2 ms·

No, the real metric is carbon, not the number of coal plants. "China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal" https://www.sustainabilitybynumber

No, the real metric is carbon, not the number of coal plants. "China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal" https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Except that makes no sense. You don't build something that expensive if you don't expect to use it, unless you're a fool. Moreover, unless they plan to continue to use all of the the existing coal-fired power plants and the new ones, if they were going to burn less then they could just use the existing ones. You can come up with some hypothetical like that article does where they're using coal as peaker plants (even though it's not very good at that because they take more time than natural gas to get up to temperature), but both the economics and the CO2 of that are pretty bad. You build and maintain all of these coal power plants and then only use them half the time, doubling their cost per unit electricity, and yet you do use them half the time and emit all of that CO2. But the alternative where you build them all for some rare emergency load is crazy. That's the one where they wouldn't be producing a catastrophic amount of CO2, but the economics of that are so bad that assuming that's their intent is assuming they're incompetent. They'd have to recover the cost of building and maintaining all of those power plants while only running them 2% of the time. That makes no sense compared to spending not all that much more to build nuclear plants instead which then generate power all of the time and avoid the need to also build something else (presumably intermittent renewables) to generate that power the other 98% of the time. So either they're incompetent or that theory is wrong and they're building a lot more coal power plants because they intend to burn a lot more coal. > the real metric is carbon https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/carbon-co2-e... More than triple the CO2 emissions as they had in 2000 and the number continues to go up over time rather than down.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  > More than triple the CO2 emissions as they had in 2000 and the number continues to go up over time rather than down. Yeah they shot up for a decade after 2000, while the US/Canada reduced theirs and yet they're still 2x higher per capita. The area under the graph is the real contribution to the problem. China is very far from the obvious target for any objective evalution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The area under the graph is a sunk cost. What matters is the decisions being made today, not the things nobody can change anymore. US CO2 emissions per capita were higher in 1950 than they are in China today -- and in the US today -- because in 1950 there were no nuclear power plants and renewables weren't a viable technology yet. That isn't true anymore. Which is why the US is replacing coal with renewables and gets three times as high a percentage than China from nuclear and its emissions per capita are trending lower. But that's harder to do than building them to begin with, because to do that you have to be competitive with a fossil fuel power plant that already exists rather than one that needs new capital in order to be built. And yet it's still happening. There is no excuse for building new coal in the 21st century. They can't say that nuclear and renewables don't exist or aren't viable yet. They can't say that they're existing plants and they need time to transition. They shouldn't be doing it.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

Except that makes no sense. You don't build something that expensive if you don't expect to use it, unless you're a fool. Moreover, unless they plan to continue to use all of the the existing coal-fired power plants and the new ones, if they were going to burn less then they could just use the existing ones. You can come up with some hypothetical like that article does where they're using coal as peaker plants (even though it's not very good at that because they take more time than natural gas to get up to temperature), but both the economics and the CO2 of that are pretty bad. You build and maintain all of these coal power plants and then only use them half the time, doubling their cost per unit electricity, and yet you do use them half the time and emit all of that CO2. But the alternative where you build them all for some rare emergency load is crazy. That's the one where they wouldn't be producing a catastrophic amount of CO2, but the economics of that are so bad that assuming that's their intent is assuming they're incompetent. They'd have to recover the cost of building and maintaining all of those power plants while only running them 2% of the time. That makes no sense compared to spending not all that much more to build nuclear plants instead which then generate power all of the time and avoid the need to also build something else (presumably intermittent renewables) to generate that power the other 98% of the time. So either they're incompetent or that theory is wrong and they're building a lot more coal power plants because they intend to burn a lot more coal. > the real metric is carbon https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/carbon-co2-e... More than triple the CO2 emissions as they had in 2000 and the number continues to go up over time rather than down.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
> More than triple the CO2 emissions as they had in 2000 and the number continues to go up over time rather than down. Yeah they shot up for a decade after 2000, while the US/Canada reduced theirs and yet they're still 2x higher per capita. The area under the graph is the real contribution to the problem. China is very far from the obvious target for any objective evalution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The area under the graph is a sunk cost. What matters is the decisions being made today, not the things nobody can change anymore. US CO2 emissions per capita were higher in 1950 than they are in China today -- and in the US today -- because in 1950 there were no nuclear power plants and renewables weren't a viable technology yet. That isn't true anymore. Which is why the US is replacing coal with renewables and gets three times as high a percentage than China from nuclear and its emissions per capita are trending lower. But that's harder to do than building them to begin with, because to do that you have to be competitive with a fossil fuel power plant that already exists rather than one that needs new capital in order to be built. And yet it's still happening. There is no excuse for building new coal in the 21st century. They can't say that nuclear and renewables don't exist or aren't viable yet. They can't say that they're existing plants and they need time to transition. They shouldn't be doing it.