Hacker News Reader

Comment by baud147258 | Hacker News Reader

And they are still using coal to produce electricity.

This is probably still a positive change on several levels. Plants can be remediated better than vehicles, electrification delinks generation from use to ease later greening, and for particulate pollution (unlike CO2) moving emissions away from population centers is meaningful.

That said... yes. Electrification is a massive improvement in the US, Canada, and Western Europe, but much less useful in Russia, China, and much of SE Asia. Adding to that, pushing pollution sources away from cities reinforces the demographic crisis China has had brewing for a long time, with everything from lead to lack of iodine creating serious permanent health issues in rural regions.

That's a separate problem. If/when they switch to renewable plants, then they'll already have an electric bus fleet to take advantage of that.

This World Resources Institute graph^1 shows intense growth in solar electricity generation in China so they are at least moving away from fossil fuel electricity generation at a rapid pace and fossil fuel electricity generation is plateauing^0 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m... [1] https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/distributed-solar-pv-china-...

China is in fact not moving away from fossil fuels, they're aggressively expanding their fossil fuel use. They're adding a minority of renewable energy into the mix of their new energy demand, while building a very large number of new coal plants. They're very openly lying about their environmental efforts. They're also aggressively using their state companies to build coal plants external of their borders.

This is the same tactic they use on trade. They're hyper protectionist about access to their economy, and then claim they're free traders.

"China's leading role in financing a wave of new coal plants across Asia is drawing fresh scrutiny as the world’s top climate scientists weigh calling for much deeper cuts in emissions. China, India, Japan and the Philippines rank among the biggest investors in the 1,380 coal plants under construction or development worldwide, according to a study by the German pressure group Urgewald released Thursday."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/china-s-f...

"The research, carried out by green campaigners CoalSwarm, suggests that 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China. The authors say this is the same capacity to produce electricity as the entire US coal fleet. The report says that at present China has 993 gigawatts of coal power capacity, but the approved new plants would increase this by 25%."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/climate/china-energy-comp...

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/6/17427030...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/06/china-is-massively-betting-o...

> fossil fuel electricity generation is plateauing^0

The graph you linked mostly shows exponential growth, with a slowdown in the last measured year. But similar kinks are visible twice before, with growth continuing at the same pace afterwards. I wouldn't call that "plateauing".

Well, there is another factor, the actual push to renewable energy sources and the fact that the cost of the next trillion watts of renewable energy will cost half the first https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-02/green-ene...

I flew across China earlier this year, and saw thousands and thousands of windmills that weren't there a few years ago, many had been built around open cast coal mines (and power plants), obviously they're planning on replacing the coal with wind and reusing the sunk-cost transmission lines

From a pollution perspective, is it better to have 1 coal plant generating electricity for an electric bus fleet, or to have a fleet of buses that run on hybrid-electric diesel or CNG?

Diesel busses stink and pollute no matter what - even the modern hybrid ones. I can tell you that as a Londoner!

Natural gas might be better, but for whatever reason it’s never taken off here. Seems like electric is the way things are going.

It's not a simple calculation. It depends whose numbers you use for the calculation. First off, do you only care about CO2, or are you interested in other by products of coal consumption like NOx? Which kind of coal plant, how efficient is it? What kind of coal is in use? Then, on the consumption side, it depends on your electric busses' efficiency, leakage of CNG into methane emissions, honestly there are too many specific parameters left unspecified in your question.

An electric bus doesn't produce particulates and NOx right where people live and work. So it has the least effect on local air pollution.

CNG is at least way better than diesel.

If you have to use fossil fuels a combined cycle natural gas plant generating electricity and electric buses is your best option.

That said I tend to discount arguments that compare things to coal since coal just needs to go away.

Just like the US

Reply on news.ycombinator.com