Comment by seanmcdirmid
4 months ago
You have to look at the locations of their renewables, China can only move so much industry out west due to a lack of water. They haven't been able to bring as much as that electricity back east with UWH transmissions lines as they hoped.
Can you give me some links supporting this? All the references I can find show that China is building transmission lines at about the rate they originally planned to.
They just haven’t built out wha they needed yet, they have capacity and are adding, but there is still a surplus of renewables from the west. At least Lanzhou has went from one of china’s dirtiest to one of their cleanest cities.
They also have a huge amount of line construction in the pipeline and have a tendency to do well at building things when it’s a priority. I feel like in just a few years we’ve seen anti-renewable/anti-China talking points shift from “China won’t build renewables” to “China can’t build renewables, it’s not economically feasible” to “ok, China is building renewables inexpensively and at massive scale but for some reason they won’t connect them to the grid” to “oh they are actually connecting renewables to the grid and emissions are dropping.” That midpoint of “they build but don’t connect” doesn’t feel like a hill I’d want to die on, and instead feels a lot like cope.
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