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China is where energy things are happening, both on the generation side and on the industrial consumption side. The US feels like a quiet backwater in compariso
by matthewdgreen 3y ago
China is where energy things are happening, both on the generation side and on the industrial consumption side. The US feels like a quiet backwater in comparison.
- Retric 3y agoOnly in terms of scale not innovation. China still gets most of its elected from coal and hydro. They are still building a little nuclear and lots of coal alongside all that wind and solar.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoIn this case scale is the better part of innovation. The people dominating future PV, wind, and battery industries are going to be the ones implementing the “learning curve” that brings prices down through continuous manufacturing improvement. The folks who innovate the most will be the ones deploying the new terawatts of generation, building factories that operate on intermittent and geographically-dependent energy sources, and learning to operate a massive continent-wide renewable grid. There’s this funny idea that you can keep your technical advantage doing research while another country is actually doing the things, but I don’t think that’s ever been the way the world works.
- Retric 3y agoCost competitive panels are manufactured inside and outside of China. PV already reached a point where panel costs aren’t the majority of grid scale instillation costs cutting their costs in half just doesn’t change much. Managing the grid when your dependent on PV not just feeding in a trivial amount you can make up from other sources is the uncharted territory.