So many folks overlook the impact of China on todays energy landscape. First of all renewables. People keep talking about how solar is now so economical and it

So many folks overlook the impact of China on todays energy landscape. First of all renewables. People keep talking about how solar is now so economical and it's price has fallen 90%+ in a decade. How did this happen when US and Australia (previously solar research juggernauts) threw their solar industries under the bus to protect oil and coal interests? Simple. China. When everyone else was bitching over whos pocket the energy budget should go into China didn't have a choice but to simply build everything at once just to try keep up with demand (they still failed the last few winters to go without blackouts of industrial workloads). As a result they simply dogpiled money into solar, nuclear, coal, everything. Their eventual goal is to be self-sufficient on energy which they are still a huge chunk away from and will also necessitate sunsetting the coal plants because they don't have the thermal coal necessary to keep going down that path. So China almost single-handedly (I say almost because there are other players involved) willed the current solar prices into existence. They are going to do the same with nuclear whether people believe it or not. Maybe not as dramatic as the price drops we have seen from solar (because it benefits much greater from mass production efficiencies) but they are going to build a ton of nuclear plants all with a few common designs. I hope my home country of Australia wakes up to this and leverages our strong trade (and hopefully improved relations) with China to negotiate technology transfer of Chinese nuclear to Australia at some point. No amount of renewables is going to be enough for Australia because we simply don't have the geography necessary for renewable baseload or storage. Nuclear would change the game entirely for Australia, with an abundance of cheap energy we could build desalination plants to overcome our susceptibility to drought, use electric arc furnaces to revive our steel mills which have largely been chased out of Australia because coking coal is too polluting, etc.