China on Course To Hit Wind and Solar Power Target Five Years Ahead of Time - Sl...

Posted by msmash

• ›

  If they had to entertain half the population pretending that global warming doesn't exist, they'd be as dead in the water as the rest of us.

  • Re:

    population isn't the problem in the west. worst case they'll decide to vote one discourse with a fancy green promise over another, but that's not really relevant because it's just that, a discourse, whoever gets voted will discreetly keep paying tribute to elites and their corps. which are the problem.

    in this case it's the ccp's grip on the elites, not on the population, which makes the difference. other than that they're also way more efficient at building and manufacturing overall.

  • Re:

    Germany is Democratic and they have invested heavily:

    https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]

• I'm amazed they find the time with the breakneck speed which they're rolling out new coal fired power plants.

  • Re: Right after...

    Source?

    • • Re: Right after...

        Scroll down to the key findings. They are adding coal to areas that already has overcapacity. Essentially building ghost powerplants for their ghost towns.

  • Nuclear too

    Coal and nuclear are both effective backups to the intermittency of VG (variable generation) sources like solar and wind. At least they know what they are doing.
    
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]

    • Re:

      Well they're "effective" in that they do work but coal pollutes a lot and nuclear is expensive to idle when there is wind, so neither are good options.

  • Re:

    Any solar or wind they added is one fewer coal plant they'll bring online. Given it's China just hope it's actually functional and not something completely pointless built to satisfy a quota. They have ghost cities, so it would be hardly surprising if they erected a massive wind farm full of turbine that will never spin.

• by ugen ( 93902 ) on Friday June 30, 2023 @11:33AM (#63646390)

  Went to look it up. So, apparently that 1200 Gwatt represents about 50% of China's total generation capacity (of 2500 Gwatt or so). Way to go.
  By comparison, US total generation capacity is about 1200 GWatt of which renewables represent 30%.

  US uses natural gas for about half of its generation capacity, while China uses mostly coal for the remainder. But the trajectory looks good for them. Perhaps the one area where authoritarian regimes work well is such large scale whole-economy efforts (as long as they are real, and not Potemkin villages mired in corruption of course).

  • Re:

    China is learning more quickly than the US, that being dependent on lying, posturing, incompetent, meglomaniacs for your energy security is bad news long term. If China is getting most of their petrol products from Russia, it's easy to look at Europe as the example. Piss of Vlad and you are cut off. The marriage of convenience between Russia/China is only temporary. Historically they are not friends so likely a matter of time before Russia tries to change the deal with China

    I wish the US was not awash

• Is China just a free-wheeling polluter who has no regard for hippe nonsense renewables because they dont have to care about climate accords or externalities of coal and gas? A standard retort to renewable pushes in us and eu is "But China and India just pollute as much as they want"

  Well in the case of China (since they have reached that tipping point of industrialization, India is behind but caching up) they are doing lots of renewable because even if you disregard co2 emissions, health and environmental c

  • Re:

    Even if they are ramping up renewables for electricity generation, that would seem to be the easy part for carbon reduction now that they've come down in cost. What I understand is that the economic incentive is already there. It's hard to give them credit for a principled or difficult stance when it's the path of least resistance.

    I'm more interested in how their industrial/manufacturing emissions are doing. Those generally incur a cost to reduce. So, I presume they are blowing as much crap into the air as

    • Re:

      For sure but between electricity generation and transport that's a very large chunk, a plurality even if CO2 emissions.

      Fossil fuels used for heat processes like smelting, cement production and the like are going to be tougher to solve but the whole thing is a slow process.

      If I Had to guess I would imagine most consumer product manufacturing relies 90% on electricity and/or could be electrified somewhat easily (given the funding or policy impetus)

      The issue of overconsumption in the Western world is a interes

• Let's look at China for a sec.

  China is undergoing population collapse [youtube.com]. Now, every industrialized nation is undergoing population *decline* (for obvious reasons), China's one-child policy has resulted in population *collapse*.

  This is not a criticism of China, the one-child policy seemed to be at least rational at a time when they were having trouble feeding everyone. It was implemented by an authoritarian regime with predictable actions, but it was at least rational.

  And now they're in complete collapse, there are 2x as many 15 year olds as there are 5 year olds, and in 10 years they won't have enough young people to supply workers to sustain their economic output.

  We only found out about this recently. As the video notes, some of the info was only let out a couple of weeks ago.

  The point is that China doesn't tell the truth about anything, even simple things such as population, things that anyone else could simply look up about their own country.

  Then look at China doing everything it can to become green [youtube.com].

  People in China are literally painting dead trees and rocky embankments with green paint. They are planting fields with rocks glued to rebar to make it look like crops from aerial photography.

  Posters on slashdot have previously noted that Chinese culture sees "getting around a problem" as a completely reasonable action to take, and they don't distinguish between rules, laws, or regulations as a problem. It's not cheating per-se, just taking a shorter path to getting what you want.

  So I have to look with great skepticism at just about anything China says. It might very well be that China doubles their wind and solar, or it may be that China just *says* it doubles its capacity, or it might install wind and solar and not hook them up to the grid (as with numerous ghost cities all over China containing tens of thousands of apartments that no one lives in), or it might install plywood sheets and *paint* them to look like solar panels.

  Or some other shortcut that gives China the benefit of world acclaim, without having to do the actual work involved.

  • Not sure you want to cite Peter Zeihan

    I'm a huge Peter Zeihan fan, but the dude has a huge axe to grind with China (and Obama) for some reason. (Did Barak bang his ex-wife in Shanghai?) He's got some biases.
    
    If you've watched his videos you'd also remember that they're a huge energy importer and with declining influence, self-sufficiency makes sense. They could be lying, but it's very much in their interest to reduce imports of fossil fuels from an energy security standpoint. Are they greenwashing? I don't know...I don't live there, but

    • Re:

      >Conspiracies and lies are always a possibility, but this just makes rational economic sense.

      I always try to look for the 'rational self-interest', but history sadly shows this fails when you involve large groups or long periods of time.

      People are generally not very good at looking beyond their own short-term self-interest, and when you have a highly stratified population with power highly concentrated at the top... I think when you look at it that way, it's suddenly a lot more likely that the small circ

      • Lessons from Russia/Ukraine + Taiwan

        There are many theories that China wants to invade Taiwan or generally piss off the West or the region for one reason or another. According to Zeihan himself, China is heavily dependent on imports from the Middle East and there are many countries between the Middle East and China for maritime shipping routes. He frequently cites that India could stop nearly all tankers from ever making it into China. It seems like energy independence is a short-term interest.
        
        Let's say Xi is an authoritarian militaristi

  • Re:

    You can't fake giant wind turbines that are visible on satellite imagery. You could potentially fake solar panels, but the cost would probably be about the same as the panels anyway. It would be damn near impossible to hide the extra emissions that were supposed to have been taken away by renewables too, because we see fossil fuel plants and mining operations from space, and detect the pollution being released.

    Not that China is some kind of North Korea style closed state. You can get a tourist visa and go l

    • Re:

      It literally is. Only it's Xi cosplaying as Mao instead of Kim. Your apologetics are embarrassing.

      You literally use Chinese social media to both back up your bullshit and then discount what you consider the opposite within 2 sentences. I hope being a wumao pays enough for your soul.

      • Re:

        Have you ever been to China? I have. I have family there too, and I can tell you their daily lives are nothing like North Korea.

        While there is some horrible stuff going on in parts of China, the majority of people live fairly open and in many ways quite Western style lives.

    • Re:

      China has entire cities that are completely empty. They're not fake to the extent that they don't actually have a building there or it's all a facade, but the quality is crap and no one should live in such a building. It's not too difficult to build a bunch of wind turbines that might well be structurally sound enough to stand, but will never be turned on. Even more stupidly they could build real functional turbines that just can't be hooked up to the grid because someone built them in a place that has no e

      • Re:

        Empty buildings in China are mostly because the property bubble burst, and they couldn't be sold. In some cases the builder went bust and they couldn't be completed, even if nearly finished.

• Look at all you can do when you don't have to worry about human rights, much less labor rights

  • Re:

    Right, pretty soon they'll have almost as much renewable generation as Texas.

• The best thing a country (or even an individual) can do for itself is avoid dependency on an external cartel-provided resource like oil. Even coal is better than oil (in their case). I believe their priority should be to get everyone off gasoline vehicles and into electric.. even if its coal-powered. They can worry about and come uo with fix for climate change after that. You can't solve any problems while broke/poor.

• I also don't believe my own country, so at least it is consistent.

• Gigawatt is not a unit of energy. What exactly does this mean? 1200 GW of installed capacity? 1200GWh/yr? Who knows? Caution, journalism majors at work.

  • Re:

    It is a unit of power...so that is the average rate of energy it can deliver i suspect. BTW GWh/yr is another average unit of power equivalent to GW..The journalist should just use the right language...power not energy

    • Re:

      It's still ambiguous because it could be average as you suggest or nameplate capacity. The summary mentions "capacity" several times though so I think that's that, so count like 15% of that for actual average output of solar and 25% for wind.

• Even if probably not fully truthful, it seems China can get stuff done these days. Unlike some other countries that believe they are important.

• BuT aT wHaT cOsT???