China installing the wind / solar equivalent of 5 nuclear power stations a week
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
I hope India follows suit.
It's apparently 1200GW, but the grid's capacity in 2019 was 3TW - so after accounting for capacity factor (0.25) china was only targeting ~10% renewables by 2030, compared to Australia's 80% grid share. The share will probably be higher than that in China, but it's still ridiculous to not provide a comparable number in the article.
It's easy to beat a goal that's set low, surprise! Australia's goal of 80% seems like a solid number to me as well, and given the general trajectory of renewables it would not surprise me if the grid is defacto all renewables shortly after that time anyway.
Comparing absolute numbers is obviously stupid too. 1.4B is ~50x the Australian population, so china installing 50x the capacity ("they install in a week what we install in a year") is not at all surprising (and hilarious to compare the numbers directly anywU)
The whole article just seems to be a bit of a puff piece giving air to an unambitious target. The ABC has really gone downhill, and it's a bit sad how uncritical they can be nowadays :( (not to detract from china making progress - that's always good - but this seems like a pretty baseline result given their population)
I am also not clear that it is that much more ambitious. You are not comparing the correct numbers. 1200 GW in 2030 is just solar and wind, they are targeting 3.9TW renewables by 2030 and 80% non-fossil by 2060.
I found the info from a quick look outside the article, so it could definitely be questionable. I will say, China has a bunch of hydro iirc, and right now a lot of countries with lots of renewables is is likely as not just down to huge hydro shares than anything else (though that is obviously changing quite fast nowadays).
Even by the targets (which are, admittedly, just targets, AU is targetting 80% renewable share 2030 vs CN 2060. I do expect us to be better given relative wealth etc, though all that probably matters less and less as renewables become the most competitive.
Anyway, mostly I'm frustrated by the article not providing a good analysis of the news, it's just repeating what the think tank said (this os sadly becoming par for the course for the ABC nowadays, I haven't found it to have high quality reporting :()
I understand your frustration. I had to dig quite a bit to find numbers I could use, because there are multiple energy categories that are used inconsistently: solar&wind, all renewables, non-fossil. Then they are combined with two main ways of measuring them: capacity and average production. Then there are targets, predictions and in-production. It is a nightmare to get fair 1:1 comparisons.
- p.v. modules, inverters, batteries in China have seen falling prices and not cost little enough to be very convenient, oh, the opposite happen in the west where after decades of high prices slowly lowering we even witness some spikes, especially for batteries witch now most understand are key elements to use p.v. and co ensuring power to anything on 24h... So the point is "why" and "who profit, in the short term" and the answer is OUR cleptocracy who talk about free trade only when they are free, not anyone else. Who loose most? Us, the people from the west...
- China have already hit various grids limits and start to understand that "the California model" of renewable can't scale, they works very well for SELF CONSUMPTION, meaning a gazillion of small plants for personal (domestic, single SME/local site size) where are a gazillion of individual small smart grid, because we can't have a large smart grid technically and trying to achieve it is such a security threat that no country so far want to try.
To resume: our cleptocracy want us "without nothing" in 2030 and they start to understand that the new deal is incompatible with this agenda, so they hit the new deal break hoping to find a way to keep it in their "smart cities", novel Fordlandia doomed to fails as the original and utterly unsustainable. Please try to prove I'm wrong...
> "They have clear targets and every part of their government is harnessed to deliver the plan," he said.
Do they? The fact that this is off-plan and happening very quickly makes me think that we've probably crossed a threshold and people are just building the things because they are cheap. I never understood why these conversations always seem to have the frame that the governments of the world have to be so deeply involved in constructing power plants. It is only really a factor in nuclear power because the west keeps regulating new plants out of the picture. Free markets love renewables, they have low capital costs and are very modular.
I'd love to see Australia take up China's strategy of building everything. Harmonising our nuclear policy to mimic China's appears superficially to be an extremely clever idea.
To give an example, in the late 80s/early 90s, California mandated that 10% of major automakers' car sales be zero or very low emissions. GM started leasing EVs in 1996, and Toyota start selling the first hybrid in 1998.
Total coal use was 82.4 exajules in 2013 and 82.5 exajules in 2019. It’s increased since then, but nothing like the number of power plants they have added. https://www.statista.com/statistics/265491/chinese-coal-cons...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935688 ("HN: China's clean energy pushes coal to record-low 53% share of power in May 2024")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052 ("HN: China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/15/china-switches-on-fir... ("China switches on first large-scale sodium-ion battery")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-15/top-pollu... | https://archive.today/wioou ("Top Polluter China’s Shrinking Emissions Put Carbon Peak in Play")
Those coal generators will end up as stranded assets (I believe the Chinese term is "tofu dreg"), and China is ramping battery storage deployments to firm renewables.
High coal prices mean that most coal plants in China are operating at a loss. In 2018, almost 50% had a net financial loss.2 Things have only gotten worse: data from the China Electricity Council suggests that more than half of its large coal firms made a loss in the first half of 2022.
...
China is offering ‘capacity payments’ to power plants to keep them online. This provides plants with a source of income even when they’re not being used. Some project that by the end of the decade many coal plants will be making more money from not running than actually producing power. This seems credible if we look at the tumbling capacity factors expected from S&P over the next few decades.
https://energynews.us/2013/06/17/explainer-how-capacity-mark...
Australia is also taking losses on its coal generation, and building out batteries at a tremendous rate.
> Australia’s rapid shift from coal-fired power to cleaner alternatives is underwriting a boom in battery projects able to store solar and wind energy.
> The country has at least 250 planned battery developments with a potential capacity of almost 130,000 megawatt-hours, a pipeline that’s second only to China, data compiled by BloombergNEF show. While Australia still relies on coal for more than half of its electricity generation, many major plants are set to close in the next decade.
> “Operating a reliable low-carbon power system means that energy storage is imperative,” and investments are becoming “more urgent” as proposals to shutter coal assets accelerate, said Tim Jordan, commissioner of the Australian Energy Market Commission, the government’s adviser on energy policy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/end-of-co... | https://archive.today/2owbd
So, the coal plants are unpleasant, but they are not long for this world, as the global renewables and storage deployment flywheel comes up to speed.
Tofu dreg buildings aren't stranded assets, they're (usually) buildings that have such low built quality that they're unusable. I.e having concrete walls you can rip parts out of with a single bare hand, skipping foundation entirely, making the whole thing topple over, creating drains that just end within a few cm etc
It's gonna be spicy if you've got a tofu dreg coal power plant
2. They’re built to be able to ramp up/down fairly rapidly so they can be used as backup for renewables. Just because they build them doesn’t mean they will run at 100% capacity.
3. Chinas economy is slowing down. Probably more than official numbers would have you believe.
As touched on in the other commenters, nothing points at an impending huge growth in the actual amount of coal being burnt.
But sure, the number of coal power plants being built/planned is worrying. We should keep the pressure up.
Which makes sense because China's primary goal is energy independence, not decarbonization. China has lots of thermal coal, they don't need to import it, unlike gas or metallurgical coal.
and will keep dropping. At the moment there's a load of capacity coming along, about 3x current demand which will probably lead to considearably lower prices and more batteries https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-...
Really baffling for an extremely sparse country with a huge desert in the center that shouldn’t be in anyone’s backyard.
Nobody lives in the desert. So, there's no decent transmission systems. People live in the right hand side of the dividing range, or close to it. So we put energy distribution systems close to the east, and thats where the power stations are, and so thats where the transmission lines are, and they need to be upgraded so a lot of farmers who will see their neighbours lines, but won't get $100,000 line offset money are angry.
If you want examples of "make it in the desert" then you're looking at a Queensland project called "CopperString" and at the work Mike Cannon-Brookes "Sun Cable" project in the Northern Territory. Or, the huge investments in solar made by the mostly-deserted-lands mining and minerals sector, replacing super-expensive diesel for their off-grid power needs (mainly in West Australia)
There's a break-even point. But, that assumes you WANT to transfer electricity over the distance. Given that the desert is more than 600km from most habitation I agree that per-unit-travel it's not more expensive, but the thing is there are viable sites for generation closer to the location of use, which means both transmission cost and losses, and cost-of-construction are below the break even point: If you want to use deserted regions, you have to be prepared to front load the construction cost with higher total costs.
The Sun Cable system being planned for the N.T. will be using HVDC to transmit power into Indonesia and Singapore, if it gets off the ground. The Trans-tasman electricity feeder cable is HVDC (for instance) but people continue to argue it is not economically viable, despite Tasmania have huge hydro power resources and arguably being able to do what the Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydro is meant to do.
W.A. is 2000km from the eastern Seaboard. an HVDC would work fine. There is no strong economic drive to make the eastern seaboard transmission network which spans South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, N.S.W. and Queensland a national grid.
I wonder how long until smoggy Chinese cities are a thing of the past.
China Building Twice as Much Wind and Solar as Rest of World Combined
But as always humanity manages to get lost in a glass of water.
China still has plans for some 100 nuclear reactors (IIRC) with 10 or 15 under construction right now (again, ballpark as I recall) and a still standing long term goal of nuclear at 18% maybe 20% of total generation.
China already has nuclear reactors, has generations of skilled nuclear reactor technicians and a new generation in the pipeline being trained. It's also a large economy.
Australia is a great deal smaller in both population and wealth and utterly lacks any significant skill set in nuclear power generation and engineering, a handful of Australian nuclear scientists aside.
Of the two dominant Australian political parties one essentially denies AGW (climate change) is an issue and seek to do as little as possible, to this end they have proposed their "climate solution" as Nuclear!! (but much later than now, and only a few power stations, and we don't really have an actual plan like a blueprint or time table or permissions from proposed site owners, etc).
This isn't a nuclear plan, it's a plan to build more coal power station "in the meantime" and hope that one day it'll be economical in Australia to buy some "off the shelf" set and forget SMR magical thinking nuclear tech.
As a matter of pragmatic action, in the immediate short term, in an Austraian context, it makes better economic sense to put money now into rapid expansion of renewables and storage - there's even a solid government scientific body report on that.
This isn't a "let's hate nuclear" position, more a "what's the most economically feasible solution in Australia as it stands now" position.
The downplaying of China's nuclear portion of future planning here is entirely based (by my best guess) on not wanting to be seen to say "Hey, it's working in China" to an Australian readership.
It is working in China, but that has no real bearing on nuclear being a good fit in Australia at the present time.
And so wouldn't it be better to put a patch on these lacks? China also had no nuclear competence, now it speaks for itself. Same stuff for the automobile market.
These shortcomings are not a problem, but an opportunity to build an industry. Otherwise with the same mentality there would be no progress.
> This isn't a nuclear plan, it's a plan to build more coal power station "in the meantime" and hope that one day it'll be economical in Australia to buy some "off the shelf" set and forget SMR magical thinking nuclear tech.
Which is equivalent to thinking you can install solar, wind and batteries all in one day. Germany has been investing for decades, hoping to remove coal-fired power plants. But so far, it hasn't succeeded.
At least, with nuclear power, you know that once you build the plant, you're sure you're going to have that energy, for now it's whishful think the rest.
> As a matter of pragmatic action, in the immediate short term, in an Austraian context, it makes better economic sense to put money now into rapid expansion of renewables and storage
And why wouldn't it be possible to do both? The most pragmatic solution would be to diversify.
What's the pyramid of needs to support a sufficient number of nuclear engineers and how long is the lead up time?
China started during the Cold War and has a population and wealth of a billion+ people to draw on, Australia has considerably less.
> Which is equivalent to thinking you can install solar, wind and batteries all in one day.
We can, do, and already have been installing solar and solar batteries in Australia since the 1970s. Today we have massive solar farms going in and city scale battery parks in Adelaide, etc.
Check technical history .. nuclear power plants take a little longer and there are none at present in Australia (the existing facility is a research reactor, different kettle of neutrons).
> And why wouldn't it be possible to do both?
Australia has finite resources to invest in energy solutions, what we invest now gives better returns if put into renewables and we have a commitment to reduce emissions by 2050 that's based on a real problem.
Money we put towards nuclear delivers no power at all for decades and what would eventually result (given what we can afford) is less than we require (shortfall) and still requires money to be put to coal power now to carry us over until the time of not enough nuclear.
Have you read the CSIRO report on Australia's energy options?
Good intent but you're comparing a dictatorship with 1.4 billion people to a mostly conservative, sparsely populated island with 26 million people.
Australia's biggest problem is it needs to find a way to deal with its mining lobbies and political revolving doors hamstringing every attempt to move forward.
If that ever gets dealt with we would move incredibly quickly.
Australia has no nuclear reactors currently, nor any waste disposal facility...
The article is trying to show how easily China can accomplish what will take years here with numerous delays and cost blow outs.
When we do agree to do something, we don't have the skilled man power to do it in under a decade. Our broadband network upgrade for example has taken 15 years and counting to get fibre to everyone.
Something as simple as a rail line from the CBD to an airport can take half a century... and counting...
Australia has huge legal corruption issues.
We can't see clearly how parties and members are funded.
There's nothing illegal in getting a high paying private job after you leave politics even if there were clear conflicts of interest.
Our media is easy to gag legally and without question.