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Worth highlighting: The research firm projects that by 2026, solar power alone will outstrip coal as China's main energy source, reaching 1.38 TW in cumulative

• asdefghyk 2y ago
  How long is the 294 GW produced , For solar is the rated output only produced when sun shining?- which means the quoted OP is only for a few hours a day? The nuclear power plan OP would be constant.
  • Chilko 2y ago
    Capacity factor of solar is generally ~20%
    • bryanlarsen 2y ago
      These are grid scale installations in a desert with few clouds. It's possible they have a capacity factor over 30%.
      • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
        Solar panels don’t like sands. It flies everywhere and the deposit partially shades the pane. You have to clean them to get back to peak efficiency. That’s why solar panels farm in desert are so complicated to run and why you don’t see more of them.
        • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
          There is a huge difference between a scrub desert and sand dune one. Xinjiang and Gansu is more scrub than sand, the Gobi is where all the dust comes from.
        • sunshinesnacks 2y ago
          Several of the largest solar plants in the world are in deserts. Edit: I think that all of the top 5 largest are in deserts. Maybe more.
          • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
            Yes, because there is a lot of space there and the sun shines a lot. But they are not more efficient that installation outside of deserts which was the claim made by the comment I was replying to.
            • sunshinesnacks 2y ago
              Maybe not more efficient, but there’s usually more solar resource in the desert, and the net is usually more electricity produced. See the executive summary linked at the bottom of this page: https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/utility-scale-solar-2023-edition https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/utility-scale-solar-2023-ed....
      • morepork 2y ago
        China's deserts are reasonably far north (latitudes of 30+ degrees), so I doubt they get a capacity factor that high
  • toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Currently, the world is on track to be deploying ~660GW of solar per year by end of year, and at current manufacturing capacity ramp rates, will very likely reach ~1TW/year in ~18 months. This doesn’t stop, it only continues to climb. The Sun delivers enough energy to Earth in under an hour to power humanity for a year. There will certainly be challenges along the way as the world heads towards net zero, but none of this is unsolvable with current renewable and storage technology. Renewable and storage costs continue to decline, new nuclear is dead, existing nuclear will run as long as safe to do so until decommissioning. Fission lost to fusion at a distance. Very simply, we just keep building and deploying solar as quickly as possible. Wind and batteries too. https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2024-_vf.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-global-renewable-energy-capacity-by-technology https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-global-renewabl... https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/14/overbuilding-solar-at-up-to-4-times-peak-load-yields-a-least-cost-all-renewables-grid/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/14/overbuilding-solar-at... https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy/atlas-of-100-percent-renewable-energy https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-s-batteries-are-now-cheap-enough-to-power-huge-shifts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA https://archive.today/DklaA
    • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
      Rare earth elements production will be the limiting factor. China is already the first producer by far and has been scaling up but not fast enough. I’m sceptical of PV being *the* solution to the world energy issue but who knows, maybe.
      • bryanlarsen 2y ago
        Solar panels generally don't use rare earths.
        • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
          I was thinking more about the batteries part if people are aiming for grid scale storage.
  • senectus1 2y ago
    there in lies the problem with nuclear. Solar is cheaper and easier, so when the sun is shining you get essentially free energy while the nuclear cant be ramped down so you are now producing excess energy during the day. solar eats nuclear's lunch during the day... with the long term waste issue and military target danger of nuclear thrown in.
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      This is related to a common bad idea, that is, that nuclear should be used to provide backup power when renewables are not available. It's a bad idea because after renewables have satisfied their share of demand, the residual demand will be very unsteady. And unsteady demand is the opposite of what nuclear is good at satisfying.
      • senectus1 2y ago
        >This is related to a common bad idea, that is, that nuclear should be used to provide backup power when renewables are not available. fundamentally disagree, this is taking simple facts and changing the narrative around the facts to make renewables look bad. Renewables are cheaper and faster to invest, build and use. Nuclear is slower and more expensive to invest, build and use. there is a use for nuclear, but common widespread rollout is not it.
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          Making renewables look bad? I was making nuclear look bad. Renewables don't leave any place for new nuclear for the grid.
          • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
            I still don't understand how you're expected to replace fossil fuel heating sources with solar. Peak heating demand is in winter and at night, when solar production is at its lowest. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear can be done by you building nuclear plants, using cogeneration (steam pipes) to distribute heat to the population with reasonable distance of the plant and electricity generated by the plant to operate heat pumps for people who live more distance away. To do this reliably with solar you need enough solar generation capacity on the coldest day of the year with the least sunlight to generate an amount of power on the order of the size of the entire existing power grid, just for heating. Then you need to store the majority of it for use at night. Then you need an entirely separate backup system in case it's cloudy for too long, because if solar doesn't generate enough power then people freeze. I've heard suggestions of maintaining an entirely redundant set of traditional fossil fuel generating stations to bring online in the event of undersupply -- these things cost nearly as much by themselves as the nuclear plants. How is that combination supposed to be cheaper? Also, how is it supposed to be built in parallel when battery production capacity is already being consumed to electrify transportation and do peak shaving to allow renewable sources to replace fossil fuels in the existing grid?
  • ralferoo 2y ago
    > only produced when sun shining?- which means the quoted OP is only for a few hours a day? China has a very large desert region in the northwest that receive a LOT of sun year round, so I'd expect the panels to be producing a decent amount of power throughout most of the day. The biggest problem is actually distance - even a few years back, I was reading that there was a massive amount of solar power, but a very significant percentage was lost in transmission to the most densely populated areas of China which are predominantly in the southeast and east of the country. These areas are also where a lot of rare earth metals are mined, so feasibly it would be relatively cheap to produce giga-batteries there too smooth demand, but I also suspect that they could see significant advantage to doing things that are traditionally energy-costly like electrolysis of water to create hydrogen that could be transferred across the country by pipe with pretty minimal losses and then burned to drive turbines at the other end. Such systems might end up with overall fewer losses than just having thousands of miles of power grid. Another thing I read recently that was interesting is that it's getting approximately close to free for China to produce solar panels now, significantly cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Largely this is also due to the excess power produced in the northwest that can be cheaply used in the processing needed to produce more solar panels.
    • bigiain 2y ago
      I dunno about that distance problem? There's a project here in Australia that reckons its profitable to build a solar farm in Australia and ship the electricity over 5,000km to Singapore. https://www.suncable.energy/our-projects https://www.suncable.energy/our-projects Maybe that's all just marketing hype and greenwashing corporate bullshit, but it at least _seems_ feasible to transport solar (and battery stored for 24x7) power long distances.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        China was investing in UHV lines a few years back to deal with the distance problem. They seem to have a bunch already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity... I’d expect HVDC to deal with power loss well enough. The longest one in China is 3200 km at 1100kv and 12 Gw capacity. My guess is that the HVDC lines they have isn’t really enough to move all that renewable energy yet, or the strategy might be to build more industry out west closer to solar and wind, although water is then the limited resource.
• Workaccount2 2y ago
  I'm not one to champion China, but thank god that they seem to be pretty co2 conscious. It's easy to envision China having leadership that didn't give a fuck about climate change (or didn't want to hear it was real) and just went full on coal energy independence.
  • roenxi 2y ago
    One of the best aspects of Chinese energy policy is there isn't much evidence they care about CO2 at all. They aren't world's largest coal consumer (by a 5x margin I believe [0]) because they care about CO2. They care about cheap energy and energy security. They've been relatively transparent that they are pursuing all available options as far as those options will go. It has been a wildly successful strategy for them in securing prosperity and I wish the west had that sort of ambition. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-country-terawatt-hours-twh?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
    • culi 2y ago
      These numbers are not per capita
      • roenxi 2y ago
        They're not meant to be per capita. If energy policy is based on CO2 emissions then the absolute numbers matter, not per capita numbers. The laws of physics don't care how many people benefited from an action, they happen based on total volumes and weights.
        • culi 2y ago
          You're obviously not talking about energy policy or laws of physics. You're making moralistic judgements and anthropomorphizing a nation-state If you wanna make comparisons (I don't, you do), per capita obviously matters. There's no reason why you should be holding members of one nation state to a stricter standard than members of another.