Comment by phil21
13 hours ago
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.
It's not clear what your issue is or whether you would prefer that country X used absolutely no renewables whatsoever and derived all their energy needs including transport and electricity from damaging and limited fossil fuels.
> 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