest assessment report, released earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the world must phase out coal completely by 2050 in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Thus a lot is riding, for China and the world, on the success of the pilot project now underway in Shanxi. Local officials, feeling the pressure, whisper about how Beijing expects their offices to make strides on climate goals but offers little oversight or funding.

For all the country’s progress at building out renewables, it seems it has yet to commit to the investments needed to meet its commitment to reduce emissions.

“Shanxi is one of China's most coal-dependent provinces and responsible for the largest increase in CO2 emissions in recent years among Chinese provinces, so I don't think it's realistic for Shanxi to become a model to copy,” says Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst on air pollution and climate at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, an independent research organization with a strong focus on China. “Rather, my hope would be that the province will find a way to peak and decline its own emissions well ahead of the 2030 deadline.”

Over the past 40 years China has built the world’s largest industrial sector and export economy based on power from coal. Chinese officials sometimes call it the economy’s “ballast stone.”

Although in the past few years the country has also become the world’s largest investor in renewable energy, renewables such as wind, solar, and hydropower cumulatively account for only about 28 percent of its electricity generation—and a much smaller percentage of its total energy consumption. Coal still takes the lion’s share, producing more than 60 percent of both electricity and total energy.