6 ms·

China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal

35 points by ZeroGravitas 3y ago

adrianN 3y ago
As long as China keeps adding renewables like crazy, it doesn’t matter all that much what else they do for the next few years. Eventually they’ll want to add some form of storage, but you can go to pretty high levels of renewable penetration before you need that.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  China is adding more renewable capacity than anyone else in the world, dwarfing what's being done in the US and Europe, so much so that forecast is now that their emissions may well peak within the next few years, between 2026 and 2030. That's quite a feat.
  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >their emissions may well peak within the next few years, between 2026 and 2030. That's quite a hypothetical feat that will not actually happen.
    - mytailorisrich 3y ago
      It's not hypothetical at all. This is the consensus across the board based on the huge growth in clean energy over there. The anti-China stance that this topic reeks of is not useful and only aimed at diverting from our own issues. Let's install as much low emission energy/renewable as they do then we can criticise.
- realusername 3y ago
  It does matter, no renewables are compensating coal plants especially in a growing economy like China. China's results are already pretty poor, they have the same amount of emissions per capita as France when excluding exports but pretty far from the development level though. Usually developing country emit less because it's easier when you have a large portion of the population which isn't very rich. What's explaining the bad results of China is the unsustainable middle class powered by those coal plants.
- christkv 3y ago
  I mean you have to trust their self reported numbers which are politically controlled. So approach any official numbers with a huge level of suspicion.
  - xbmcuser 3y ago
    Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal so it is in China's economic interests to put in more solar and wind so I personally don't think they need to lie about it. Now politicians in China fudging numbers that their cities or provinces have met targets is not out of question but economically adding more solar, wind and batteries makes more sense. I predict in 3-4 years China will start removing a lot of coal from its grid as cost of solar and batteries drop another 40-50%. Recently I was looking how many electric vehicles China alone has added in the last 4-5 years and it hit me that had China not gone big on electric the world's oil consumption would be few million barrels per day more and the prices would be above $120+ per barrel.
    - macspoofing 3y ago
      >Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal so it is in China's economic interests Solar and wind could be free and it wouldn't change the equation by much .. because .. solar and wind cannot serve as baseload. Think about it this way, if solar and wind are cheaper, why is China building coal plants? Why was Germany signing multi-decade deals with Russia and building new pipelines (at least before the war) to ship Russia's natural gas? What do they know, that you don't know? >I predict in 3-4 years China will start removing a lot of coal from its grid as cost of solar and batteries drop another 40-50%. There is no grid-scale battery technology today, nor coming in the next few decades - so don't pin your hopes on that. It also doesn't matter how cheap Li-ion batteries become because Li-ion batteries are simply not the right technology for grid-scale battery storage.
      - itsoktocry 3y ago
        >Think about it this way, if solar and wind are cheaper, why is China building coal plants? Why was Germany signing multi-decade deals with Russia and building new pipelines (at least before the war) to ship Russia's natural gas? What do they know, that you don't know? This is the right question to ask. China is the global leader in battery and solar tech, yet they are building many coal plants. Why?
- macspoofing 3y ago
  >Eventually they’ll want to add some form of storage There is no grid-scale battery technology to handle baseload for any meaningful duration. Worse, there is no grid-scale battery technology on the horizon either (you can define 'horizon' as the 'next few decades').
  - dnedic 3y ago
    Why do you assume electric batteries have to be used? We've had things like reservoir lakes for hydro plants for a long time. Energy can be stored in more ways than electrical.
    - macspoofing 3y ago
      >We've had things like reservoir lakes for hydro plants for a long time. Energy can be stored in more ways than electrical. Hydro is great. Gravity batteries (e.g. pumped storage) are great. The problem is that they require particular geography to work - especially at grid-scale, and we pretty much exploited all of it already - so you cannot scale it.
  - tzs 3y ago
    China has over 20 nuclear plants under construction and another 70 planned.
    - macspoofing 3y ago
      As a substitute for battery storage?
      - tzs 3y ago
        For baseload. Battery storage only came up in this branch of the thread because wind and solar don't cover baseload.
        macspoofing 3y ago
        Right .. Nuclear is fine. It is a perfectly viable way to power your economy. Solar/Wind/Batteries are not.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  Adding renewable energy sources will not reduce total fossil fuel consumption world wide. There's not a limit on the amount of energy that people will use -- adding more renewable energy sources won't satiate our demand for energy and as long as fossil fuels are there, people will use them. Double, triple, quadruple, renewable energy production, and people will still burn fossil fuels as fast they can pull it out of the ground. The rollout of renewable will have to be accompanied by a ban on the use of fossil fuels to supplement them.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    Energy use per person is going down in developed nations.
    - sl-1 3y ago
      Because we don't count the energy taken to produce the things for these developed nations in other "less developed" countries.
      - adrianN 3y ago
        Actually some people do and what I said above remains true regardless.
melling 3y ago
Global coal usage reached all time highs last year. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global-coal-use-all-time-high-2023-iea-2023-12-15/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global... Seems like not where we want to be 26 years from net zero.
- defrost 3y ago
  The International Energy Agency Coal Report has it that global coal use has reached peak per annum and will decline from now forwards. Very few countries are bucking that trend. IIRC India is the greatest exception. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273
  - itzprime 3y ago
    a yes, they already said that already in 2015, 2017
    - defrost 3y ago
      The IEA did NOT say that global coal demand had peaked in 2015, nor did they say that in 2017. IEA Coal 2015:https://www.iea.org/reports/medium-term-coal-market-report-2015 https://www.iea.org/reports/medium-term-coal-market-report-2... IEA Coal 2017: https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2017 https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2017 You seem to have misremembered discussions about declines in demand, and possibilities of local country peaks. Don't sweat it, it's easy to confuse first and second derivitives but do please check your sources and your tone.
  - samarthr1 3y ago
    For a good portion of the nation, _some_ power is better than no power. Unlike the west which had electrified heavily early on, India has lagged on that front. The government of india is building coal capacity, as well as renewable capacity. We are rather fortunate that our peak of power use oft coincides with peak solar (as, our largest non industrial power consumers have usually been air conditioners). The electricity demand in india is only going to grow, and i would expect that coal will be one of the many sources of electricity, and will probably decline. As a society, I hope that we electrify, and fast. We are also seeing a revolution of electric scooters in the country, which are cost competitive with ICE scooters already (less than 33% more). If this trend continues, I would expect that the demand for electricity will further grow
contrarian1234 3y ago
This graph puts things in perspective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_generation_in_China_by_source.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_generation_in... From a geo-politics point of view, it seems preferable for China to be reliant on coal vs natural oil/gas. Oil/gas would bring it in conflict for energy resources with the west. Coal they can source domestically (and from Australia)
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  An alternative (and hopefully pessimistic) take: China sees itself being in conflict with most of the world’s major military powers in the next decade, and is girding itself to eliminate reliance on its long oil supply chain. If you’re a pessimistic sort, you’d also note that many of the US’s Asian allies have a similarly long/disruptable oil supply chain, which will make their economies extremely vulnerable to disruption (as an example, notice how much damage a single Iranian-supplied militia has been able to do to middle eastern shipping.) Eliminating fossil fuel dependence isn’t just good for the environment. It might be a matter of national survival.
  - maxglute 3y ago
    It's obviously incentivized by energy security. But PRC has also stopped funding/constructing new coal plants abroad. So their incentive to limit new emissions is at least genuine. They could have pocketed 100s of billions in BRI coal plant projects. Like US did massive shale/LNG build out for energy security, except they ended up being the largest producer/exporter of both.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Part of the reason is probably similar to why they are building empty apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere: developers secured funding to do that and now they need to deliver a plant. The fact that it might never be profitable to operate is not their problem. There just is a lot of inertia to these projects. Another part is that they are probably replacing dirty, inefficient, old plants with more economical and efficient newer ones. The less efficient a plant is, the more pollution it creates and China has huge issues with smog. And of course a lot of the plans of even a few years ago are getting obsoleted by rapidly the changing facts of renewables scaling faster and cheaper than anticipated. In a way, they are a victim of their own success here as a lot of the renewables industry is happening in China. The theory that coal plants are going to be used as peaker plants makes a bit of sense as it means they won't have to import expensive gas and build new plants for that. My guess is that they will use more coal in the winter than in the summer when they have more solar on the grid. But it's going to be some time before they can stop relying on coal completely.
- lebean 3y ago
  Tofu dreg coal plants? Maybe
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  The main reason is that they need energy, and coal is cheap, reliable and abundant. Worry about the environment is not at the top of the list. They aren't making cement or steel with solar panels. This is the reality.
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    It's not that cheap. And it's not abundant locally so they have to import it. The reality is that it's more cost effective to generate energy using wind and solar at this point. Which is why China is deploying so much of that. You are right they don't care as much about the environment. But they do care about cost. Coal stopped being economical in most places years ago. That's why so many coal plants are closing everywhere. The reason the Chinese are still building coal plants is that they can't ramp up solar and wind production quick enough and they don't want to switch to gas at this point, which would be a temporary thing as well. As per their plans a few years ago, they would bridge the gap with nuclear and renewables with temporary coal plants with that peaking a few years from now and that ultimately being largely gone by 2065. However, the calendar keeps shifting there, in favor of solar and wind. Which is why this article is projecting the number of plants to still grow but less coal burned overall. Which is good news of course. I think their nuclear plans are being adjusted downwards for the same reasons. Cost.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
macspoofing 3y ago
So ... maybe number of coal plants is not a good metric of anything. Maybe instead we should just talk about emissions - and in that case, it sounds like China's are going up, though the article is hopeful that may not be the case (hope springs eternal). >As low-carbon energy sources continue to grow, they’ll take priority spot in the electricity mix. Coal power will start to take on the role of ‘peaker plants’. Another 'hopeful' statement from the author. Coal power will be a baseload in China for a long time still.
0ckpuppet 3y ago
burn less coal than who?
- plorg 3y ago
  Than themselves, over time. Or at least that seems like the implication. But this article includes very few numbers, and none are about tons of coal burnt or GWh electricity produced from coal annually. The figure they cite most consistently is capacity factor, suggesting that figure may be decreasing as coal is used for peaking. Beyond the likelihood that this kind of usage pattern is actually worse for emissions, capacity factor itself is a misleading figure to use. If you build a single new coal plant that has lower capacity factor usage than the rest of your fleet the fleet average would go down despite you burning a larger quantity of coal. I hope that's not what they are trying to claim, because it would ridiculous. But it's the closest thing this article cites to an actual trend. The rest is just people (or the authors) saying, "yeah, [despite all of the evidence] we expect coal usage to decline".
itsoktocry 3y ago
What a headline. Developing markets are not going to scale back. The people concerned with climate change need to explain how any of this is going to work. Apparently they are going to try do so with explanations like, "yes, more coal and coal plants, but maybe they'll burn less?" Good luck.
- fisf 3y ago
  Sadly, some of the countries doubling down on coal, are going to be most severely impacted by climate change.
  - sl-1 3y ago
    But they are not going to be impacted less if they burn less (on the margin). Most of the impact is already locked in in short term.
  - Yizahi 3y ago
    But thankfully they will easily find some external enemies to blame for their own mistakes and nuke from orbit.
- silverquiet 3y ago
  > The people concerned with climate change need to explain how any of this is going to work. What is going to work? It obviously isn't, but if you say what is obvious, you're labeled a "doomer".
- tzs 3y ago
  > Developing markets are not going to scale back. The people concerned with climate change need to explain how any of this is going to work. It was explained, in the Paris Agreement. The rich countries that got that way off decades of massive cheap fossil fuel use provide financial aid to the developing countries to develop renewable energy sources there so that the developing countries can get off fossil fuel without derailing their development.
Yizahi 3y ago
Nobody cares (nobody should care) about the amount of coal, or gas, or oil burned or number of coal/gas plants constructed. We should care about the amount of CO2 and other GH gasses in the atmosphere. The actual important number, not the derivative numbers intending to hide issues and misdirect public. And that number is constantly rising and that rise is accelerating. Always, so far.
- cmeacham98 3y ago
  Isn't "amount of coal burned" a direct proxy for "amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere (by coal-powered electricity)"?
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    I think you’re missing the emphasis. The headlines is that less coal is being burned, which implies less emissions. But there arent less emissions - its a false hope.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - Yizahi 3y ago
    In some ideal world - yes. In the real world that number can be easily cheated and hard to verify, and hard to translate into emissions, due to different tech, different fuel composition, different usage patterns and so on. So estimate, then use estimate to estimate a bigger picture and on and on, introducing errors every time and never being sure about base numbers, if they are true or fake. We can't cheat or fake CO2 level in the atmosphere. You can plop a spectrometer in the middle of Beijing and no CCP can alter that number (there was a fun permanent scandal similar to this, when US embassy in China was measuring air pollution daily and published it in Xitter, CCP was furious). No politicians at COP9000 can sit together and fudge some numbers to make their work look good and important. It's just there, in every place on this planet, easily measurable by everyone.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
tzs 3y ago
What is often overlooked is that China can actually carry out reasonably long term plans. It's one of the few good things about not being a democracy or representative government. Their plan is for all their energy sources to increase over the next few years, but as the 20+ nuclear plants they are now building and the 70 that are permitted but have not yet started construction get built (not to mention that they are approving more each year), combined with the new hydro capacity they are adding, and the massive amounts of solar and wind they are adding they can drop the coal and other fossil source and reach net zero around 2060. They are far more likely to succeed then the US is with its net zero plans, because the US plan can change every time there is a presidential election. And not just change a little, since one of the two major parties still isn't convinced that climate change is something that actually needs to be addressed. And even when the plan doesn't change with a presidential election the ability to advance the plan can change every two years, because that's how long terms are for members of the House of Representatives, and there is a tendency for the party that did not win the presidency to do better in the next House election. So even if we have a president who is trying to advance the net zero plan, they often will end up with a House that won't pass the legislation necessary to make progress.

35 points by ZeroGravitas 3y ago

As long as China keeps adding renewables like crazy, it doesn’t matter all that much what else they do for the next few years. Eventually they’ll want to add some form of storage, but you can go to pretty high levels of renewable penetration before you need that.

mytailorisrich 3y ago
China is adding more renewable capacity than anyone else in the world, dwarfing what's being done in the US and Europe, so much so that forecast is now that their emissions may well peak within the next few years, between 2026 and 2030. That's quite a feat.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >their emissions may well peak within the next few years, between 2026 and 2030. That's quite a hypothetical feat that will not actually happen.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    It's not hypothetical at all. This is the consensus across the board based on the huge growth in clean energy over there. The anti-China stance that this topic reeks of is not useful and only aimed at diverting from our own issues. Let's install as much low emission energy/renewable as they do then we can criticise.
realusername 3y ago
It does matter, no renewables are compensating coal plants especially in a growing economy like China. China's results are already pretty poor, they have the same amount of emissions per capita as France when excluding exports but pretty far from the development level though. Usually developing country emit less because it's easier when you have a large portion of the population which isn't very rich. What's explaining the bad results of China is the unsustainable middle class powered by those coal plants.
christkv 3y ago
I mean you have to trust their self reported numbers which are politically controlled. So approach any official numbers with a huge level of suspicion.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal so it is in China's economic interests to put in more solar and wind so I personally don't think they need to lie about it. Now politicians in China fudging numbers that their cities or provinces have met targets is not out of question but economically adding more solar, wind and batteries makes more sense. I predict in 3-4 years China will start removing a lot of coal from its grid as cost of solar and batteries drop another 40-50%. Recently I was looking how many electric vehicles China alone has added in the last 4-5 years and it hit me that had China not gone big on electric the world's oil consumption would be few million barrels per day more and the prices would be above $120+ per barrel.
  - macspoofing 3y ago
    >Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal so it is in China's economic interests Solar and wind could be free and it wouldn't change the equation by much .. because .. solar and wind cannot serve as baseload. Think about it this way, if solar and wind are cheaper, why is China building coal plants? Why was Germany signing multi-decade deals with Russia and building new pipelines (at least before the war) to ship Russia's natural gas? What do they know, that you don't know? >I predict in 3-4 years China will start removing a lot of coal from its grid as cost of solar and batteries drop another 40-50%. There is no grid-scale battery technology today, nor coming in the next few decades - so don't pin your hopes on that. It also doesn't matter how cheap Li-ion batteries become because Li-ion batteries are simply not the right technology for grid-scale battery storage.
    - itsoktocry 3y ago
      >Think about it this way, if solar and wind are cheaper, why is China building coal plants? Why was Germany signing multi-decade deals with Russia and building new pipelines (at least before the war) to ship Russia's natural gas? What do they know, that you don't know? This is the right question to ask. China is the global leader in battery and solar tech, yet they are building many coal plants. Why?
macspoofing 3y ago
>Eventually they’ll want to add some form of storage There is no grid-scale battery technology to handle baseload for any meaningful duration. Worse, there is no grid-scale battery technology on the horizon either (you can define 'horizon' as the 'next few decades').
- dnedic 3y ago
  Why do you assume electric batteries have to be used? We've had things like reservoir lakes for hydro plants for a long time. Energy can be stored in more ways than electrical.
  - macspoofing 3y ago
    >We've had things like reservoir lakes for hydro plants for a long time. Energy can be stored in more ways than electrical. Hydro is great. Gravity batteries (e.g. pumped storage) are great. The problem is that they require particular geography to work - especially at grid-scale, and we pretty much exploited all of it already - so you cannot scale it.
- tzs 3y ago
  China has over 20 nuclear plants under construction and another 70 planned.
  - macspoofing 3y ago
    As a substitute for battery storage?
    - tzs 3y ago
      For baseload. Battery storage only came up in this branch of the thread because wind and solar don't cover baseload.
      - macspoofing 3y ago
        Right .. Nuclear is fine. It is a perfectly viable way to power your economy. Solar/Wind/Batteries are not.
empath-nirvana 3y ago
Adding renewable energy sources will not reduce total fossil fuel consumption world wide. There's not a limit on the amount of energy that people will use -- adding more renewable energy sources won't satiate our demand for energy and as long as fossil fuels are there, people will use them. Double, triple, quadruple, renewable energy production, and people will still burn fossil fuels as fast they can pull it out of the ground. The rollout of renewable will have to be accompanied by a ban on the use of fossil fuels to supplement them.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Energy use per person is going down in developed nations.
  - sl-1 3y ago
    Because we don't count the energy taken to produce the things for these developed nations in other "less developed" countries.
    - adrianN 3y ago
      Actually some people do and what I said above remains true regardless.

melling 3y ago

Global coal usage reached all time highs last year. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global-coal-use-all-time-high-2023-iea-2023-12-15/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global... Seems like not where we want to be 26 years from net zero.

defrost 3y ago
The International Energy Agency Coal Report has it that global coal use has reached peak per annum and will decline from now forwards. Very few countries are bucking that trend. IIRC India is the greatest exception. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273
- itzprime 3y ago
  a yes, they already said that already in 2015, 2017
  - defrost 3y ago
    The IEA did NOT say that global coal demand had peaked in 2015, nor did they say that in 2017. IEA Coal 2015:https://www.iea.org/reports/medium-term-coal-market-report-2015 https://www.iea.org/reports/medium-term-coal-market-report-2... IEA Coal 2017: https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2017 https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2017 You seem to have misremembered discussions about declines in demand, and possibilities of local country peaks. Don't sweat it, it's easy to confuse first and second derivitives but do please check your sources and your tone.
- samarthr1 3y ago
  For a good portion of the nation, _some_ power is better than no power. Unlike the west which had electrified heavily early on, India has lagged on that front. The government of india is building coal capacity, as well as renewable capacity. We are rather fortunate that our peak of power use oft coincides with peak solar (as, our largest non industrial power consumers have usually been air conditioners). The electricity demand in india is only going to grow, and i would expect that coal will be one of the many sources of electricity, and will probably decline. As a society, I hope that we electrify, and fast. We are also seeing a revolution of electric scooters in the country, which are cost competitive with ICE scooters already (less than 33% more). If this trend continues, I would expect that the demand for electricity will further grow

contrarian1234 3y ago

This graph puts things in perspective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_generation_in_China_by_source.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_generation_in... From a geo-politics point of view, it seems preferable for China to be reliant on coal vs natural oil/gas. Oil/gas would bring it in conflict for energy resources with the west. Coal they can source domestically (and from Australia)

matthewdgreen 3y ago
An alternative (and hopefully pessimistic) take: China sees itself being in conflict with most of the world’s major military powers in the next decade, and is girding itself to eliminate reliance on its long oil supply chain. If you’re a pessimistic sort, you’d also note that many of the US’s Asian allies have a similarly long/disruptable oil supply chain, which will make their economies extremely vulnerable to disruption (as an example, notice how much damage a single Iranian-supplied militia has been able to do to middle eastern shipping.) Eliminating fossil fuel dependence isn’t just good for the environment. It might be a matter of national survival.
- maxglute 3y ago
  It's obviously incentivized by energy security. But PRC has also stopped funding/constructing new coal plants abroad. So their incentive to limit new emissions is at least genuine. They could have pocketed 100s of billions in BRI coal plant projects. Like US did massive shale/LNG build out for energy security, except they ended up being the largest producer/exporter of both.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Part of the reason is probably similar to why they are building empty apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere: developers secured funding to do that and now they need to deliver a plant. The fact that it might never be profitable to operate is not their problem. There just is a lot of inertia to these projects. Another part is that they are probably replacing dirty, inefficient, old plants with more economical and efficient newer ones. The less efficient a plant is, the more pollution it creates and China has huge issues with smog. And of course a lot of the plans of even a few years ago are getting obsoleted by rapidly the changing facts of renewables scaling faster and cheaper than anticipated. In a way, they are a victim of their own success here as a lot of the renewables industry is happening in China. The theory that coal plants are going to be used as peaker plants makes a bit of sense as it means they won't have to import expensive gas and build new plants for that. My guess is that they will use more coal in the winter than in the summer when they have more solar on the grid. But it's going to be some time before they can stop relying on coal completely.

lebean 3y ago
Tofu dreg coal plants? Maybe
itsoktocry 3y ago
The main reason is that they need energy, and coal is cheap, reliable and abundant. Worry about the environment is not at the top of the list. They aren't making cement or steel with solar panels. This is the reality.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  It's not that cheap. And it's not abundant locally so they have to import it. The reality is that it's more cost effective to generate energy using wind and solar at this point. Which is why China is deploying so much of that. You are right they don't care as much about the environment. But they do care about cost. Coal stopped being economical in most places years ago. That's why so many coal plants are closing everywhere. The reason the Chinese are still building coal plants is that they can't ramp up solar and wind production quick enough and they don't want to switch to gas at this point, which would be a temporary thing as well. As per their plans a few years ago, they would bridge the gap with nuclear and renewables with temporary coal plants with that peaking a few years from now and that ultimately being largely gone by 2065. However, the calendar keeps shifting there, in favor of solar and wind. Which is why this article is projecting the number of plants to still grow but less coal burned overall. Which is good news of course. I think their nuclear plans are being adjusted downwards for the same reasons. Cost.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

macspoofing 3y ago

So ... maybe number of coal plants is not a good metric of anything. Maybe instead we should just talk about emissions - and in that case, it sounds like China's are going up, though the article is hopeful that may not be the case (hope springs eternal). >As low-carbon energy sources continue to grow, they’ll take priority spot in the electricity mix. Coal power will start to take on the role of ‘peaker plants’. Another 'hopeful' statement from the author. Coal power will be a baseload in China for a long time still.

0ckpuppet 3y ago

burn less coal than who?

plorg 3y ago
Than themselves, over time. Or at least that seems like the implication. But this article includes very few numbers, and none are about tons of coal burnt or GWh electricity produced from coal annually. The figure they cite most consistently is capacity factor, suggesting that figure may be decreasing as coal is used for peaking. Beyond the likelihood that this kind of usage pattern is actually worse for emissions, capacity factor itself is a misleading figure to use. If you build a single new coal plant that has lower capacity factor usage than the rest of your fleet the fleet average would go down despite you burning a larger quantity of coal. I hope that's not what they are trying to claim, because it would ridiculous. But it's the closest thing this article cites to an actual trend. The rest is just people (or the authors) saying, "yeah, [despite all of the evidence] we expect coal usage to decline".

itsoktocry 3y ago

What a headline. Developing markets are not going to scale back. The people concerned with climate change need to explain how any of this is going to work. Apparently they are going to try do so with explanations like, "yes, more coal and coal plants, but maybe they'll burn less?" Good luck.

fisf 3y ago
Sadly, some of the countries doubling down on coal, are going to be most severely impacted by climate change.
- sl-1 3y ago
  But they are not going to be impacted less if they burn less (on the margin). Most of the impact is already locked in in short term.
- Yizahi 3y ago
  But thankfully they will easily find some external enemies to blame for their own mistakes and nuke from orbit.
silverquiet 3y ago
> The people concerned with climate change need to explain how any of this is going to work. What is going to work? It obviously isn't, but if you say what is obvious, you're labeled a "doomer".
tzs 3y ago
> Developing markets are not going to scale back. The people concerned with climate change need to explain how any of this is going to work. It was explained, in the Paris Agreement. The rich countries that got that way off decades of massive cheap fossil fuel use provide financial aid to the developing countries to develop renewable energy sources there so that the developing countries can get off fossil fuel without derailing their development.

Yizahi 3y ago

Nobody cares (nobody should care) about the amount of coal, or gas, or oil burned or number of coal/gas plants constructed. We should care about the amount of CO2 and other GH gasses in the atmosphere. The actual important number, not the derivative numbers intending to hide issues and misdirect public. And that number is constantly rising and that rise is accelerating. Always, so far.

cmeacham98 3y ago
Isn't "amount of coal burned" a direct proxy for "amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere (by coal-powered electricity)"?
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  I think you’re missing the emphasis. The headlines is that less coal is being burned, which implies less emissions. But there arent less emissions - its a false hope.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Yizahi 3y ago
  In some ideal world - yes. In the real world that number can be easily cheated and hard to verify, and hard to translate into emissions, due to different tech, different fuel composition, different usage patterns and so on. So estimate, then use estimate to estimate a bigger picture and on and on, introducing errors every time and never being sure about base numbers, if they are true or fake. We can't cheat or fake CO2 level in the atmosphere. You can plop a spectrometer in the middle of Beijing and no CCP can alter that number (there was a fun permanent scandal similar to this, when US embassy in China was measuring air pollution daily and published it in Xitter, CCP was furious). No politicians at COP9000 can sit together and fudge some numbers to make their work look good and important. It's just there, in every place on this planet, easily measurable by everyone.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago

tzs 3y ago

What is often overlooked is that China can actually carry out reasonably long term plans. It's one of the few good things about not being a democracy or representative government. Their plan is for all their energy sources to increase over the next few years, but as the 20+ nuclear plants they are now building and the 70 that are permitted but have not yet started construction get built (not to mention that they are approving more each year), combined with the new hydro capacity they are adding, and the massive amounts of solar and wind they are adding they can drop the coal and other fossil source and reach net zero around 2060. They are far more likely to succeed then the US is with its net zero plans, because the US plan can change every time there is a presidential election. And not just change a little, since one of the two major parties still isn't convinced that climate change is something that actually needs to be addressed. And even when the plan doesn't change with a presidential election the ability to advance the plan can change every two years, because that's how long terms are for members of the House of Representatives, and there is a tendency for the party that did not win the presidency to do better in the next House election. So even if we have a president who is trying to advance the net zero plan, they often will end up with a House that won't pass the legislation necessary to make progress.