6 ms·

The largest solar farm just came online in China

63 points by 1970-01-01 2y ago

noxs 2y ago
"However, reports and allegations regarding the treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the region have led to calls for more transparency and ethical considerations in the supply chain." as usual
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- azinman2 2y ago
  Is it not of concern?
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
China is running circles around the rest of the world in the push for electrification. Sure, it's not a free market, but their government policies are making it an economic powerhouse. The world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up / if the rest of the world doesn't keep up.
- s1k3s 2y ago
  "We need a good dictator" - someone
  - _zoltan_ 2y ago
    Believe it or not, it helps.
    - schmidtleonard 2y ago
      It helps until it hurts, and then it really hurts.
  - tristanb 2y ago
    Trumps market...
    - dyauspitr 2y ago
      Trump is anti green energy. What good is a damn dictator if they can’t do infrastructure and energy well, atleast modi is killing that part of his mandate.
- TheDudeMan 2y ago
  10 years.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  The US is installing roughly 3 times as much solar at the utility level, each quarter[1]. We aren't building quite as many of these megafarms as China, but the US's solar numbers are actually pretty dramatic[2]. (Or by another metric: China has about twice as much solar production capacity as the US, but a much smaller fraction per-capita[3].) [1]: https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight [2]: https://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/SolarCheatSheetQ2_2024.pdf https://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/SolarCheatS... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_use_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_...
  - seo-speedwagon 2y ago
    I'm not sure what the value of a per-capita measure is, or why it's worth making a distinction at "utility" (I'm assuming this means consumer) level. Wouldn't the most relevant measure, at least as far as emissions go, be the ratio of energy coming from renewables / solar vs. total energy consumption? Or something similar? edit: spelling
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      Quite right. This mistake also seems to occur when comparing California and Texas. Texas has a ton of renewable sources, but its extremely energy intensive economy consumes disproportionately more. So it seems to make more sense to normalize by load than by person.
    - icehawk 2y ago
      As linked in the GP, solar production as a percentage of total generation capacity China is 4.8%, just like the US.
    - szvsw 2y ago
      Yeah there are lots of ways to normalize that might be better, but per capita isn’t uninteresting per se: US uses roughly 2.5-3x the energy per capita compared to china fwiw [1]. The energy use per capita can be influenced by all sorts of things, including climate - for instance, SGP will always be in the top few spots on this sort of list due to the space conditioning needs. Could also be due to lots of heavy industry. Could also be due to lots of inefficient homes or high consumer demand. So it can also be interesting to look at energy use per person plotted against GDP per capita, where as expected higher energy use per capita typically also means higher GDP per capita [2]. US has significantly higher GDP per capita. Anyways, at the end of the day, in this kind of head-to-head energy technology race, the only thing I care about really at the end of the day is decarbonization. The US has been falling each year (not fast enough though, and much of it does not actually come from renewable adoption but instead other changes like natural gas replacing coal over the last decade and changes in mfg capacity etc) while China is still rapidly increasing. Both countries need to be doing more, way more (well really the whole world). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-gdp-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-...
- barney54 2y ago
  Using Uyghur slave labor can be helpful.
  - kkzz99 2y ago
    Rufmord.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  US energy production isn't much of a free market either.
  - twothreeone 2y ago
    And if you have a "free market" the big utility companies are going to eat each other over time until you end up with de-facto regional monopolies which are then systematically run into the ground, extracting all inherent value, until it's no longer functional and has to be taken over by the government to ensure people can still take hot showers and use their computers. You can't make this shit up.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up It can’t. Besides demography, Xi has wiped out his political competition. The history of what comes after a long-serving dictator who purged his generation’s political braintrust is unidirectional.
  - woooooo 2y ago
    USSR didn't terminally stagnate until 20, 25 years after Stalin died, though. They still looked pretty capable under Kruschev.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > USSR didn't terminally stagnate until 20, 25 years after Stalin died, though. They still looked pretty capable under Kruschev True, and Kruschev is 20 years Stalin’s junior. I’m inclined to regard him as a fluke; the wheels of power replaced him with the far-less competent Brezhnev after ten years, at which point the Soviets’ fate was sealed. It’s an open question: if the ISSR could have both beaten the U.S. and remained intact following Stalin’s death. I don’t think they could have. Insisting on not just parity, but supremacy, may have doomed them. The ability for Beijing is Taiwan. They really shouldn’t obsess over it. But Xi has done so, and likely can’t retreat. Which means his successor is similarly damned, and with him, his nation.
  - hackerlight 2y ago
    Biden's chips sanctions are also hurting them. They only just figured out how to make 7nm chips. They'll struggle to assemble the compute to keep up in AI. Now, if only we didn't insist on publishing all our trade secrets in the geopolitically naive pursuit of open source, which spits on the reality of the security competition we are currently engaged in, we'd be even more ahead.
grecy 2y ago
> The world’s largest solar farm in Xinjiang is part of China’s megabase project, a plan to install 455 GW of wind and solar. China now boasts the three largest solar farms in the world by capacity. The Ningxia Tenggeli and Golmud Wutumeiren solar farms, each with a capacity of 3 MW, are already online. Very, very cool. I’m so happy the future is being built while I am alive to see it.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Isn’t Bhadla Solar farm in India the second largest in the world at this point?
philipkglass 2y ago
According to this article, the project cost $2.13 billion for 3.5 gigawatts-peak of installed capacity: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/06/06/worlds-largest-solar-plant-goes-online-in-china-2/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/06/06/worlds-largest-solar-... It's expected to generate 6.09 TWh per year, for a capacity factor of 19.8%. That's equivalent to $3.07 per real annualized watt. For rough comparison purposes, last year's contract for China to build a 1.2 GW nuclear reactor in Pakistan was for $4.8 billion [1] (4 dollars per watt, $4.44 per real annualized watt assuming a 90% capacity factor [2]). [1] https://www.voanews.com/a/pakistan-signs-4-8-billion-nuclear-power-plant-deal-with-china/7144967.html https://www.voanews.com/a/pakistan-signs-4-8-billion-nuclear... [2] https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=937 https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  That looks pretty good for nuclear! I assume the cost of batteries to shift a annualized watt from day to night is more that $1.50
  - stkdump 2y ago
    Don't know how it is for Chinese projects, but in the west you should not compare actual cost of A with projected cost of B, because with such projects we repeatedly see that the actual cost can be a multiple of the projected costs, especially for nuclear power. For Chinese projects we can assume that the price tag also doesn't match the actual costs (similar to French nuclear projects) due to heavy government subsidies.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      > For Chinese projects we can assume that the price tag also doesn't match the actual costs (similar to French nuclear projects) due to heavy government subsidies. Why would China subsidize a $5 billion reactor in Pakistan? That's not their MO with the Belt and Road initiative - China prefers to inflate sticker prices and loan more money to the buyer, building more economic influence. The project certainly benefits from the economies of scale thanks to all the reactors China builds, but it hardly helps to conflate that with actual subsidies.
s1k3s 2y ago
Please allow me to go political for a second: both US and EU have an insane amount of politicians who support backing down on green energy and going back to coal mining, oil drilling and the like. I hope that at least the people who are intelligent enough to see the progress of green energy won't support that through their votes. We can literally have "free" energy coming from this star around us but instead of using it we're coming up with excuses that keep us from progressing. That's it </political>
- bwb 2y ago
  I don't understand, the USA and EU are adding solar and wind very fast. Financially, it is a no-brainer and getting added in record numbers. What else do you want? Sure there are issues over regulations and power lines approval, but those are hopefully going to get solved surely.
  - s1k3s 2y ago
    I'm not talking about what's happening now (even though there's plenty of criticism to be said about the programs that we run). I'm talking about a new wave of politicians that's coming up in both regions, and they want this to stop.
    - blackhawkC17 2y ago
      As long as it’s economical, people will keep adding solar and going green without paying attention to politics. Case point: Oil and gas industry-loving Texas added 6.5 GW of solar in 2023 alone, more than any other state. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/texas-solar-record-ercot-grid-18705325.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/tex...
    - bwb 2y ago
      Ah gotcha, right now there seems to be a radical group that would oppose their own nose if it twitched the wrong way. I wouldn't worry, the smart money is on renewables, and nothing is going to stop it. Plus, national security people know it is so important globally.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
Surely it has been generating power during the entire construction? Were they waiting to connect the grid once the final panel was in place?

63 points by 1970-01-01 2y ago

noxs 2y ago

"However, reports and allegations regarding the treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the region have led to calls for more transparency and ethical considerations in the supply chain." as usual

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
azinman2 2y ago
Is it not of concern?

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

China is running circles around the rest of the world in the push for electrification. Sure, it's not a free market, but their government policies are making it an economic powerhouse. The world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up / if the rest of the world doesn't keep up.

s1k3s 2y ago
"We need a good dictator" - someone
- _zoltan_ 2y ago
  Believe it or not, it helps.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    It helps until it hurts, and then it really hurts.
- tristanb 2y ago
  Trumps market...
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    Trump is anti green energy. What good is a damn dictator if they can’t do infrastructure and energy well, atleast modi is killing that part of his mandate.
TheDudeMan 2y ago
10 years.
woodruffw 2y ago
The US is installing roughly 3 times as much solar at the utility level, each quarter[1]. We aren't building quite as many of these megafarms as China, but the US's solar numbers are actually pretty dramatic[2]. (Or by another metric: China has about twice as much solar production capacity as the US, but a much smaller fraction per-capita[3].) [1]: https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight [2]: https://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/SolarCheatSheetQ2_2024.pdf https://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/SolarCheatS... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_use_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_...
- seo-speedwagon 2y ago
  I'm not sure what the value of a per-capita measure is, or why it's worth making a distinction at "utility" (I'm assuming this means consumer) level. Wouldn't the most relevant measure, at least as far as emissions go, be the ratio of energy coming from renewables / solar vs. total energy consumption? Or something similar? edit: spelling
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    Quite right. This mistake also seems to occur when comparing California and Texas. Texas has a ton of renewable sources, but its extremely energy intensive economy consumes disproportionately more. So it seems to make more sense to normalize by load than by person.
  - icehawk 2y ago
    As linked in the GP, solar production as a percentage of total generation capacity China is 4.8%, just like the US.
  - szvsw 2y ago
    Yeah there are lots of ways to normalize that might be better, but per capita isn’t uninteresting per se: US uses roughly 2.5-3x the energy per capita compared to china fwiw [1]. The energy use per capita can be influenced by all sorts of things, including climate - for instance, SGP will always be in the top few spots on this sort of list due to the space conditioning needs. Could also be due to lots of heavy industry. Could also be due to lots of inefficient homes or high consumer demand. So it can also be interesting to look at energy use per person plotted against GDP per capita, where as expected higher energy use per capita typically also means higher GDP per capita [2]. US has significantly higher GDP per capita. Anyways, at the end of the day, in this kind of head-to-head energy technology race, the only thing I care about really at the end of the day is decarbonization. The US has been falling each year (not fast enough though, and much of it does not actually come from renewable adoption but instead other changes like natural gas replacing coal over the last decade and changes in mfg capacity etc) while China is still rapidly increasing. Both countries need to be doing more, way more (well really the whole world). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-gdp-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-...
barney54 2y ago
Using Uyghur slave labor can be helpful.
- kkzz99 2y ago
  Rufmord.
BurningFrog 2y ago
US energy production isn't much of a free market either.
- twothreeone 2y ago
  And if you have a "free market" the big utility companies are going to eat each other over time until you end up with de-facto regional monopolies which are then systematically run into the ground, extracting all inherent value, until it's no longer functional and has to be taken over by the government to ensure people can still take hot showers and use their computers. You can't make this shit up.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up It can’t. Besides demography, Xi has wiped out his political competition. The history of what comes after a long-serving dictator who purged his generation’s political braintrust is unidirectional.
- woooooo 2y ago
  USSR didn't terminally stagnate until 20, 25 years after Stalin died, though. They still looked pretty capable under Kruschev.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > USSR didn't terminally stagnate until 20, 25 years after Stalin died, though. They still looked pretty capable under Kruschev True, and Kruschev is 20 years Stalin’s junior. I’m inclined to regard him as a fluke; the wheels of power replaced him with the far-less competent Brezhnev after ten years, at which point the Soviets’ fate was sealed. It’s an open question: if the ISSR could have both beaten the U.S. and remained intact following Stalin’s death. I don’t think they could have. Insisting on not just parity, but supremacy, may have doomed them. The ability for Beijing is Taiwan. They really shouldn’t obsess over it. But Xi has done so, and likely can’t retreat. Which means his successor is similarly damned, and with him, his nation.
- hackerlight 2y ago
  Biden's chips sanctions are also hurting them. They only just figured out how to make 7nm chips. They'll struggle to assemble the compute to keep up in AI. Now, if only we didn't insist on publishing all our trade secrets in the geopolitically naive pursuit of open source, which spits on the reality of the security competition we are currently engaged in, we'd be even more ahead.

grecy 2y ago

> The world’s largest solar farm in Xinjiang is part of China’s megabase project, a plan to install 455 GW of wind and solar. China now boasts the three largest solar farms in the world by capacity. The Ningxia Tenggeli and Golmud Wutumeiren solar farms, each with a capacity of 3 MW, are already online. Very, very cool. I’m so happy the future is being built while I am alive to see it.

dyauspitr 2y ago
Isn’t Bhadla Solar farm in India the second largest in the world at this point?

philipkglass 2y ago

According to this article, the project cost $2.13 billion for 3.5 gigawatts-peak of installed capacity: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/06/06/worlds-largest-solar-plant-goes-online-in-china-2/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/06/06/worlds-largest-solar-... It's expected to generate 6.09 TWh per year, for a capacity factor of 19.8%. That's equivalent to $3.07 per real annualized watt. For rough comparison purposes, last year's contract for China to build a 1.2 GW nuclear reactor in Pakistan was for $4.8 billion [1] (4 dollars per watt, $4.44 per real annualized watt assuming a 90% capacity factor [2]). [1] https://www.voanews.com/a/pakistan-signs-4-8-billion-nuclear-power-plant-deal-with-china/7144967.html https://www.voanews.com/a/pakistan-signs-4-8-billion-nuclear... [2] https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=937 https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

s1artibartfast 2y ago
That looks pretty good for nuclear! I assume the cost of batteries to shift a annualized watt from day to night is more that $1.50
- stkdump 2y ago
  Don't know how it is for Chinese projects, but in the west you should not compare actual cost of A with projected cost of B, because with such projects we repeatedly see that the actual cost can be a multiple of the projected costs, especially for nuclear power. For Chinese projects we can assume that the price tag also doesn't match the actual costs (similar to French nuclear projects) due to heavy government subsidies.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    > For Chinese projects we can assume that the price tag also doesn't match the actual costs (similar to French nuclear projects) due to heavy government subsidies. Why would China subsidize a $5 billion reactor in Pakistan? That's not their MO with the Belt and Road initiative - China prefers to inflate sticker prices and loan more money to the buyer, building more economic influence. The project certainly benefits from the economies of scale thanks to all the reactors China builds, but it hardly helps to conflate that with actual subsidies.

s1k3s 2y ago

Please allow me to go political for a second: both US and EU have an insane amount of politicians who support backing down on green energy and going back to coal mining, oil drilling and the like. I hope that at least the people who are intelligent enough to see the progress of green energy won't support that through their votes. We can literally have "free" energy coming from this star around us but instead of using it we're coming up with excuses that keep us from progressing. That's it </political>

bwb 2y ago
I don't understand, the USA and EU are adding solar and wind very fast. Financially, it is a no-brainer and getting added in record numbers. What else do you want? Sure there are issues over regulations and power lines approval, but those are hopefully going to get solved surely.
- s1k3s 2y ago
  I'm not talking about what's happening now (even though there's plenty of criticism to be said about the programs that we run). I'm talking about a new wave of politicians that's coming up in both regions, and they want this to stop.
  - blackhawkC17 2y ago
    As long as it’s economical, people will keep adding solar and going green without paying attention to politics. Case point: Oil and gas industry-loving Texas added 6.5 GW of solar in 2023 alone, more than any other state. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/texas-solar-record-ercot-grid-18705325.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/tex...
  - bwb 2y ago
    Ah gotcha, right now there seems to be a radical group that would oppose their own nose if it twitched the wrong way. I wouldn't worry, the smart money is on renewables, and nothing is going to stop it. Plus, national security people know it is so important globally.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

Surely it has been generating power during the entire construction? Were they waiting to connect the grid once the final panel was in place?