Note that China's coal usage was basically flat in 2023 and expected to decline in 2024.
China's coal capacity is increasing dramatically, but they're increasingly using their coal plants as peaker plants rather than for base production.
China's coal capacity is increasing dramatically, but they're increasingly using their coal plants as peaker plants rather than for base production.
Short term - nothing much is happening. Rome wasn't built in a day.
The US can idly sit around and burn it's own natural gas and oil. The US at least has the option to maintain the status quo for a long time (it won't). But China doesn't even have this option.
Additionally, auto manufacturing (ICE cars) accounts for ~5% of US employment. For China ICE auto manufacturing is ~0, and they have the opportunity to produce a huge chunk of the worlds EVs. They're not only incentivized massively to get off oil - they're incentivized to get EVERYONE ELSE off of oil, too.
China needs to IMPORT natural gas and oil. They'd much rather lead the world in renewables EXPORT EVs and renewable generation than be reliant on Russia & KSA for energy (the basis of their current economy)...
China will likely cut their emissions faster than the US has - which if you're realistic - the US has done an impressive job.
The US emits ~30% less carbon per capita than it did in 2000. And we're on pace to be at ~40% less by the end of 2030: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...
In 20 years, China is likely to be around ~75% less than today. The US probably won't get from ~40% to ~75% over that time.
The lobbying from our own energy producers will too much to cut that deep that quickly.
The US and China are close to ~50% of emissions: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
No one else besides India is really going to move the needle (certainly not in the wrong direction - no one else is growing fast enough).
India will be the wild card. Will they import renewable energy generation from China or fossil fuel from Russia and KSA?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-renewabl...
Every geopolitically relevant country will feel more secure with renewable, and therefore utterly independent, energy generation.
A reminder that Texas, a uniparty state literally run by Oil Barron families for decades, still gets at least a third of it's power from renewable sources, because it's so goddamned cheap. It doesn't matter how profitable oil is, or how much you pump, it will always be cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to replace it with power that just manifests itself out of the sky or wind for merely the cost of maintenance.
Each oil well requires tens of highly skilled, rather well paid tradespeople to manage, drill, run, explode, etc. An entire field of wind turbines requires one or two small teams of somewhat well paid maintenance engineers.
The rest of your post is spot on, though.
https://grid-analytics.ece.utexas.edu/chart/fuel-type-genera...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861358
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2024/01/03/plan-to-...
What I do hear about is this (possibly outdated, I'm increasingly noticing the references there are not kept up to date) claim on Wikipedia:
> On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via eight 5 GW superconductor links, although the Texas Interconnection does not intend to connect for regulatory reasons. The Eastern Interconnection withdrew from the project in 2015, rendering the project moot. Construction was never started.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/how-texa... ("How Texas became the hottest grid battery market in the country")
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-power-grid-bat... ("As brutal heat tests Texas’ power grid, batteries play a small but growing role in keeping the lights on")
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/batteries-texas-consumers-6... ("Batteries saved Texas consumers $683M during 2-day January freeze: Aurora Energy Research")
https://web.archive.org/web/20240707022007/https://www.eia.g... (EIA 12 month forward looking generator deployment; scope to Texas and gray icons, which indicate battery storage)
vel0city's recent comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504630: "Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026."
If you look at California, what happens is that renewables grow rapidly, pushing out fossil generation (coal first, and then fossil gas, as fossil gas is more flexible from a generation perspective wrt throttling and commodity cost). At some point, you arrive at a situation where your spot prices drop below zero during daylight hours (as you're generating power in excess of grid demand, renewables can bid to give away the power or curtail, fossil gas and coal cannot, they'll take the L to keep spinning while paying for fuel and the per hour O&M costs). This is when battery deployment takes off, as batteries can charge when power is almost free, and discharge in the evening hours after sunset when it is profitable to do so. You can see California's ~10GW of batteries "breathe" daily in the data doing this. This revenue, combined with grid services (synthetic inertia, black start capability readiness [jump starting fossil generators during a grid outage]), makes batteries a strong economic proposition from an investment perspective.
Battery firmed renewables compete directly with fossil gas from a cost perspective. As of ~6 months ago, Texas had 100GW of solar in ERCOT’s interconnect queue, in comparison to ~65.8GW of fossil gas generation and ~14.3GW of coal generation currently operating. Even assuming worst case capacity factor (20% hypothetical vs 25% actual per https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...), 75GW of solar with a storage component is enough to push that coal generation out of the mix. It's also unlikely solar deployments stop or slow down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601878 ("HN: Lazard: IRA brings LCOS of 100MW, 4hr standalone BESS down as low as US$124/MWh")
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost... ("Lazard 2023 Levelized Cost Of Energy+")
Related citation wrt battery costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052 ("HN: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")