Comment by bdangubic
14 hours ago
You listed out a whole lot of excuses for America, suburbia this, heating that, etc etc, etc...
Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?
They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.
What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants instead of directing the same labor to building more nuclear or renewable generation? There is no reason to build coal, Trump is a schmuck for proposing it but China have been the ones actually doing it.
Chinese demand is increasing just like everyone else's, and they're both retiring older less efficient plants and using fossil fuels as both peaker and baseline generation. But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China. There's plenty of reason to build out coal capacity to keep grids stabilized while you transition to solar and wind (China finished their 2030 1200GW solar capacity target 6 years early in 2024 and continue to grow that number at an incredible rate).
I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita - despite much of the manufacturing and such not happening in our countries.
> But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China.
"Basically flat" only after running up an exponential curve so that coal consumption is now higher per capita in China than it is in the US and China is generating ~60% of its electricity from coal compared to ~16% in the US.
> I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita
You don't even get to say "westerners" anymore. CO2 emissions are higher per capita in China than they are in Europe because they burn such a disproportionate amount of coal, and are only lower than the US and Canada because the US and Canada burn more oil per capita from being so spread out.
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They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined, and are the biggest investor in renewables. Their emission of CO2 just recently peaked. But they need a lot of power, and most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.
> They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined
All the more reason they have no excuse for building coal. Yet they're also burning more coal than the rest of the world combined.
> most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.
If that was actually the case they wouldn't need to build new coal plants because renewable generation at 40% of normal plus the existing traditional power plants that used to be enough to supply 100% of power by themselves would be more than sufficient. More to the point, if that was actually the case then their emissions would be way down because they'd only be burning coal for something like one week every two years.
China needs some form of dispatchable power and is basically using coal instead of gas because they have none. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47276338 for numbers/more detail.
Japan, Spain and France also have negligible oil and gas production and didn't go all-in on coal as a result. Spain is 0.32% coal and 22.5% natural gas. France is 0.31% coal and 5.7% natural gas.
They are building coal for things that cannot yet be handled by renewables because coal is the fossil fuel natural resource they have the most of.
It's the same reason it was the dominant fossil fuel for electricity in the US until the shale revolution made natural gas cheap and abundant.
The reasons Trump is a schmuck for pushing coal are (1) he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage, and (2) in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.
Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage, and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
> What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants
Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?
Assuming you're American, it's a bit rich to have contributed more in absolute terms and then tell other countries what they can't do.
Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy? In rural I can sorta see it. But in cities, why drive a truck? These are all choices that America makes.
> Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?
This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.
> Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy?
The "best selling" light vehicles in the US are pickup trucks because the sales numbers aren't divided out into personal and business purchases and businesses buy a lot of trucks. The best selling non-pickup is the Toyota RAV4, which gets better than 30 MPG in the non-hybrid version and better than 40 MPG in the hybrid version.
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⬆ what he said