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Comment by barney54 | Hacker News Reader

Riding a bike is cheaper than driving. Driving a car is dead.

China produces more power from renewables than the entire generation capacity of the UK. You can build more firm generation capacity with solar and batteries than a typical nuclear generator, in a year, at a cheaper price. Hell of a bike.

Nuclear has a niche, but it got steamrolled by the S curve of solar, wind, and batteries.

Slight amendment: China is installing more wind and solar PV generation capacity this year than the entire generation capacity of the UK. The increment, not the total.

Edit: Nuclear power generation in China has, IIRC, tripled in the 21st century.

But demand has gone up much more than twentyfold though, and this year we are the crossover point where wind an PV manufacturing and install rates, and transmission line build rates, exceed the growth of demand, so fossil plants can start to be retired there.

If nuclear can't be built fast in China, where can it?

Citation:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...

> The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.

> The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.

You won’t get an answer to this. The energy world has changed very quickly in the past few years, and many can’t adjust their opinions to take new data and trends into account.

It would be interesting to see what the consequences of that would be. China solar addition scale is from another fourth dimension. Not only it is massive but it seems to be accelerating too. They added more in PV Solar in 2022 than the whole PV installations of Germany. It seems that the politicians there realize that being dependent on unstable regions (ie: Middle-East) for fuel is not wise. They are not B.S.ing their population with green propaganda and instead going full speed for PV solar and electric vehicles.

Edit: I found the 2022 numbers on Wikipedia and got curious what the 2023 outlook is going to be. It is shocking: https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-sur... Their 2023 numbers are double the 2022.

Electricity is fungible.

But not easily storable.

Not entirely true. There's all sorts of mechanical storage systems, the most common being artificial hydroelectric and flywheels - spin something really fast and than extract energy from its rotational velocity later.

But a practical issue here is that there hasn't really been much motivation to develop this industry, because there's been relatively little critical necessity for high capacity at-scale energy storage.

Just store it by selling it to your neighbor state or country and buying it back when their renewables are at peak :)

It is very easily storable, and in energy markets that are driven by free markets (rather than utility biases or legislative mandates), storage is one of the biggest investments on the grid:

> Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future.

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/1017

Terrible metaphor, obviously. All electricity generating methods are compared in the same way, cost per power generated.

Unless you are in USA because we like to live each in a separate house instead of apartment complex.

I'd want a separate house, too, if my neighbors are Americans.

Privileged myopia is certainly is alive in thriving!

I say this as someone who bikes their kid around most of the time; I love biking but it is way of life that only a minority of people can make work.

Riding a bike requires you to live in a shoebox-sized apartment.

Shoeboxes are dead.

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