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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

China has distracted the USA energy focus by dumping cheap solar panels here while continuing to develop advanced nuclear generation capabilities at home.

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China is simply betting on all horses: solar, wind, thorium, batteries, coal even, anything to not buy foreign oil and be as independent, self-sufficient as possible. Seems like it's working too

Seems like a wise thing to do too.

Yup.. Happens to align somewhat with climate goals too, luckily for the rest of us. Once solar+batteries becomes the cheapest form of generation, the coal usage should also drop, if that isn't already the case

> Once solar+batteries becomes the cheapest form of generation, the coal usage should also drop

Marginal versus bulk. It can make sense, economically, to keep building coal plants even if solar is cheaper if you’re building solar as fast as you can and still need more power.

Luckily it is already the case, and it looks like coal is starting to drop in china

Exactly. That's less noticed by many people. Just give you two examples:

1.While China scaled up the EV production, the development of Hydrogen based technology is still going on. There are some progress but lost in the bigger noise of EV.

2.China became the largest automobile exporter, leading by EV. But most people thought that's because EV took over ICE. That's partially true because EV dominate the export. What the most people missing is a quite portion of export are ICE cars. Because the ICE engine from China achieved higher energy transformation efficiency than Japanese and German cars. Again the information was lost in the EV noise.

How exactly has it distracted the U.S?

I don't see the U.S rushing to adopt either renewables or nuclear. We're just increasing our fossil fuel burning (natural gas).

> I don't see the U.S rushing to adopt either renewables or nuclear. We're just increasing our fossil fuel burning (natural gas)

This is wrong. Natural gas is falling from 42% of U.S. electricity generation in '23 and '24 to 40% in '25E and '26E [1]. Renewables, meanwhile, keep marching from 23% ('24) to 24% ('25E) and 26% ('26E). (Nuclear falls from 19% ('24) to 18% ('25E and '26E).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/

That's capacity, not generation. Getting through the accounting tricks that make renewables seem viable is a challenge. 1 watt of nuclear capacity is worth 1.5 watts of FF and 9 watts of renewables. That's because the amount of power from each type of plant is very different due to downtimes of generation. Nuclear runs all the time and refuels for a couple of days every 18 months (depending on the reactor). FF plants run most of the time by require 10x more maintenance downtime. Renewables only make power about 10% of the time. That's how they skew the numbers to make renewables seem viable when they produce a shockingly low amount of actual power. Oh, and if you use renewables for baseload you have to keep a spinning reserve which means they actually increase (not decrease) the amount of CO2 emitted per watt generated.

You should tell the folks overwhelming choosing to build and finance renewable power plants! They clearly missed this key point, they’ll surely be grateful you let them know that their renewable investments don’t make sense, and they should have picked nuclear due to it being cheaper overall

> That's capacity, not generation

Irrelevant. The question is what we're investing in. "The U.S" is "rushing to adopt...renewables."

> FF plants run most of the time

"CCGT capacity factor rose from 40% in 2008 to 57% in 2022" [1]. "In the western United States," meanwhile "the capacity value of PV plants can be in the range of 50% to 80%" [2].

> That's how they skew the numbers to make renewables seem viable when they produce a shockingly low amount of actual power

This is a report from Trump's EIA.

[1] https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/average-utili...

[2] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57582.pdf

> That's capacity, not generation.

No that’s generation. It’s on page 49 of the report. Table 7d Part 1 “US Regional Electricity Generation” it’s measured in billions of kilowatt hours.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf

And if anyone is interested I have some of my own graphs on top of the EIA data to make it easier to read - https://eia.languagelatte.com/

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