Comment by teach
17 hours ago
Normally I try to go with the most charitable interpretation, but this article makes it difficult.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything....
China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
They are adding everything. They know baseload is important so they build nuclear. They know they can't fill the hole fast enough, so they are still building some coal.
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
On the contrary, check out this graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024. New coal production swamps everything else combined.
They already have well over double the US solar output (US solar output is about 750 Twh according to this source, while China's is a bit over 2000 Twh) and their YoY solar increase is about 4x the US (600 Twh increase in China vs 150 Twh increase in the US)
They are also increasing coal usage, you are correct, however in the past 2 years, their solar output has increased significantly, to the point where it increased more than their coal output in 2024.
My point is that the comment you are quoting is actually technically correct, if you compare 2023 and 2024 in that graph for example, solar was the largest increase in output.
It may be huge someday, but now it is niche, and a tiny fraction of new capacity. Coal is king and not about to be dethroned.
In the last year of that graph 2023-2024, the increase in solar was greater than any other source, including coal, it's 15x greater than nuclear.
And unless people are shoveling coal directly into the data centres this electricity generating gas turbine is intended to be used for the electricity generation mix is more appropriate to conapre:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
why are you fixating on 1 single year? Look at the past 10 years or past 5 years and its the complete opposite.
3 replies →
> Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas.
That graph shows production, not capacity, nor installed capacity in each year.
Well good, those are the correct numbers focus on because:
Solar capacity and say nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil capacity
Are different beasts.
When solar advocates bang on about adding X gigawatts of capacity, they’re being dishonest. What they really mean is they added X/4, because, obviously, it’s sunny only about 25% of the time throughout a year.
Adding batteries doesn’t change that. Still have to over build.
So let’s focus on the numbers that reflect actual production, so we can have an honest conversation.
Nuclear / coal / gas / hydro / fuel oil, even biomass have capacity factors typically about 80%, often about 90%.
Wind and solar are never going up ro those capacity factors, even with batteries (including pumped hydro).
are we looking at the same graph? if you look at the past decade or so, the "solar" slice is clearly widening the fastest
In the graph I'm looking at, with no extrapolating, solar energy is a tiny sliver of coal. If I extrapolate, crossing of the lines looks like something in the far future.
2 replies →
This is designed for "fast" and "high power", but not for efficiency: it's not a combined cycle plant.
Yeah, its totally inefficient - according to Wikipedia a simple cycle gas turbine can be up to 43% efficient - with a combined cycle (you boil water with the first stage jet engine exhaust and then run a steam turbine off that) it can get up to 64%.
So like this there is possibly about 20% of (a lot of) energy/fuel just wasted. You can get even better, running something like a city wide district heating off the waste heat from the steam turbine - potentially reaching 100% in the sense that people get heating, warm running water or possibly also process heat for industrial use.
Or you can do none of that and power a datacenter of questionable utility with it at about 40% efficiency. :P