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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

Probably the easiest way would have been to draw a line around each factory in the US, declare that those now counted as outside-US for emissions purposes, and then declare that now the US was a zero-emissions country.

Done and dusted, problem solved.

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Take it up with China. They are building tons of coal plants as we speak, and also eating our lunch in trade.

Edit: I got a "posting too fast" nonsense message. So here is my response to "solar is cheaper than coal, they are fools":

China has a TON of solar panels and batteries. They make most of them. So they apparently think coal is worth it anyway. If coal was more expensive or worse overall, theu would be absolute suckers to ship their product to us.

If they are still building a ton of coal they’re making a colossally foolish mistake.

Solar is already far cheaper than coal for new installations, and the price is still falling.

They're building coal peaker plants to complement the massive amount of solar they're building. The capacity factor of their coal plants has halved at the same time the number of plants has doubled -- those coal plants just run at night.

Up until this year coal has been cheaper than batteries for this task. That changed this year and they're now building some very large battery farms and i invasive their coal builds will drop.

> That changed this year and they're now building some very large battery farms and i invasive their coal builds will drop.

This is an under-considered point: just because energy sources like coal or solar, etc. are being installed NOW doesn't mean they will be there forever. Here in the UK, there is often a lot of opposition to solar and wind farms. But I would expect those eventually to be phased out in the same way as coal once better/cheaper forms of generation come along.

With all of the AI demands for electricity, as well as the strategic importance of 24/7 power production, you should not hold your breath for coal plants to be decommissioned.

AI and crypto uses a lot of electricity in relative terms, not in absolute terms.

If AI and crypto use 2% of a country's electricity, that's a big deal relative to the average growth in electricity usage of 1% per annum.

But the challenge is converting 100% of the power to carbon-free. If you can do 100% you can do 102%.

Literally on the day you posted that comment:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...

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