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The growth is still slow compared to China and the evolution of the international order though. Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't

by mrtksn 1y ago

The growth is still slow compared to China and the evolution of the international order though. Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine. I love exploring these graphs: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=EU&entity=United+States&entity=China https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... EU is doing just slightly better than US. US has the advantage of its fossil fuels but it's actually China that is doing the revolution. They are accelerating and at some point not too far away will reach abundance and switch off all the fossils. It's unwise that the new US administration be pushing for the opposite of China. But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid. IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
> Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine. They might've just started the war 4 years earlier, then.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  In 2014 Russia decided to attack Ukraine because its political ambitions had been thwarted. A pro-Russian politician took existing EU integration plans and went "fuck that, we love Russia" instead and Ukrainians particularly in the West of the country turned out on the streets in a huge protest. In the aftermath, with Ukraine now definitively not in Russia's sphere of control, Putin ordered seizure of the eastern parts of Ukraine. Four years earlier doesn't make sense, Russia has plans that are expected to work out in their favour, and Putin is less secure in 2010 than he is today, invading a neighbour looks very ambitious in 2010. Moving the more recent part of the invasion - which starts with trying to seize Kyiv - forward by four years maybe makes more sense, but that compresses a lot of timeline.
- gyudin 1y ago
  There were not much disruption though, EU has payed Russia over €214 billions since the start of the war
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  There were calls to roll out renewables faster when Russia first entered Crimea, mostly focused on wind since it was 2014. Traitorous climate frauds like Bjørn Lomborg responded by claiming that wind power didn't work and we should instead invest in some new unspecified alternative to wind and solar.
wongarsu 1y ago
Are we looking at the same numbers? Looking at the graph you linked it looks like the EU is generating slightly more solar energy than the US, while using slightly above half the total electricity. In my book that constitutes doing twice as good as the US, not just slightly better. And while China's growth in renewables is impressive, the same can be said about their coal plants. Their energy mix looks way worse than the EU
- mrtksn 1y ago
  From the dropdowns you can filter by source and type. China's fossils increase linearly and clean energy geometrically, which mean the energy mix is quickly becoming renewable heavy. Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.
  - akamaka 1y ago
    That just means that China started later. Europe is already past 50% and are on the top half of the S-curve where adding additional renewables has diminishing returns.
    - mrtksn 1y ago
      Look at the absolute values, china added 4X the clean energy as EU. Once the manufacturing of panels is in place they can keep doing it without further investment. That's not diminishing returns, that's actual power every time. Cars don't run on percentages, they run on kWh. There's nothing diminishing
      - akamaka 1y ago
        The diminishing return happens when you have so many solar panels that on a sunny day you generate more than 100% of the electricity you can use. Maybe that situation is great if you want to subsidize solar panel factories, but you get less usable kWh for the same cost. It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.
looping__lui 1y ago
You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That backup capacity needs to be equal to the entire electricity demand. Renewables need to exceed that by a significant margin. So, either you build gas power plants and keep them idle, or you build nuclear power plants and switch them off when the sun is shining. There is an interesting in-depth analysis by Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Fraunhofer-ISE-Studie-Wege-zu-einem-klimaneutralen-Energiesystem.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... (see page 25, for example). Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar? PS: I built a low-energy house, heat it with a heat pump, and have PV on my roof.
- ezfe 1y ago
  Yes, if you want 100% renewable. However, 100% is not the goal right now. Studies have shown that 97% solar coverage can be cheaper than nuclear in sunny areas, for example. Obviously Europe isn't necessarily the sunniest so that number would have to be lower.
  - looping__lui 1y ago
    What are you going to do at night, or in Germany when it’s cloudy and rainy for a month straight? I can show you my electricity consumption from my heat pump in the winter compared to the electricity my PV system produced. Hint: it doesn’t work. And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day. Take a look at the Fraunhofer study.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      One complements batteries with hydrogen (burned in turbines) or long term thermal storage. Germany has plenty of salt formations for very cheap hydrogen storage, and there are no geographical constraints on thermal storage.
      - 1y ago
pzo 1y ago
This is only about electricity generation not overall energy usage (transportation, heating, etc) from given source. This is always misleading and gives impression that renewables cover 50% of needs already. Its so much worse - it's only around 20% in EU: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?country=~OWID_EU27 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
- mrtksn 1y ago
  They are also very fast at electrifying everything. Especially for transportation, they built large high speed train network(runs on electricity) and are far ahead in electrifying the public transport like busses which also resulted in Chinese electric cars dominance. Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable. US, EU should just drop everything and go electric or in a few years will look like backward civilizations because China is exporting that all over the world.
  - dzhiurgis 1y ago
    How much of total transportation is trains?
    - vkou 1y ago
      Not great. 7.0% of person-kilometers travelled. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240916-1#:~:text=Transport%20by%20planes%20made%20up,Hungary%20(13.0%25)%20trailing%20behind.&text=Austria%20ranked%20highest%20in%20rail,awareness%20of%20sustainable%20urban%20mobility. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
      - kragen 1y ago
        That's in the EU, though. China?
    - csomar 1y ago
foobarian 1y ago
I'm also loving projects like these [1] popping up all over the place. Looks like they are installing Tesla Megapacks with LFP cells. [2] [1] https://vcrenewables.com/medway-grid-energy-storage-system/ https://vcrenewables.com/medway-grid-energy-storage-system/ [2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/07/17/massachusetts-greenlights-800-mwh-battery-energy-storage-facilities https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/07/17/massachusetts-greenli...
barbazoo 1y ago
> But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid. > IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar. If I find myself finding obvious "errors" in other people's plans and easy solutions they "just" have to implement then I'm usually missing something. Europe's strategy to tie themselves economically to Russia for the purpose of peace didn't work out but a lot of the infrastructure and energy investments were made when that was the strategy. The other thing is that you're talking about electricity, fossil fuels have thousands of uses so you can't "drop everything".
- elzbardico 1y ago
  Europe didn't tie themselves to Russian fossil fuels for the purpose of peace. They bought the cheapest energy available to them, and this was the basis of their economy. You can't just compete with oil and gas coming out of a pipeline, regardless what a computer programmer may believe about energy policy and electrical grids.
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    As someone that grew up in Europe it was clear to me and as far as I could tell every one around me that the economic, cultural, etc integration after the cold war was to develop a rules based relationship with Russia to reduce the risk of another war. To a lesser extend but similar to how European countries tightly integrated with each other on all levels making an armed conflict less likely than otherwise.
colechristensen 1y ago
Ugh, can we stop with the negativity every time anything environmental or energy related comes up. Regardless of how fast anything was progressing there will always be someone saying NOT FAST ENOUGH, you're not adding anything here.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  If you're not the fastest, it means that you're not doing good enough.
jalk 1y ago
You must have some other sources than that site. Downloaded the CSV, and at the risk of misinterpreting the columns here is some simple filtering: % of total energy generation EU Coal 9.64% US Coal 14.88% CH Coal 57.77% EU Solar 11.19% US Solar 6.91% CH Solar 8.32% Largest generation source EU Nuclear 23.57% US Gas 42.51% CH Coal 57.77% This ofc only says something about generation and not consumption
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Look at the absolute values, your kettle doesn't run of fractions it runs on absolute power and EU&US are about the same. USA has fractionally lower renewables because they have very large fossil production. EU is making up for its lack of fossils through high efficiency policies.
- xbmcuser 1y ago
  One of the biggest thing a lot of people are missing is that from this year Solar + battery became cheaper than coal in China. And avg annual price decline for solar and battery is still around 8-10% ie if you don't go to solar and electric machinery you will not be able to compete with China as they are about to reach the point in the next 10 year where electricity/energy is practically free.
  - eucyclos 1y ago
    It is weird to me that nobody wants to import Chinese electric cars. If Chinese investors and politicians are really subsidizing the production of electric cars, importing them would be basically having the new grid subsidized by a foreign government!
    - crote 1y ago
      The usual argument is that this kills the domestic car industry, leaving us fully dependant on Chinese cars: what's going to happen when they hike their prices by 1000%, or threaten to stop all exports?
alexey-salmin 1y ago
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar. If this is not happening without government's help then it's not profitable. Which means a forced transition to solar requires to "drop everything" quite literally.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  AFAIK its more complex than that. It requires high capEx at first, it needs the grid to match it and affects previous investments. The solar got cheap fast, wind didn't as much but it has its own advantages like it works when solar doesn't etc. A lot of government coordination is needed to work. The governments can be very effective with that through providing long term visibility and reducing the risks.
kwanbix 1y ago
If they hadn't shut down most nuclear reactors, some even after the war had already started, this wouldn't have happened.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  EU did not shut down most of their reactors, Germany shut down a few.
  - kwanbix 1y ago
    Fair enough, Germany isn't all of Europe, though of course it's part of it. Still, Germany, which completed its nuclear phase-out by permanently closing its last three reactors in by 2023 even while energy prices were sky-high. I know this firsthand as I was living there, and our energy bill jumped from around 100 to 250. Belgium followed a similar path, shutting down one reactor in September 2022 and another in February 2025.
TacticalCoder 1y ago
[dead]
fpoling 1y ago
Europe has plenty of coal that can be used as a good backup for renewable energy production.
icetank 1y ago
I heard a few years ago that China was building up to two new coal power plants every week causing huge amounts of pollution. Looks like they still do. Yes they scale up renewable energy but what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate. At least with the EU and the US you can see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  > what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate It doesn't scale at the same rate though. Renewables are accelerating which means in China especially you see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable. The fossil thing about China is kind of understandable because don't forget that pretty much everything we all consume is made in China.
- hmm37 1y ago
  They were building new coal plants that were far more efficient, while also closing down extremely old inefficient and dirty coal plants. So overall it was a net gain.
mielioort 1y ago
China claims to be doing the revolution. If you look at the planned coal powerplants, they themselves posted, you would very much doubt that Photo OP.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  In absolute units the coal usage in China has started to drop now in 2025.
lm28469 1y ago
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar. The funny part is that we dropped our home grown nuclear power in favor of renewables, which are mostly provided by China since all the biggest manufacturers of solar panels and windmills are Chinese. Why should we "drop everything" to pursue renewables when no one else is doing it? It's obviously not the right choice, we should be consolidating our nuclear power reactors AND developing renewable Look into the history of pro renewable in Europe, the foreign ties, the whole german/france nuclear scandal, the common European electric market abomination, were not fighting China or the US, we're fighting ourselves > Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine. There are plenty of things you cannot do with electricity, try to make fertilizer or medicine with electricity instead of petroleum derivates
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  We dropped new built nuclear power because it didn’t deliver. There’s no grand conspiracy. In the early 2000s we invested both in the nascent renewable industry and the nuclear industry. Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer it is abundantly clear that the nuclear industry doesn’t deliver. Why spend hundreds of billions on dead-end nuclear subsidies to ”try one more time!!!”???
  - lm28469 1y ago
    > We dropped nuclear because it didn’t deliver. There’s no grand conspiracy. ? Look at France again... It gave them unlimited cheap, clean energy and nuclear weapons, all at once. And then again, Germany, even if they went full renewables right now it would take hundreds of years to make up for the past pollution > Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer it is abundantly clear that the nuclear industry doesn’t deliver. Hm weird, we had 0 problem delivering back in the days when we really cared and had politicians with long term visions about their countries... > Why spend hundreds of billions on dead-end subsidies to ”try one more time!!!”??? Look at renewable subsidies lol... https://www.mr-sustainability.com/stories/2020/the-sky-is-the-limit-for-clean-energy https://www.mr-sustainability.com/stories/2020/the-sky-is-th...

by mrtksn 1y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

> Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine. They might've just started the war 4 years earlier, then.

tialaramex 1y ago
In 2014 Russia decided to attack Ukraine because its political ambitions had been thwarted. A pro-Russian politician took existing EU integration plans and went "fuck that, we love Russia" instead and Ukrainians particularly in the West of the country turned out on the streets in a huge protest. In the aftermath, with Ukraine now definitively not in Russia's sphere of control, Putin ordered seizure of the eastern parts of Ukraine. Four years earlier doesn't make sense, Russia has plans that are expected to work out in their favour, and Putin is less secure in 2010 than he is today, invading a neighbour looks very ambitious in 2010. Moving the more recent part of the invasion - which starts with trying to seize Kyiv - forward by four years maybe makes more sense, but that compresses a lot of timeline.
gyudin 1y ago
There were not much disruption though, EU has payed Russia over €214 billions since the start of the war
ZeroGravitas 1y ago
There were calls to roll out renewables faster when Russia first entered Crimea, mostly focused on wind since it was 2014. Traitorous climate frauds like Bjørn Lomborg responded by claiming that wind power didn't work and we should instead invest in some new unspecified alternative to wind and solar.

wongarsu 1y ago

Are we looking at the same numbers? Looking at the graph you linked it looks like the EU is generating slightly more solar energy than the US, while using slightly above half the total electricity. In my book that constitutes doing twice as good as the US, not just slightly better. And while China's growth in renewables is impressive, the same can be said about their coal plants. Their energy mix looks way worse than the EU

mrtksn 1y ago
From the dropdowns you can filter by source and type. China's fossils increase linearly and clean energy geometrically, which mean the energy mix is quickly becoming renewable heavy. Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.
- akamaka 1y ago
  That just means that China started later. Europe is already past 50% and are on the top half of the S-curve where adding additional renewables has diminishing returns.
  - mrtksn 1y ago
    Look at the absolute values, china added 4X the clean energy as EU. Once the manufacturing of panels is in place they can keep doing it without further investment. That's not diminishing returns, that's actual power every time. Cars don't run on percentages, they run on kWh. There's nothing diminishing
    - akamaka 1y ago
      The diminishing return happens when you have so many solar panels that on a sunny day you generate more than 100% of the electricity you can use. Maybe that situation is great if you want to subsidize solar panel factories, but you get less usable kWh for the same cost. It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.

looping__lui 1y ago

You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That backup capacity needs to be equal to the entire electricity demand. Renewables need to exceed that by a significant margin. So, either you build gas power plants and keep them idle, or you build nuclear power plants and switch them off when the sun is shining. There is an interesting in-depth analysis by Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Fraunhofer-ISE-Studie-Wege-zu-einem-klimaneutralen-Energiesystem.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... (see page 25, for example). Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar? PS: I built a low-energy house, heat it with a heat pump, and have PV on my roof.

ezfe 1y ago
Yes, if you want 100% renewable. However, 100% is not the goal right now. Studies have shown that 97% solar coverage can be cheaper than nuclear in sunny areas, for example. Obviously Europe isn't necessarily the sunniest so that number would have to be lower.
- looping__lui 1y ago
  What are you going to do at night, or in Germany when it’s cloudy and rainy for a month straight? I can show you my electricity consumption from my heat pump in the winter compared to the electricity my PV system produced. Hint: it doesn’t work. And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day. Take a look at the Fraunhofer study.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    One complements batteries with hydrogen (burned in turbines) or long term thermal storage. Germany has plenty of salt formations for very cheap hydrogen storage, and there are no geographical constraints on thermal storage.
    - 1y ago

pzo 1y ago

This is only about electricity generation not overall energy usage (transportation, heating, etc) from given source. This is always misleading and gives impression that renewables cover 50% of needs already. Its so much worse - it's only around 20% in EU: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?country=~OWID_EU27 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

mrtksn 1y ago
They are also very fast at electrifying everything. Especially for transportation, they built large high speed train network(runs on electricity) and are far ahead in electrifying the public transport like busses which also resulted in Chinese electric cars dominance. Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable. US, EU should just drop everything and go electric or in a few years will look like backward civilizations because China is exporting that all over the world.
- dzhiurgis 1y ago
  How much of total transportation is trains?
  - vkou 1y ago
    Not great. 7.0% of person-kilometers travelled. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240916-1#:~:text=Transport%20by%20planes%20made%20up,Hungary%20(13.0%25)%20trailing%20behind.&text=Austria%20ranked%20highest%20in%20rail,awareness%20of%20sustainable%20urban%20mobility. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
    - kragen 1y ago
      That's in the EU, though. China?
  - csomar 1y ago

foobarian 1y ago

I'm also loving projects like these [1] popping up all over the place. Looks like they are installing Tesla Megapacks with LFP cells. [2] [1] https://vcrenewables.com/medway-grid-energy-storage-system/ https://vcrenewables.com/medway-grid-energy-storage-system/ [2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/07/17/massachusetts-greenlights-800-mwh-battery-energy-storage-facilities https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/07/17/massachusetts-greenli...

barbazoo 1y ago

> But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid. > IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar. If I find myself finding obvious "errors" in other people's plans and easy solutions they "just" have to implement then I'm usually missing something. Europe's strategy to tie themselves economically to Russia for the purpose of peace didn't work out but a lot of the infrastructure and energy investments were made when that was the strategy. The other thing is that you're talking about electricity, fossil fuels have thousands of uses so you can't "drop everything".

elzbardico 1y ago
Europe didn't tie themselves to Russian fossil fuels for the purpose of peace. They bought the cheapest energy available to them, and this was the basis of their economy. You can't just compete with oil and gas coming out of a pipeline, regardless what a computer programmer may believe about energy policy and electrical grids.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  As someone that grew up in Europe it was clear to me and as far as I could tell every one around me that the economic, cultural, etc integration after the cold war was to develop a rules based relationship with Russia to reduce the risk of another war. To a lesser extend but similar to how European countries tightly integrated with each other on all levels making an armed conflict less likely than otherwise.

colechristensen 1y ago

Ugh, can we stop with the negativity every time anything environmental or energy related comes up. Regardless of how fast anything was progressing there will always be someone saying NOT FAST ENOUGH, you're not adding anything here.

mrtksn 1y ago
If you're not the fastest, it means that you're not doing good enough.

jalk 1y ago

You must have some other sources than that site. Downloaded the CSV, and at the risk of misinterpreting the columns here is some simple filtering: % of total energy generation EU Coal 9.64% US Coal 14.88% CH Coal 57.77% EU Solar 11.19% US Solar 6.91% CH Solar 8.32% Largest generation source EU Nuclear 23.57% US Gas 42.51% CH Coal 57.77% This ofc only says something about generation and not consumption

mrtksn 1y ago
Look at the absolute values, your kettle doesn't run of fractions it runs on absolute power and EU&US are about the same. USA has fractionally lower renewables because they have very large fossil production. EU is making up for its lack of fossils through high efficiency policies.
xbmcuser 1y ago
One of the biggest thing a lot of people are missing is that from this year Solar + battery became cheaper than coal in China. And avg annual price decline for solar and battery is still around 8-10% ie if you don't go to solar and electric machinery you will not be able to compete with China as they are about to reach the point in the next 10 year where electricity/energy is practically free.
- eucyclos 1y ago
  It is weird to me that nobody wants to import Chinese electric cars. If Chinese investors and politicians are really subsidizing the production of electric cars, importing them would be basically having the new grid subsidized by a foreign government!
  - crote 1y ago
    The usual argument is that this kills the domestic car industry, leaving us fully dependant on Chinese cars: what's going to happen when they hike their prices by 1000%, or threaten to stop all exports?

alexey-salmin 1y ago

> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar. If this is not happening without government's help then it's not profitable. Which means a forced transition to solar requires to "drop everything" quite literally.

mrtksn 1y ago
AFAIK its more complex than that. It requires high capEx at first, it needs the grid to match it and affects previous investments. The solar got cheap fast, wind didn't as much but it has its own advantages like it works when solar doesn't etc. A lot of government coordination is needed to work. The governments can be very effective with that through providing long term visibility and reducing the risks.

kwanbix 1y ago

If they hadn't shut down most nuclear reactors, some even after the war had already started, this wouldn't have happened.

mrtksn 1y ago
EU did not shut down most of their reactors, Germany shut down a few.
- kwanbix 1y ago
  Fair enough, Germany isn't all of Europe, though of course it's part of it. Still, Germany, which completed its nuclear phase-out by permanently closing its last three reactors in by 2023 even while energy prices were sky-high. I know this firsthand as I was living there, and our energy bill jumped from around 100 to 250. Belgium followed a similar path, shutting down one reactor in September 2022 and another in February 2025.

TacticalCoder 1y ago

[dead]

fpoling 1y ago

Europe has plenty of coal that can be used as a good backup for renewable energy production.

icetank 1y ago

I heard a few years ago that China was building up to two new coal power plants every week causing huge amounts of pollution. Looks like they still do. Yes they scale up renewable energy but what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate. At least with the EU and the US you can see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable.

mrtksn 1y ago
> what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate It doesn't scale at the same rate though. Renewables are accelerating which means in China especially you see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable. The fossil thing about China is kind of understandable because don't forget that pretty much everything we all consume is made in China.
hmm37 1y ago
They were building new coal plants that were far more efficient, while also closing down extremely old inefficient and dirty coal plants. So overall it was a net gain.

mielioort 1y ago

China claims to be doing the revolution. If you look at the planned coal powerplants, they themselves posted, you would very much doubt that Photo OP.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
In absolute units the coal usage in China has started to drop now in 2025.

lm28469 1y ago

> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar. The funny part is that we dropped our home grown nuclear power in favor of renewables, which are mostly provided by China since all the biggest manufacturers of solar panels and windmills are Chinese. Why should we "drop everything" to pursue renewables when no one else is doing it? It's obviously not the right choice, we should be consolidating our nuclear power reactors AND developing renewable Look into the history of pro renewable in Europe, the foreign ties, the whole german/france nuclear scandal, the common European electric market abomination, were not fighting China or the US, we're fighting ourselves > Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine. There are plenty of things you cannot do with electricity, try to make fertilizer or medicine with electricity instead of petroleum derivates

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
We dropped new built nuclear power because it didn’t deliver. There’s no grand conspiracy. In the early 2000s we invested both in the nascent renewable industry and the nuclear industry. Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer it is abundantly clear that the nuclear industry doesn’t deliver. Why spend hundreds of billions on dead-end nuclear subsidies to ”try one more time!!!”???
- lm28469 1y ago
  > We dropped nuclear because it didn’t deliver. There’s no grand conspiracy. ? Look at France again... It gave them unlimited cheap, clean energy and nuclear weapons, all at once. And then again, Germany, even if they went full renewables right now it would take hundreds of years to make up for the past pollution > Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer it is abundantly clear that the nuclear industry doesn’t deliver. Hm weird, we had 0 problem delivering back in the days when we really cared and had politicians with long term visions about their countries... > Why spend hundreds of billions on dead-end subsidies to ”try one more time!!!”??? Look at renewable subsidies lol... https://www.mr-sustainability.com/stories/2020/the-sky-is-the-limit-for-clean-energy https://www.mr-sustainability.com/stories/2020/the-sky-is-th...