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Comment by tick_tock_tick | Hacker News Reader

If this comes true which is a BIG if since the calculations include "carbon pricing and pollution policies" which are not happening anytime soon in China.

It will be almost completely due to the cheap price of natural gas not renewables as the article implies.

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Every coal plant closed is a coal plant closed.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

China can make no changes and we can still make the world a better place. Start with your neighborhood first.

I didn't say anything about good/bad just that the article is implying something very different than reality.

I'm just googling, but FWIW, from 2017: The China Carbon Market Just Launched, And It's The World's Largest. Here's How It Can Succeed. https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2017/12/19/the...

At a cursory glance, it seems like it's still ongoing, at a price of 8$/ton: https://www.icf.com/insights/public-policy/china-carbon-pric...

Solar's gone down in price 80% in a decade, and is still continuing that downward trend.

Wind, both on and offshore, is also getting cheaper.

By 2030, new solar will certainly be cheaper in China than it is to operate existing coal plants.

I'm a lot more comfortable betting that mass-manufactured things get cheaper, than I am on the price of natural gas a few years or a decade out. With solar and wind going down another 50% and battery prices under $100/kWh, the economics are pretty powerful.

The politics are just as powerful; China has massive internal pressure to clean up the air (and people have been reminded of how clean it could be), and a chance at replacing the US for world leadership if it can show the way forward on climate.

Unlike the USA, China does not have huge resources of natural gas. For the most part, natural gas will not replace coal in China.

China does have a lot of renewables[1] - enormous solar and wind farms in the interior and west, and the potential for far more. These can produce energy much cheaper than coal plants can. But the challenge is getting that energy to the more populous provinces in the south and east where it’s needed. Transmission infrastructure is expensive, even in China.

[1] Renewables supplied 27% of China’s electricity in 2017, compared to only 4% for natural gas.

> Unlike the USA, China does not have a lot of natural gas.

China doesn't need a lot of natural gas within its borders. It's neighbors with Russia, which can supply via pipeline all the natural gas that China can take. The issue is it remains cheaper to do coal domestically in China than to buy natural gas from Russia, so they overwhelmingly prefer to do that still. It's also of course expedient for China to use coal, whereas pipelines and energy deals can take a decade.

Their 2014 deal was a $400 billion arrangement involving an 8,000 km pipeline. China has greater access to natural gas thanks to bordering Russia, than nearly all of the world's largest natural gas producers have access to natural gas in their own backyards.

Perhaps, but it’s hard to see China ever wanting to become too dependent on imported natural gas. They like coal not only because it’s cheap (which, increasingly, it isn’t), but because it’s domestic.

The virus might change that calculation to some degree, now that we know it can be transmitted via air pollution.

Do we?

“Know” is perhaps strong, but there are studies pointing that way.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v...

https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_le-coronavirus-pourr...

Russia has shown to be willing to use natural gas as a geopolitical weapon. There is no chance China will become dependant on natural gas from outside their border.

I'm thinking that China could flip the script by getting Russia to become dependent on Chinese money buying their gas. Use just enough of it to establish the relationship, but not so much that a pipeline shutdown will overly harm the Chinese economy.

The population ratio (~10:1) and GDP ratio (~4:1) makes it possible to create this scenario.

Not only that, but Russia-Chinese relations have not always been smooth. They have had dustups over one of the longest land borders in the world before.

With this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Sino-Soviet_Border_Agreem... I think border disagreement already solved. Besides, I believe they realize the contention between them only strengthens NATO over them. I think the possible conflict nowadays is influence over central Asia. However, they might share the influence with China got the economic influence and Russia got political influence. It is interesting to predict this balance post-Putin though.

I mean, that's for now. Russia and the US also signed an agreement over the Ukraine in 1994 and look how that went.

That's why if one of the parties goes caput the balance might be disturbed.

Ukraine moving out of the Russian, and into the NATO sphere of influence is the reason for why that went the way it did.

The China-Russia dynamic is a little different.

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