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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.” https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants#....

By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year. IE adding ~20GW in December has 1/12th impact in 2023, but it’s now online for the next ~25 years. Which is why some predictions have China using less coal in 2024 despite bringing new power plants online in 2023.

China alone represents 30% of the world’s electricity production/consumption so it has real impact, but they just don’t have the natural gas supplies which the US has used to ween itself off coal.

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Apparently part of the issue is that the Chinese grid is very badly managed.

They can build physical grid connections much more easily than we can manage (for the usual values of “we”), but they manage interprovincial transmission according to fixed schedules rather than responding to demand.

Which means that they have a relatively easy lever they can pull to significantly lower emissions even further.

Undoing dumb rules that favour existing vested interests is hard everywhere.

I mean, the US doesn't exactly cover itself in glory in its own utility regulations. "cost-of-service" regulation means that monopoly utilities are allowed to charge such that they make a regulated rate of return on the cost of providing the service. So the more they increase their costs, the more money they are permitted to make!

"Relatively easy" is a poor phrasing choice on my part. It's still very hard, but it's one of the easiest in a list of really hard tasks. Solving climate change involves a lot of really hard problems.

Also critically they don’t have to build these coal plant to be economically used in the same way as free market states do. They’re building them mostly as a hedge - if they end up barely used , which is likely given renewable trends, that’s ok for state owned power. It makes everything a bit more expensive, but you can’t exactly vote for an alternative.

If they need to get used a lot for whatever reason, no one is unhappy either, you avoid shortages and discontent.

Whereas coal stopped being built in market economies roughly as soon as it became uneconomical.

How do you vote for an alternative in the US?

If a state gov made choices that made power way more expensive than it should be, and people get upset enough it theoretically could hurt them in an election. I realize this hasn’t happened in California but it’s possible

> That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.

That doesn't sound all that misleading then? If they've installed 20 times more coal generating capacity than the rest of the world and are operating it 50% of the time then they're still adding 10 times more emissions than the rest of the world combined, and that's assuming the rest of the world will all be operating their coal-fired power plants fully 100% of the time.

> By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year.

217 GW of nameplate capacity or of average generation? These are very different numbers for solar because of the low capacity factor.

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