China on Course To Hit Wind and Solar Power Target Five Years Ahead of Time 80
China is shoring up its position as the world leader in renewable power and potentially outpacing its own ambitious energy targets, a report has found. The Guardian: China is set to double its capacity and produce 1,200 gigawatts of energy through wind and solar power by 2025, reaching its 2030 goal five years ahead of time, according to the report by Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based NGO that tracks operating utility-scale wind and solar farms as well as future projects in the country.
It says that as of the first quarter of the year, China's utility-scale solar capacity has reached 228GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined. The installations are concentrated in the country's north and north-west provinces, such as Shanxi, Xinjiang and Hebei. In addition, the group identified solar farms under construction that could add another 379GW in prospective capacity, triple that of the US and nearly double that of Europe. China has also made huge strides in wind capacity: its combined onshore and offshore capacity now surpasses 310GW, double its 2017 level and roughly equivalent to the next top seven countries combined. With new projects in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu and along coastal areas, China is on course to add another 371GW before 2025, increasing the global wind fleet by nearly half.
It says that as of the first quarter of the year, China's utility-scale solar capacity has reached 228GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined. The installations are concentrated in the country's north and north-west provinces, such as Shanxi, Xinjiang and Hebei. In addition, the group identified solar farms under construction that could add another 379GW in prospective capacity, triple that of the US and nearly double that of Europe. China has also made huge strides in wind capacity: its combined onshore and offshore capacity now surpasses 310GW, double its 2017 level and roughly equivalent to the next top seven countries combined. With new projects in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu and along coastal areas, China is on course to add another 371GW before 2025, increasing the global wind fleet by nearly half.
Only Because They Don't Have Democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
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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:Only Because They Don't Have Democracy (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
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It's just so hard these days with you "conservative" types to tell what level your lie came from. Are you just credulously taking the opinion of some mainstream media talking head, or are you credulously repeating something you read in a conspiracy blog or youtube video? Or is this something you just made up on the spot?
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It's reality buddy and trivially verifiable. China is where they make the vast majority of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries those subsidies are buying. Tax dollars shipped right over seas.
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"Trillions"? huh? I'd love to see the receipts. Also, you're just talking about buying stuff There's nothing wrong with buying stuff when you're getting value for the money. It's not the same thing as just funneling money somewhere. The question of value is a tricky one of course, since you have to consider a lot of externalities beyond just cost. International trade is generally not a drag on economies, however.
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They are still building coal plants, so it's all propaganda.
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Of course they are. They are like other countries: they need to provide for the growing electricity/energy needs of their citizens. This is the same reason why Germany keeps burning coal/lignite, and has been investing a lot in gas plants (and LNG terminals) lately.
From the own words of Germany Foreign Minister [euractiv.com], Annalena Baerbock: “Yes, we had to temporarily reactivate a handful of coal plants we had held in reserve, to keep families warm in the freezing winter,”
Why shouldn't China do be allowed
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re: Right after... (Score:1)
Source?
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Re: Right after... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Right after... (Score:1)
Permitting!= Building
Building!= Firing
Energy-related carbon emissions added less than 1% in 2022 to a new high of more than 36.8 billion tons. The increase was less than expected, as renewables helped limit the impact of a global rise in coal and oil consumption. Comparatively, global emissions from energy gained by 6% in 2021.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/08/energy-chinas-renewables-progress-comes-alongside-a-coal-power-boom.html
Nuclear too (Score:2)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
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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.
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Blackouts during dunkelflaute are even more expensive.
Well sure but those are not necessarily the best way to deal with blackouts. If you have gas you could do the same with less of an environmental disaster or just do a mostly nuclear grid.
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Well sure but those are not necessarily the best way to deal with blackouts. If you have gas you could do the same with less of an environmental disaster or just do a mostly nuclear grid.
Gas is excellent. Cleaner than coal and cheaper than nuclear. Provides reliable steady state, responds quickly to changes in demand, and provides needed inertia that lets the grid reliably absorb long distance unsynchronized DC from distant VG sources . It is actually the best system we have except for the CO2, but if CO2 is your hang up nuclear is the next best thing, it is just expensive (but still competitive with renewables plus storage. A lot of discussions about price leave out the storage part.)
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It is actually the best system we have except for the CO2, but if CO2 is your hang up nuclear is the next best thin
Renewables are deployed for the low CO2 emissions. Gas is bad in terms of CO2 emissions, it makes no sense to think you can use gas to reach a net zero scenario. And if you don't care about CO2 emissions, why deploy renewables in the first place...
See my other comment about gas [slashdot.org] for a more detailed answer and numbers.
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it makes no sense to think you can use gas to reach a net zero scenario.
Of course. We won't be doing that anytime soon.
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If you have gas you could do the same with less of an environmental disaster or just do a mostly nuclear grid.
This is just an uneducated comment. Gas is almost as bad as coal in terms of CO2 emissions. What we learn from the last issue of the Statistical Review of World Energy [energyinst.org] from BP (or from the Energy Institute since this year apparently):
- when it is burned, gas emits half as much CO2 as coal. This is why we often hear than gas is only emitting half the CO2 emissions of coal, which is good (200g CO2/kWh vs 350g CO2/kWh). This is also a lot better than Lignite for instance, which is the special kind of coal that
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A slightly nuanced view of the situation would observe that China is still developing economically and per capita electricity consumption in China is still less than half that of the U.S. and that demand is growing strongly so they need to build additional capacity in many ways. They are also building nuclear power plants quickly (you are hot for those, right?). Between 2022 and 2025 China is on track to add 21 GW of nuclear capacity. 24 GW are under construction now) with about 90 GW more planned at which
That's 50% (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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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
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But...on this 50% number. The solar and wind stories always have a footnote. I would be curious on how much of this 50% capacity is delivered as a percentage of overall electricity. They will (should) keep building out renewables goal or no goal.
tldr; I bought a 100W foldable solar panel from China for car camping...even in the clearest, sunniest, day, with no shadows, angled correctly, decent temps, that thing has never delivered more than 55W.
Those cheap aliexpress panels are garbage, good ones can get pretty close to their ratings. Buuut only for a few hours per day. On average they tend to deliver like 15% of the rated capacity unless you're like at he equator.
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China has plenty of lying, posturing megalomaniacs of their own. Such as Xi Xinping.
Heaping praise upon the CCP for (sort of, maybe) following the Western Green agenda is a mistake.
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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%.
The US population is less than a quarter of China. Many climate change activists claim that the only valid way to compare carbon output of different countries is on a per capita basis, so shouldn't we be comparing renewable energy capacity the same way?
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Note this is generation capacity, not actual generation MIX. China is still consuming way more coal fired power plants and most of this renewable wind and solar power is currently being underutilized and effectively, wasted.
The windy bits of the country are not where the population centers are, and even though China has plenty of cross-country transmission lines, they are only about 60% utilized. Oh, and there are power shortages and brownouts. So they are awash in solar and wind power, but are consuming co
Which China is it? (Score:2)
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
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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
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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
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but please please please understand that unless you do this for a living, you probably have no idea what you are talking about.
Hah, kindly fuck off?
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China is building EV's and then letting them rot in parking lots, fully insured.
It doesn't matter when China puts out propaganda saying they're the leader in making X thing, when they are just sending X thing to be destroyed in the next breath.
Ghost EV's, Ghost Cities, Ghost Power Plants, Fake soil-rention schemes (resulting in even worse flooding), liteately painting the landscape green instead of planting anything.
Like there is nothing to applaud China for on the environmental front. It's all fake.
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You can give no shits at all about the environment and still make a solid case for wind, solar and electrification (and yes nuclear fission absolutely should be a part of that mix as well)
No, no you can't. The reason why you think this is due to things called capacity cost and utilization cost. Capacity cost is what you pay to build capacity, so the cost of installing a solar array or building a powerplant. Utilization cost is the total cost of ownership (and includes capacity cost) and it is what both the utilities and rate payers (us) pay. When you are told solar is cheaper than coal (or something similar) you are being given capacity cost. Capacity cost only matters to the finance de
China and actual work (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 from a rational perspective, it makes sense for a country that imports energy and exports industrial products to do all they can to move to solar and wind...not to mention they manufacture a HUGE portion of the equipment needed, so they're just buying their own goods and propping up their sales numbers.
Conspiracies and lies are always a possibility, but this just makes rational economic sense. I don't view it as altruism for "acclaim" but in order to keep their country running, especially if they decide they want to invade Taiwan. I find Peter Zeihan's videos to be educational and entertaining and I watch them daily, but sometimes the dude goes off the rails. There's plenty of material in his many videos on China to suggest more rational explanations that serve their national interests.
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>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 (Score:2)
I see nothing in that chain that inspires any altruism or actual long-term planning. In fact, it resists it, because altruists inevitably interfere with the people above them who are trying to hold on to their positions.
Much like with Russia, I trust news out of China when it's independently verified by a third party. When someone not aligned with China, from a country not aligned with China, verifies they're doing what they say they're doing? That's when I'll buy it.
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
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China is famous for its five year plans, and actioning them. Whatever the motivation, even their rivals take note if the five year plans.
China's economic strength is partly based on massive exports. They make what the world wants - clean, cheap, renewable energy in this case. Naturally the domestic market gets flooded with it too.
Economic growth and rapidly improving lifestyles is what keeps the CCP in power.
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Re:China and actual work (Score:4, Informative)
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 look for yourself, take some photos of the wind farms. You don't need to though, because there are plenty of Chinese people posting their photos on social media.
You posted your YouTube videos before. The problem is they are just random clips some guy found on Chinese social media, most likely posted as jokes. None of it seems to be substantiated by reputable journalists, which is presumably why you posted YouTube links instead of the BBC or something. There was some green spraying back for the 2008 Olympics, and apparently developers have been known to try it to make property more attractive without having to actually do any landscaping.
The point is that China's climate pledges are real and verifiable. And put many other countries to shame - why aren't we installing so many wind turbines? We have the space and investors ready to go, it's politics that is holding it up.
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Not that China is some kind of North Korea style closed state.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
some conflicting reports, but personally corroborated per chinese acquaintances: in chinese culture, there's an aspect of pride in fooling others.
it's not seen as nefarious or shameful, but a positive demonstration on one's cunning and mental acuity.
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Right, pretty soon they'll have almost as much renewable generation as Texas.
Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Somehow I don't believe you. (Score:2)
"1,200 gigawatts of energy" (Score:2)
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.
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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
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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.
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That is pretty impressive (Score:2)
Even if probably not fully truthful, it seems China can get stuff done these days. Unlike some other countries that believe they are important.
Obligatory (Score:2)
Meanwhile they are adding coal plants... (Score:2)
Proving China can walk and chew gum at the same time?
"China ramps up coal power while pushing for renewables"
https://www.ft.com/content/fc88b98b-ae3f-4ac8-a564-7c1d391d85bb
Energy security is important it seems.
Firefly (Score:2)
Seems the show "Firefly" was prescient.
No EPA, no regulations (Score:1)
Reak question (Score:2)
Green energy (Score:1)