Comment by bayindirh
4 hours ago
> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours.
Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.
Last year France produced 94% of electricity from low-carbon sources, that is impressive.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of...
China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...
For me, both are equally impressive actually. Europe has some great clean-energy countries.
Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me.
This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.