Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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China backing off coal power plant approvals after 2022-23 surge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303635 - Aug 2024

China's total wind and solar capacity outstrips coal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220098 - Aug 2024

China is on track to reach its 2030 clean energy targets already - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41026542 - July 2024

China installing the wind / solar equivalent of 5 nuclear power stations a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982276 - July 2024

China building two-thirds of world's wind and solar projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40940950 - July 2024

China's clean energy pushes coal to record-low 53% share of power in May 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935688 - July 2024

China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052 - July 2024

China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39440374 - Feb 2024

Look at trajectories, think in systems. They are rapidly building a nation state clean energy electrical system, and when they're done domestically, these products will be exported globally.

The graphs on the below page might be helpful.

https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...

I'm not sure the trajectory of PR matters much.

The actual generation trajectory seems more useful: https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/CHN

I think that page is telling a similar story to the PR:

"Primary energy production (percentage)" says 15% in Table 1 at the top, but I'm not sure how that's calculated - the whole table is as it seems to contradict the rest of the page:

- Generation by renewable sources has grown from 25% -> 40% from 2013 -> 2022 (Figure 5)

- 32 new nuclear power plants under construction in 2023 (Table 5)

- 49% of installed capacity in 2022 was renewables (Figure 6)

Nuclear is much more important than wind and solar because it provides baseload and the plants last longer than 20 years.

Electricity generation is what the grandparent was talking about, though the actual primary energy consumption of fossil fuels is more important w.r.t. climate change.

Primary energy production includes things like domestic coal production. Primary energy consumption includes things like gas consumption by cars, imports and distribution losses.

yeah but your article is about 2021 and 2022, and the point is this stuff is changing really fast especially in the past 2 years

I’m so tired explaining people what the capacity factor and baseload are and why wind and solar do not replace conventional power plants.

Germany has an installed solar capacity of 100 GW, 72 GW wind and some hydro and bio mass.

Yet there are 109 coal plants and 267 natural gas plants in Germany.

Comparing wind and solar with conventional power plants is completely pointless.

Unless you have a way of storing your power and replaying it when needed.

Like a lake that can maybe sustain 36GW of output for 10 hours.

I know it is a typo, but for other readers the figure in the article is 3.6 GW from 12 300 MW turbines, not 36 GW.

The best metric is CO2 reduction. Running fossil fuel plants for less time is a useful objective towards that.

Sure - all I'm saying is that they still have a whole lot of building to do, that's all. Reading the headlines it's sometimes easy to think that they're pretty much already there while the current production mix is not all that great yet.

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