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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 so
by 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 agoChina 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 agoIt'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 agoIt 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 agoI 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 agoSolar 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 agoWhy 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 agoChina has over 20 nuclear plants under construction and another 70 planned.
- macspoofing 3y agoAs a substitute for battery storage?
- tzs 3y agoFor baseload. Battery storage only came up in this branch of the thread because wind and solar don't cover baseload.
- macspoofing 3y agoRight .. Nuclear is fine. It is a perfectly viable way to power your economy. Solar/Wind/Batteries are not.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoAdding 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.