Comment by defrost
14 hours ago
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
Sure, but their energy budget includes everything. They don’t have the luxury of importing energy others invested into decades ago when convenient and having it be off balance sheet like Denmark does.
China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.
This is the biggest issue I have with headlines "[country] got all of its electricity from [some renewable] today!" when the reality is they rely on some other supply when [some renewable] has zero output.
Like you say, a lot of countries get a pass because a neighbour invested billions and decades building nuclear. Or else they fall back to coal/gas.
> China would actually have to build stuff to do that.
and they do. Unlike Denmark, China is the world's factory and can use the windfall from exports to fund projects and have them on its balance sheet.
a big part of why china likes renewables so much is because they have to import fossil fuels
they already are a major importer of energy