China's total wind and solar capacity outstrips coal
renewablesnow.com
renewablesnow.com
Last year, China added a record 293 GW of wind and solar, driven by gigawatt-scale renewable hub projects. Coal power additions were about 40 GW in 2023, while the first half of 2024 saw only 8 GW of new coal capacity, according to Rystad Energy’s estimates.
After a record 216 GW of solar installations last year, China is expected to exceed 230 GW this year. Wind capacity additions are projected to be 75 GW in 2024.
To put those numbers into perspective, the largest nuclear power plant complex in the US (Vogtile) has a capacity of 4.6 GW, while the world's largest power plant at the Three Gorges does 22.5 GW (max).
Edit: I think that all of the top 5 largest are in deserts. Maybe more.
See the executive summary linked at the bottom of this page: https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/utility-scale-solar-2023-ed....
Renewable and storage costs continue to decline, new nuclear is dead, existing nuclear will run as long as safe to do so until decommissioning. Fission lost to fusion at a distance. Very simply, we just keep building and deploying solar as quickly as possible. Wind and batteries too.
https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-global-renewabl...
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/14/overbuilding-solar-at...
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA
I’m sceptical of PV being *the* solution to the world energy issue but who knows, maybe.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-...
https://electrek.co/2024/05/17/china-first-large-scale-sodiu...
That’s prospective technology developed literally in order to overcome the limitation that is lithium availability… The battery you are talking about in China is both the first and very small capacity related to the grid.
I’m sorry but I think you clearly have an axe to grind and are not engaging with me with full intellectual honesty here.
[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292113 ("HN: North Carolina is getting a $1.4B sodium-ion battery gigafactory")
https://electrek.co/2024/08/16/north-carolina-sodium-ion-bat... ("electrek: North Carolina is getting a $1.4B sodium-ion battery gigafactory")
Rare earth elements (REEs) and rare metals are key ingredients for glass, lights, magnets, batteries, and catalytic converters, and used in everything from cell phones to cars. For example, to make the magnet for one wind turbine, you need about 300 kilograms of neodymium.
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/thorium-molten...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Solar is cheaper and easier, so when the sun is shining you get essentially free energy while the nuclear cant be ramped down so you are now producing excess energy during the day.
solar eats nuclear's lunch during the day... with the long term waste issue and military target danger of nuclear thrown in.
It's a bad idea because after renewables have satisfied their share of demand, the residual demand will be very unsteady. And unsteady demand is the opposite of what nuclear is good at satisfying.
fundamentally disagree, this is taking simple facts and changing the narrative around the facts to make renewables look bad.
Renewables are cheaper and faster to invest, build and use.
Nuclear is slower and more expensive to invest, build and use.
there is a use for nuclear, but common widespread rollout is not it.
Peak heating demand is in winter and at night, when solar production is at its lowest. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear can be done by you building nuclear plants, using cogeneration (steam pipes) to distribute heat to the population with reasonable distance of the plant and electricity generated by the plant to operate heat pumps for people who live more distance away.
To do this reliably with solar you need enough solar generation capacity on the coldest day of the year with the least sunlight to generate an amount of power on the order of the size of the entire existing power grid, just for heating. Then you need to store the majority of it for use at night. Then you need an entirely separate backup system in case it's cloudy for too long, because if solar doesn't generate enough power then people freeze. I've heard suggestions of maintaining an entirely redundant set of traditional fossil fuel generating stations to bring online in the event of undersupply -- these things cost nearly as much by themselves as the nuclear plants.
How is that combination supposed to be cheaper? Also, how is it supposed to be built in parallel when battery production capacity is already being consumed to electrify transportation and do peak shaving to allow renewable sources to replace fossil fuels in the existing grid?
Ultimately The storage part is actually a huge improvement to existing design with modular design and decentralized layout giving societies DR capability that would be horrendously expensive in the more centralized designs we use now.
> these things cost nearly as much by themselves as the nuclear plants.
This is completely wrong. A simple cycle turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the capex per W of a nuclear plant; a combined cycle plant maybe 1/10th. Combustion turbines are amazing.
We will also see migration of thermal energy intensive industries to lower latitude places with more sun and less seasonality. Diurnal storage of heat from PV is quite feasible. Sorry Europe, nuclear won't save you.
I will also note that 2/3rds of industrial heat demand is at < 300 C, which means heat pumps can be used (particularly if the process has a warm waste heat stream to feed into the heat pumps.)
https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/solar-industrial-process-heat....
But the premise was "solar is getting so cheap". Wind costs more than solar, and is still intermittent so you still need the backup.
> A simple cycle turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the capex per W of a nuclear plant; a combined cycle plant maybe 1/10th. Combustion turbines are amazing.
That's just the capex for the plant itself. It doesn't include whatever you're using to produce and store the fuel. The capex to store a week's supply of hydrogen in particular would well exceed the capex for the plant itself. Plus the "operating costs" which largely still exist even if the plant is only operated 1% of the time. It still has to pay for full-time security and maintenance and have a full complement of staff on-call at all times in case the plant has to be brought into service.
And many of those costs go up rather than down as usage declines. Right now we have a network for the production and distribution of natural gas which gets funded by domestic use for heating and cooking and existing power plants can tie into those pipelines at minimal incremental cost. If we stop using fossil fuels for heating, now you have to justify the opex on all those pipelines just for the infrequently-used combustion power plants, or you have to build and maintain a different distribution system for the fuel.
The low cost thing to do would be to have have a production and distribution system that can replenish the week's worth of fuel over the course of three months, but now you can get a period of undersupply in November and the tanks won't be replenished until spring. Whereas if you want to be able to produce a week's supply of fuel the next week, add another billion+ dollars per GW of capacity for electrolyzers.
Even if this still costs less than a nuclear plant, this is the cost of the backup system by itself. You still have to add the cost of the renewable sources to be used the other 99% of the time. And the efficiency advantage if nuclear is used for heating via cogeneration.
> We will also see migration of thermal energy intensive industries to lower latitude places with more sun and less seasonality.
Industries are fine, the question is how to heat homes in Europe or the northern half of the US.
And while cost is a big deal, long-term waste isn't that much of an issue, and reactors are not good military targets.
China has a very large desert region in the northwest that receive a LOT of sun year round, so I'd expect the panels to be producing a decent amount of power throughout most of the day.
The biggest problem is actually distance - even a few years back, I was reading that there was a massive amount of solar power, but a very significant percentage was lost in transmission to the most densely populated areas of China which are predominantly in the southeast and east of the country.
These areas are also where a lot of rare earth metals are mined, so feasibly it would be relatively cheap to produce giga-batteries there too smooth demand, but I also suspect that they could see significant advantage to doing things that are traditionally energy-costly like electrolysis of water to create hydrogen that could be transferred across the country by pipe with pretty minimal losses and then burned to drive turbines at the other end. Such systems might end up with overall fewer losses than just having thousands of miles of power grid.
Another thing I read recently that was interesting is that it's getting approximately close to free for China to produce solar panels now, significantly cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Largely this is also due to the excess power produced in the northwest that can be cheaply used in the processing needed to produce more solar panels.
There's a project here in Australia that reckons its profitable to build a solar farm in Australia and ship the electricity over 5,000km to Singapore.
https://www.suncable.energy/our-projects
Maybe that's all just marketing hype and greenwashing corporate bullshit, but it at least _seems_ feasible to transport solar (and battery stored for 24x7) power long distances.
I’d expect HVDC to deal with power loss well enough. The longest one in China is 3200 km at 1100kv and 12 Gw capacity.
My guess is that the HVDC lines they have isn’t really enough to move all that renewable energy yet, or the strategy might be to build more industry out west closer to solar and wind, although water is then the limited resource.
The only issue is that, like the Sahara, but unlike the Arabian peninsula and the American Southwest, Australia is not closely located to any other major consumers of power, so will need to build that kind of infrastructure.
To be honest I'm quite excited. I think the transition to solar is happening faster and at an accelerating rate, ahead of anything we dreamed of even a decade ago.
Not that I'm an expert of anything but Australia has a lot of mining of resources that I would think could use a lot of electricity? Like instead of sending iron ore to mainland China, why not make steel in Australia if electricity is cheap?
Hmmm now I'm curious - google google google.
Refining bauxite into aluminium increases the price about 12 times from $40/ton for bauxite to about $2,700 per tone for aluminium which requires 5 tons of bauxite as an input.
Australia exports about 40,000kt of bauxite a year. It requires about 15 kWh/kg to refine aluminium from bauxite.
So if we refined all that bauxite into aluminium before exporting it, we'd use about 600GWh of electricity to turn $1.6 billion worth of bauxite into $220 billion worth of aluminium. (And the economics is better than that, because there's only be 8 million tons or stuff to export instead of 40 million tons.)
Surely that extra 218 billion a year would be way better (for Australia) staying in our economy instead of having all that bauxite refined somewhere else?
On the other hand...
Sun Cable reckons it'll deliver 1.7GW to Singapore 24x7, or 15,000GWh. So refining _all_ the bauxite would only use 4% of that.
Australia generates about 280TWh of electricity over a year. So refining _all_ the bauxite would use only 0.2% of that.
So no. It sure as hell doesn't use "a lot of power", even if people do refer to aluminium as "solid electricity"...
That was a fun rabbit hole.
(Disclaimer: no effort made to verify numbers some of which were sourced directly from DuckDuckGo search response page snippets. Also, I'm notorious for dropping three orders of magnitude when doing mental math using kilo/mega/giga/tera prefixes.)
It's the thing where the use of electricity is a large part of the production of aluminum, but the production of aluminum is not a large part of the use of electricity.
They care about cheap energy and energy security. They've been relatively transparent that they are pursuing all available options as far as those options will go. It has been a wildly successful strategy for them in securing prosperity and I wish the west had that sort of ambition.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
If you wanna make comparisons (I don't, you do), per capita obviously matters. There's no reason why you should be holding members of one nation state to a stricter standard than members of another.
Suppose there were only two countries in the world. One had 99.99% of the world's population and the other emitted twice as much CO2 per capita. Which one is most in need of changing if you want to make an impact on the problem?
You might as well compare an individual person to the entire US, and then declare that that individual person is going a great job at combating the greenhouse effect. John Smith is doing 300 million times better than the US!
This also doesn't account for the fact that countries that produce more of the worlds goods through mining and/or agriculture are obviously gonna be inflated. Banana republics (which the US continues to uphold and profit from) are using a lot of energy "per capita" but all the wealth from that is stolen so it's senseless to assign that consumption to the nation exporting rather than the nation importing
Ten "facts" or so in that one statement. Would be great if you can cite any one with a modern reference.
Which banana republic with high per capita is US upholding and profiting from? Who is stealing their wealth? Why is that country a banana republic?
US per capita is falling while China's is rising.
https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2023/the-changi....
Keep in mind that electricity demand in the US is decreasing.
If you reduce your manufacturing, of course it'll reflect positively on emissions. China demonstrates that it's possible to make CO2 emissions decrease even while energy demand keep growing (even if it doesn't grow as much as before)
(As I linked in another comment in this page: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-falls-1-in-q... )
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
But with more up-to-date data, it could be even 8x
https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/related-research/atmospheric-ap...
(Depending if you count cumulative emissions from 1960, earlier or later)
What's the evidence?
Note that this statement obviously runs into contrary to the OP. I.e., renewable and CO2-less energy is invested more and growing more than coal.
How the OP translate to "they dont care about CO2 at all"? Your comment provides no linkage at all
Their motivations are not purely or even mostly environmental.
There isn't a link. I think the whole anti-CO2 thing is one of the stupidest ideologies since Communism. I'd still happily invest in solar energy; it looks like it might be very profitable. The fact that the Chinese behaving in a clever way doesn't imply that they are doing so for stupid reasons. They are probably behaving rationally for rational reasons.
But it is more of an abstract problem and requires thinking about long term rather than short term consequences.
In fact, one telling point is that it demonstrates that in 20,000 BCE industrialisation and rapid global warming of 4 degrees would have ushered the world into the unthinkable horrors of ... somewhat better than the present day because they'd have consumed more energy than we have. Change is clearly not automatically a bad thing.
Core of the issue though, isn't it? The planet can't support 8 billion humans right now. This living standards of around 7.8, 7.9 billion of them are unacceptably low IMO. So if it can't support 8 billion now and it can't support 8 billion in the future, I'd like some fairly concrete explanations of why we shouldn't be promoting cheap energy and industrialisation in the here and now. It appears that industrialisation drives down population and may even lead to transhumanism, so per capita improvements to prosperity seem to be the most viable solution to our sustainability problems. I'd also bet working on cheap energy will probably drive up the carrying capacity too, that is what happened all the other times securing energy got cheaper.
And as we can see in the Chinese example that we're talking about today, if we had just gone full-greed and kept building coal plants we'd probably have stumbled on a low-carbon equilibrium by accident anyway because that is more or less what seems to be happening in China. Coal and oil aren't that competitive these days. There is a pretty high chance fossil fuels would have been pushed into 2nd class status already if the deplorable fools in the 80s and 90s hadn't succeeded kneecapped western nuclear programs.
The problem is only if we get the opportunity to make hard choices for better outcomes. Do we have the self control to do that as a species, or are we doomed to act like petulant five year olds who can only think about short term benefits? Can humanity pass the marshmallow test?
The reason for the retreat of the ice sheets remains elusive, however.
Whereas there was a change in the relative strength of the sun roughly 20,000 years ago thanks to variations in the planet's orbit, it was smaller than changes that preceded it and failed to trigger a melt.
What Thawed the Last Ice Age? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-thawed-the-l...
Similary in 2010 Columbia Climate School looks at the same discussion of possible causes: https://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2707
This is energy security policy that kind of aligns with co2 goals, but they definitely don’t sacrifice economic growth for co2 mitigation.
Carbon is a much more abstract problem even in the USA, since you don’t feel climate change right away like you smell black dirt gas air. But that only really matters for high carbon low pollution energy sources like natural gas, and China doesn’t have so much of that anyways to use it in lieu of renewables.
Do you have some reading on the incident that led to Twitter being blocked? I haven't heard of that and can't find anything online
China wasn’t measuring 2.5 ppm at all back then, and was rather touting improvements in 10 ppm because a tree planting effort in the gobi temporarily solved northern china’s dust storm problem. They were basically pretending that 2.5 ppm pollution didn't exist.
Just a point of reference: back in 2009 we transited through Beijing to fly to HK and even just spending a few hours in the airport resulted in my daughter having to use an emergency nebulizer.
This time hardly anyone had a problem. Beijing used to be dry and dusty (from what my wife tells me from visiting 30y ago) now they've pulled in a lot of water through some newer canals and the humidity is really high (mosquitos are starting to become a problem).
Another improvement is: nearly zero 2-stroke motors. All scooters and mopeds are fully electric. Also 50% of the cars are electric (green license plates). All city buses and taxis are electric. Road noise is greatly reduce given the sheer volume of traffic (though they love to honk - like India).
Their government explicitly has carbon reduction and measures to mitigate climate change as a priority, it's not a secret.
https://meeb.sz.gov.cn/hdjl/ywzsk/fsaq/content/post_10828605...
> 核能的安全健康可持续发展有利于提高能源供给能力，有利于调整我国能源结构，降低对煤炭、天然气、原油的依存度。
> The safe, healthy and sustainable development of nuclear energy is conducive to improving energy supply capacity, adjusting my country's energy structure and reducing dependence on coal, natural gas and crude oil.
This is just the first link I found, there's tons more of course, since becoming a "Ecological civilization" is one of their Communist Party tenets:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_civilization
It was already obvious years ago that they were on a good track for success:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-green-revolution-is-quie...
(of course, they are succeeding: CO2 emissions are decreasing (!) or anyhow flat (over the whole of 2024), despite the growing energy demands: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-falls-1-in-q... )
but it's at least since the 18th CPC National Congress that the Communist Party is outspoken about the future being low-carbon, e.g.
http://www.qstheory.cn/dukan/qs/2019-11/01/c_1125178869.htm
> 然而一段时期对煤炭的过度依赖和粗放开采，导致产业结构失衡、生态破坏严重、经济一度断崖式下滑等结果，给山西人民带来切肤之痛。
> 指出，能源低碳发展关乎人类未来；中国高度重视能源低碳发展，积极推进能源消费、供给、技术、体制革命；中国愿同国际社会一道，全方位加强能源合作，维护能源安全，应对气候变化，保护生态环境，促进可持续发展，更好造福世界各国人民。
> over-reliance on coal and extensive mining for a period of time led to an imbalance in the industrial structure, serious ecological damage, and a cliff-like economic decline, which brought pain to the people of Shanxi.
> pointing out that low-carbon energy development is related to the future of mankind; China attaches great importance to low-carbon energy development and actively promotes energy consumption, supply, technology, and system revolution; China is willing to work with the international community to strengthen energy cooperation in all aspects, maintain energy security, respond to climate change, protect the ecological environment, promote sustainable development, and better benefit the people of all countries in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Socialist_Values
Fortunately, unlikely democracy and the rule of law, the CCP appears to actually care about cheap energy and rolling back obvious pollution in major cities.
I demonstrated that their words match their actions (ecology and energy policy wise)
It's hard to put a precise date on it but some think it happened in 2023, some 2024, the official goal is peaking by 2030 (note they've hit other renewables goals by about 7 years) but generally it's agreed that it's flattened and about to decline, if it hasn't already, due to rapid renewable rollout.
"The rate of increase is lower" is not the same as decreasing.
Will that be sustained? We'll soon see, but let's not be ignorant of the progress being made
They care about smog (or really the protests/health externalities), which is caring about CO2 by proxy, hence peaking coal by 2025 (end of 14th 5 year plan), and phasing/reducing coal starting 2026 (15th 5 year plan).
> Between 2014 and 2020, Dr Ma served as Chief Economist and then Member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China. Over the subsequent years, Dr Ma played a key role in the development of sustainable finance in China and around the world. He led the drafting of China’s green finance and green bond guidelines; he led work on green finance at the G20; he pushed for the greening of China’s Belt and Road initiative; he set up initiatives with the global accounting and standards bodies; and he helped enlist the world’s major financial centres in the drive to green the capital markets.
https://www.cleaningup.live/how-china-became-a-green-finance...
They also, after the success of those efforts, just recently upgraded a whole raft of green measures and regulations.
China cares above anything else about power, both political and electrical.
"Coal power additions were about 40 GW in 2023, while the first half of 2024 saw only 8 GW of new coal capacity, according to Rystad Energy’s estimates."
the additions is significantly lower in 2024, and the trend is showing a decreasing, dramatically.
also, any country does not seek political influence is non-sense. then what is your point?
If these number are real, it's vaery good news!
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
From the plan:
> Key objectives of China are to: Increase share of non-fossil energy in total primary energy consumption to 15% by 2020 and to 20% by 2030. Increase installed renewable power capacity to 680 GW by 2020. Increase installed wind capacity to 210 GW.
I wonder if we can do the same for electricity distribution, mitigating the uneven electricity generation of solar (day vs night, summer vs winter, etc.)
What is more likely is projects like
https://www.energymagazine.com.au/milestone-for-nt-solar-far...
Where neighbouring countries share generation and consumption (lots of western European countries already do this)
Those that have more pressing needs or have more aligned opportunities will invest first, then the cost goes down as the scale and technology improves, and the global network is built.
Geopolitics might be a big stumbling block though.
https://www.route-fifty.com/infrastructure/2022/10/bidens-pe...
In 2023, China's total emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power generation hit 5.56 billion metric tons, an all-time high that was nearly 6% greater than 2022's record. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-may-upend-...
Either the coal capacity is flat (as the main article of the thread suggests), or the coal-fired emissions are still rising (aka they are still bringing coal-fired capacity online).
It wouldn't be the first communist regime that is lying though.
https://i.imgur.com/Gfm8g2m.png
It looks flat because that's what adding 8GW to ~1200GW looks like. Adding only 8GW coal is one point article remarks as noteworthy, and the data comports.
Also some of that capital would be better invested at cleaning up the outputs of the coal plants. Supposedly there are desulfurization units in 90% of their plants. The actual pollution numbers disagree with that.
The other thing to remember is that production and storage capacity are cheap to expand, so the better question is how often it’s the case that it’s dark at times of peak demand long enough to exhaust the grid storage capacity. Currently, that’ll be the case but I’d bet that a decade from now it’ll be much less common.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Again, it all depends on the location. The US has a pretty high capacity factor for nuclear at over 90%, but the UK has it at 60-80%. Wind farms can go over 50%.
For solar/wind, this can literally never be 100%, or even close to it.
For Coal/Nuclear/Gas it just comes down to maintenance duration.
> When there's a new innovation which changes how we do things for the better, its benefits are obvious. ... However when the "But Sometimes" rears its ugly head, people tend to freak out. Suddenly all those benefits go away, because in this one particular facet of stoplight functionality, the wasteful and maintenance-heavy incandescent lamp is accidentally superior. Suddenly, when a new solution presents a new problem, all we think about is the problem.
Yes, there are problems that exist with solar that don't exist with other electrical generation systems. That is not, by itself, evidence that solar will not be sufficient by itself as we solve those problems, and it's not a good reason to slow adoption of a piece of technology that is better in almost every way.
Everything suggests we're going to fix the "but sometimes"—as others have noted there are many different paths being successfully explored at this point—and everything suggests that solar will still be both cheaper and better for the environment even when you factor in the fix.
I don't think the amount of time involved in the "sometimes" matters so much as the fact that the new problems are readily surmountable (with many solutions both in progress and already deployed) and the fact that people use the new problems as justification for a reactionary desire to jetison the technology entirely without even trying to surmount them.
"There are many potential solutions to the duck curve. The lessons learned from SETO’s projects will be critical to improving the flexibility of the grid and addressing over-generation risks as solar grows throughout the country. According to the Energy Information Administration, the installed amount of PV is expected to triple by 2030—potentially migrating the duck curve outside of California."
If you read the original comment that the person was replying to, they made a very general problem statement like it was a nail in the coffin for any renewal energy source. As if nobody has considered those drawbacks already.
There is a real and consequential lack of attention to detail in this regard, though. Energy is a tricky and subtle topic which is very commonly oversimplified in the press, in politics, even among the technically literate, likely because we have a clearly identified problem (the consequences of hydrocarbons) and what seems to be an obvious solution (renewables).
It is a dangerous fallacy to think we can simply swap wind and solar into global industrial civilization and carry on happily into the sunset, but that is how many well-intentioned people seem to understand the situation.
But just throwing up the drawbacks of a particular solution, doesn't mean that solution should be entirely thrown out. No solution is perfect in the beginning, but through iterative innovation and a need to switch to renewable energy sources, those drawbacks will become less of a drawback.
This thread is also beside the point. The relevant sphere is the general public discourse, which is largely naive and unexamined. This is not at all to insult the public, but to critique the narrative that dominates the public mindshare.
The premise that we "need to switch to renewable energy sources" is what is in question. What is it that we want do with that energy? Are "renewables" really renewable if they require a massive expansion in mining of non-renewable materials? Have we really something we ought to call a "solution" if it prolongs our war on earth-borne life?
We don't simply have a hydrocarbon problem. We have a deep and profound dilemma and a mass psychosis of global proportion. The application of tidy concepts like "problem" and "solution" to the former are symptomatic of the latter.
Even coal plants stopped being built in the middle of cities half a century ago.
That was a problem solved 91 years ago— in 1933.
Lots of similar industrial use cases