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Comment by teractiveodular | Hacker News Reader

Worth highlighting: The research firm projects that by 2026, solar power alone will outstrip coal as China's main energy source, reaching 1.38 TW in cumulative capacity, 150 GW above coal.

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).

View on HN

I'm not one to champion China, but thank god that they seem to be pretty co2 conscious. It's easy to envision China having leadership that didn't give a fuck about climate change (or didn't want to hear it was real) and just went full on coal energy independence.

One of the best aspects of Chinese energy policy is there isn't much evidence they care about CO2 at all. They aren't world's largest coal consumer (by a 5x margin I believe [0]) because they care about CO2.

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...

These numbers are not per capita

They're not meant to be per capita. If energy policy is based on CO2 emissions then the absolute numbers matter, not per capita numbers. The laws of physics don't care how many people benefited from an action, they happen based on total volumes and weights.

You're obviously not talking about energy policy or laws of physics. You're making moralistic judgements and anthropomorphizing a nation-state

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.

It's not the members of the nation state, it's the government. If one government is emitting more CO2 than any other, that government is the one that most needs to change policy because a policy change there is the place it would make the most difference.

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?

Does it matter that much of “China’s” emissions are caused by manufacturing stuff for “environmentally conscious” US and Europe? Or is it “different” and I “don’t understand”?

It's possible to manufacture stuff without emitting CO2, so what matters is who is in charge of the choice of how it gets manufactured, because that's who has to change it.

!!! Policy will always be based on per capita and indirectly also on cumulative emissions.

That's a ridiculous statement. You have to normalize by population, because if you don't, you end up comparing countries with thousands of people to countries with hundreds of millions of people. Of course a billion people are going to emit more CO2 than a thousand people.

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!

Also the US' per capita consumption is still over 2x higher than China's.

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

> 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....

> US per capita is falling

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... )

Also giving export trends, have to factor in US increasingly large net exporter of fossil while PRC exporting increasingly renewables.

It's only 2x if you consider the annual emissions, but the CO2 stays in the atmosphere. If you consider cumulative CO2 emissions, the US was around 3 times as high as China (with data up to 2015)

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)

"Cumulative emissions" is the sunk cost fallacy masquerading as an excuse to defer blame onto dead people instead of doing something to address the active problem.

Except that the people arguing against considering cumulative emissions, are precisely those doing the least to address the problem

Americans generate about 45% more GHG emissions per capita than Chinese citizens.

And I’m sure Europeans would generate more than they do if they still had an industrial base.

How delightfully irrelevant.

> there isn't much evidence they care about CO2 at all

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

China likes cheap energy. It just so happens that solar is cheap energy.

Their motivations are not purely or even mostly environmental.

The world is a much better place with a saint like you.

It doesn't just so happens that solar is cheap energy. It's China who made solar cheap energy.

> 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.

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.

XKCD provides the best illustration I know of in why you should care: https://xkcd.com/1732/

But it is more of an abstract problem and requires thinking about long term rather than short term consequences.

I agree with you in some sense. That is one of the better illustrations but it isn't very compelling.

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.

The point is the slope of the graph, not the position. Yes, climate changed in the past, just never so quickly, and by quick, we mean really really quick (in comparison to previous warming and cooling cycles). We really are in unknown territory here, and yes, things might actually be OK, or maybe not so bad as we move from a planet that can sustain 8 billion humans to 2 billion humans, or maybe we all get replaced by transhuman AI in a few generations anyways that have no problem adapting. We know there will be consequences, we just argue about how severe those consequences are, and if lifestyle changes can really turn things around (climate change optimists), or are we powerless to do anything at all (climate change pessimists).

> ... as we move from a planet that can sustain 8 billion humans to 2 billion humans ...

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 nice thing about sustainable energy is that, at a certain point of economy, no one has a good reason to not prefer it over fossil fuels. So whether you think climate change is a problem or not, well, it wouldn’t matter if it were cheaper anyways. Or if people die off to a more sustainable carry load, who cares if the remaining humans are all slaves to evaporation farms and are riding around on sand worms addicted to some spice drug.

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?

Read the “limits of the graph” section about 1/4 of the way down on the right. The graph is smoothed significantly because we simply don’t have the data resolution that people want to believe. In reality the average temps undoubtedly oscillate with changing seasonal and solar system effects across decades. Forest fires, asteroids, volcanic ash.

Anyone know why this happened -> "Changes in the earth orbit around 18000 BC cause the ice caps to melt"

That's a throw to a single notion of possible change that was current at the time the cartoon was drawn up.

    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.

From a Scientific American article of 2012 that discusses another paper with an alternative notion of cause:

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

Thanks!

Solar is the cheapest power generation source. China wants more power. They still build coal plants for peak demand.

This is energy security policy that kind of aligns with co2 goals, but they definitely don’t sacrifice economic growth for co2 mitigation.

China imports nearly all its oil and most of its oil comes from the middle East. This means solar/wind/coal is preferable because it can be created locally. Oil can easily be stopped with a Naval blockade by either of USA/India/Philippines etc.

Pollution is a huge problem for them also. It got really bad in places like Beijing, people here in the western USA complain about forest fires, but 150 ppm AQI would be a clean air day in Beijing’s winter. It is survival for them, since people simply can’t live like that.

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.

To be fair, China's moving at a MUCH faster rate to clean their air than it took the US when they were at this stage of industrialization. And they've set their air quality targets much higher than the US, which hasn't updated its air quality standards in decades.

There is a lot more technology today than back then, so it isn’t really a fair comparison. Still, it’s good that China took the problem seriously, there was some time in 2010 when they were clearly in denial (the Us embassy in Beijing crazy bad air incident that got Twitter blocked).

Sure that's fair.

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

I was in China around that time and I don't remember the incident leading to Twitter being blocked. In fact, I think Twitter was blocked earlier than pollution incident. I do remember everyone getting pissed off that the US Embassy reading was so different than the local one: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensing-our-planet/craz...

It was not completely blocked in November 2010, but was completely blocked shortly there after as far as I remember (I was in Beijing from 2007 to 2016).

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.

The US didn't have solar and wind as real alternate energy options in the 1970s or '80s. They had nuclear, but all the environmentalists hated it then.

The environmentalist hate for nuclear was definitely ginned up by the petroleum industry.

I recently visited Beijing for a few weeks and was worried about AQI (I have a kid with situational asthma) . Most of the time AQI was around 50, and sometimes it got to 100. Not bad at all for us.

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).

Beijing is pretty humid in the summer, I’m not sure where you get dry from (although my first summer in Beijing wasn’t until 2002, not quite thirty years ago). Dust storm season is spring and pollution season is winter (especially when they get inversions). Fall is the best season to tour in Beijing if you want clean air and no dust, the air won’t start getting bad until November, although moving all the farmers away from coal heating has improved things a lot (they still have bad inversions, but like LA and Salt Lake City). Two strokes have been banned for awhile, electric bikes were already taking over in 2002, you already could no longer find the tuktuks that I remember from my first trip in 1999.

> there isn't much evidence they care about CO2 at all

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.

In the west there have been environmental commitments since the at least 1990s. The governments just seem to mostly ignore those commitments. So it's pretty easy for westerners to not believe commitments made by other governments.

Action matters more than speech. "Democracy", "freedom", "equality", "justice" and the "rule of law" are also Core Socialist Values of the CCP.

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.

You're responding in a thread in which people are discounting the "actions", because "the Communist Party doesn't really want to decrease CO2"

I demonstrated that their words match their actions (ecology and energy policy wise)

They don't though. If they cared about CO2 then the amount of CO2 they emit would be decreasing over time, because that would be their priority over e.g. rapid growth or cost considerations. If they wanted to they could be shutting down coal plants and replacing them with solar or nuclear instead of building new coal burners in addition to solar, but they're not.

It is decreasing though.

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.

> It is decreasing though.

"The rate of increase is lower" is not the same as decreasing.

You should bother reading what you're replying to, because emissions are in fact decreasing... It's not simply the rate of increase

Will that be sustained? We'll soon see, but let's not be ignorant of the progress being made

They also want to be the Saudi Arabia of solar power (the panels)

> care about CO2 at all

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).

Here's a podcast you may be interested in:

> 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 is also building two new coal powered plants per week. Far more than the rest of the planet combined: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

China cares above anything else about power, both political and electrical.

or did you even read? the latest data shows:

"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?

I didn't read the main article, no. I just looked for a reference to the gigantic Chinese coal power expansion I knew about.

If these number are real, it's vaery good news!

How long is the 294 GW produced , For solar is the rated output only produced when sun shining?- which means the quoted OP is only for a few hours a day? The nuclear power plan OP would be constant.

Capacity factor of solar is generally ~20%

These are grid scale installations in a desert with few clouds. It's possible they have a capacity factor over 30%.

Solar panels don’t like sands. It flies everywhere and the deposit partially shades the pane. You have to clean them to get back to peak efficiency. That’s why solar panels farm in desert are so complicated to run and why you don’t see more of them.

There is a huge difference between a scrub desert and sand dune one. Xinjiang and Gansu is more scrub than sand, the Gobi is where all the dust comes from.

Several of the largest solar plants in the world are in deserts.

Edit: I think that all of the top 5 largest are in deserts. Maybe more.

Yes, because there is a lot of space there and the sun shines a lot. But they are not more efficient that installation outside of deserts which was the claim made by the comment I was replying to.

Maybe not more efficient, but there’s usually more solar resource in the desert, and the net is usually more electricity produced.

See the executive summary linked at the bottom of this page: https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/utility-scale-solar-2023-ed....

China's deserts are reasonably far north (latitudes of 30+ degrees), so I doubt they get a capacity factor that high

Currently, the world is on track to be deploying ~660GW of solar per year by end of year, and at current manufacturing capacity ramp rates, will very likely reach ~1TW/year in ~18 months. This doesn’t stop, it only continues to climb. The Sun delivers enough energy to Earth in under an hour to power humanity for a year. There will certainly be challenges along the way as the world heads towards net zero, but none of this is unsolvable with current renewable and storage technology.

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

Rare earth elements production will be the limiting factor. China is already the first producer by far and has been scaling up but not fast enough.

I’m sceptical of PV being *the* solution to the world energy issue but who knows, maybe.

Solar panels generally don't use rare earths.

I was thinking more about the batteries part if people are aiming for grid scale storage.

Sodium ion batteries do not require rare earths. Rare earths are not a limiter to scaling up PV and battery storage deployment. All necessary inputs are abundant and geographically diverse. Minerals and energy goes in, out comes clean energy infra.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-...

https://electrek.co/2024/05/17/china-first-large-scale-sodiu...

> Sodium ion batteries

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.

I’ve provided facts. If you are unhappy with those facts, that is a choice, but the facts are still facts. Lithium is also abundant; I mentioned sodium because it is even more abundant and the evidence shows China’s pilot with the technology to be successful, but using lithium for utility scale storage is also feasible based on reserves available [1] and cost [2] if sodium ion utility scale storage is unable to scale, for whatever reason. Neither chemistry requires rare earths.

[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA

Additional citation:

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")

Most house batteries use LFP. They do not contain rare earths. I've never checked, but I presume that's true for grid scale batteries too as the cost per kWh stored is roughly the same LCM, but LFP last for an order of magnitude more cycles (and weigh more, which isn't a concern for grid storage).

Batteries don't use rare earths either. Rare earths are used in magnets, which are used in most motors and generators.

Solar panels don't exist in isolation;

    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.

Rare earth production is a limiting factor for general electronics, magnets and batteries.

New nuclear is most certainly not dead - Both China and Russia are busy building more nuke plants for baseload. China has even greenlit (2023) the buildout of a thorium power plant [1]. If successful, this would reduce proliferation risks as well as removing fuel availability issues as thorium is plentiful [2].

[1] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/thorium-molten...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

there in lies the problem with nuclear.

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.

This is related to a common bad idea, that is, that nuclear should be used to provide backup power when renewables are not available.

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.

>This is related to a common bad idea, that is, that nuclear should be used to provide backup power when renewables are not available.

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.

Making renewables look bad? I was making nuclear look bad. Renewables don't leave any place for new nuclear for the grid.

I still don't understand how you're expected to replace fossil fuel heating sources with solar.

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?

Renewables are not a single/binary solution. They're a mixed environment with storage playing a big part.

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.

Renewables, not just solar. At high latitude, wind is significant, and tends to be stronger in winter. Solar + wind can complement one another. Now, one still needs storage, including potentially weeks-long storage for Dunkelflauten, but that rarely used long period storage use case is handled by e-fuels like hydrogen (turned back to electrical power with turbines or fuel cells). Which brings us to...

> 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....

> Renewables, not just solar.

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.

Nuclear can be ramped down pretty well in an engineering sense. It's a cost problem far more than anything else.

And while cost is a big deal, long-term waste isn't that much of an issue, and reactors are not good military targets.

> only produced when sun shining?- which means the quoted OP is only for a few hours a day?

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.

I dunno about that distance problem?

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.

China was investing in UHV lines a few years back to deal with the distance problem. They seem to have a bunch already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

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.

That's where Australia is going to want to be. Perfect for solar. Vast quantities of low population density land with virtually perfect solar weather, and relatively near the equator.

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.

> 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.

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?

Mining uses "a lot of power" in the sense that it uses several hundred times more power than a typical home. It doesn't use "a lot of power" when you start comparing it to cities with millions of homes and businesses.

I don't have a feel for the numbers, but does that hold true for aluminium and Australian bauxite exports?

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.)

Right, so it makes sense to use solar to smelt aluminum, but even if you smelt all the aluminum with solar you'd still need to transmit a ton of power from the isolated desert to the cities where people live.

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.

There was a plan to make a line to South East Asia and sell power to them but I'm not sure where it's at.

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