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Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose. The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for
by noosphr 10mo ago
Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.
The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.
That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.
- movedx 10mo agoI feel like energy is the most critical aspect to any economy and military. It's the beginning of anything and everything you want to achieve.
- kccqzy 10mo agoIt totally is. I don’t remember where I heard it from but there’s a saying that all poverty is energy poverty. Not enough food for your citizens? That’s because you don’t have enough energy to run the Haber Bosch process for fertilizer production.
- dfee 10mo agoshort of the defense of energy infrastructure, of course.
- siscia 10mo agoWhat's the hard part?
- noosphr 10mo agoNuclear build out, wires and transformers. China has been building 5% extra nuclear capacity every year for the last 30 years. On target for making up 24% of their energy mix in 2060.
- dalyons 10mo agoEverything I’ve read says their nuclear share is actually declining y/y, due to the crazy growth of renewables. I think that target is out of date?
- subroutine 10mo agoIf they build out wind and solar first then yes, the nuclear share will have declined year over year.
- dyauspitr 10mo agoDeclining because they’re building out everything else so rapidly. I believe they have 30+ reactors being actively constructed right now.
- dalyons 10mo agoSure, I’m just pointing out that 24% share of power being nuke by 2060 is never going to happen now. Renewables got too cheap, and it’s not “on target”
- noosphr 10mo agoIf I have zero wives yesterday and one today, by next week I will need a new house for all my new wives. Like I said in the original post: >Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose. >The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe. Only capitalists are so penny wise and pound foolish to bet their civilization on the lowest bidder while hoping the inevitable doesn't happen in the next quarter.
- dalyons 10mo agoI agree with you, china is building risk mitigation in a way that no one else is, and it will serve them well. However, in this thread I’m solely replying to your comment on the “24% nuke by 2060” plan. That particular plan is not going to happen any more, nuclear is not competitive enough, even for china.
- bobson381 10mo agoWeathering the knock-on effects of ecological overshoot, probably. It's going to be interesting.
- jacquesm 10mo agoClimate change, and having an abundance of energy allows a country to offset some of those challenges.
- phtrivier 10mo agoDemography. They're soon going to run out of "young" workers, which mean they have to invent the robotics of the 2100s to ensure the few remaining people will have machine to harvest crops and wage wars. Also, they're soon going to run out of women, so they need to perfect artificial wombs. The few remaining party elites will want to live practically forever, so biology will be on the programs once fusion and robots have been cracked. And it doesnot even seem like china will make ussr-level mistakes. Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.)
- komali2 10mo ago> Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.) Might be more accurate to say that the PRC has successfully done an opium wars situation to the USA with e.g. fentanyl precursors.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoPeople worship China for being "green focused". The reality is that they don't have a good source of fossil fuels, and energy independence is a core necessity.
- dahart 10mo agoThe trend is clear that if we keep using fossil up, then soon nobody will have a good source for it. And it’s clear that for geopolitical reasons in addition to environmental reasons, energy independence will be a core necessity everywhere on earth. It’s handy that the sun is sending us enough energy, directly (solar) and indirectly (wind, hydro), that nobody has a good reason not to be “green focused” and phase out fossil fuels for energy. Any country that leads and shows the rest of the world that it can be done deserves applause.
- chaostheory 10mo agoWho is going to pay for it? Even when it was cheap, solar uptake was low except in Texas. EV adoption is still poor outside of California. Then there’s the issue of a K Shaped economy. Outside of our bubble in Silicon Valley, a lot of people can barely afford necessities let alone go green.
- triceratops 10mo agoChina isn't "going green" to go green. They're doing it because it's cheaper. The elites are pinning us to fossil fuels and driving up the cost of necessities.
- dahart 10mo agoYou might be confusing consumer purchasing choices with the national energy policy and infrastructure we were talking about. Going green personally is only more expensive to consumers in places where our country isn’t building and offering green power by default. EVs are a bit of a different topic. But what difference does it make when fossil fuels run out? Left unchecked, sooner or later market forces will make oil much more expensive as it becomes scarce, and eventually there is no choice. Yes we might be decades or even hundreds of years away from that, but in the big picture that’s not far away, and it doesn’t matter because the eventuality is obvious. Eventually there will be no such thing as non-renewable energy. Might as well start now.
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