Comment by bgnn

Not in the history so far. I'm just trying to balance the extreme negative view on Chinese subsidies. They are of similar nature, and scale (as percentage of the total economy). In the EU we have this view of Chinese EVs because they get subsidies from the state, whereas we are doing the same for European car manufacturers (especially Germany amd France). We can at least be rational in our analysis.

I mean, yes. The coal industry put huge amounts of effort into trying to halt oil and later gas, and it didn't really work in the end.

The entire world gets the bulk of their energy from fossil. One country is leading the pack in defossiling their economy relatively rapidly, and that's China. Double emissions of the US translates to half-emissions on a per-capita basis. Much less if you include historical emissions. And China's emissions dropped in the previous period, the US increased.

The coal plants are known to be built to support economic growth for one (simple truth), and as baseload for renewable sources (you simply can't go renewable without this, at the moment). Coal plant utilisation rates have been dropping for two decades and are expected to keep dropping. [0]

[0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DJUu!,w_1456,c_limit...

A case study in lying by omission. They build coal plants but they don't use them. In 2024 more than 80% of their energy growth came from solar and wind. As of 2023 solar was already cheaper than coal in China.

What do you gain from lying like this?

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/#:~:tex...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

Yup, China added the most capacity in the world of solar, coal and nuclear at the same time.

However, the new coal plants are largely replacing old, inefficient, heavily polluting ones, so they're still a net positive.

California obtains almost 80% of their daily needs from solar, and is the world’s fourth largest economy. Almost the entire US could run off of solar and batteries based on current utility scale costs of both technologies (but will likely continue to use a mix of nuclear, renewables, batteries, transmission, demand response, and fossil gas for filling in the gaps as learning curves continue to deliver cheaper low carbon energy).

It's simply a matter of will (or in the case of the US, lack thereof).

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35097.pdf

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31072025/inside-clean-ene...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

https://electrek.co/2025/06/20/batteries-are-so-cheap-now-so...

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/26/there-is-one-clear-winn...

And China's biggest solar and wind farms are in Gansu and Xinjiang. Which is even more remote.

China developed and built many UHVDC transmission lines to deal with it.

True. But as usual there is more to it. US is running on cheap fossil fuels to most part, though the renewables aren't negligible too. The fossil fuels are actually subsidized, and they are cheap because they are results of exploitation of cheap land. On top of that there are subsidies like tax breaks on the drilling costs etc.. To be fair this is also the case for hydroelectric etc.

So, similar dynamic. If the oil fields, coal mines etc would be sitting on prime land, you wouldn't have it this cheap. If there weren't subsidies, they wouldn't have been this cheap. It's very hard to compare different energy sources because of this. But solar being cheap isn't only a Chiblnese phenomenon. India, Spain etc all prove this. It's cheap when you have a lot of empty land and sunshine.

Ridiculously cheap power is what turns near worthless land into valuable land.