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Comment by p2detar | Hacker News Reader

There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.

In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total.

China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.

0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o

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>China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.

it is classic case of new dominant players emergence when paradigm shift happens. PC vs. mainframe, GPU vs. CPU, clean energy economy vs. fossil fuel based.

Pakistan has better geography for solar.

How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?

60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC).

Coal share is shrinking, a lot.

Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.

Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.

> They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.

There are also other reasons. The name of western province is Xinjiang. They did have a plan to turn it into manufacturing hub, and it's one of the reasons why you see stuff you see.

I actually went to changji before, and visited my friend’s brother furniture factory, so they have manufacturing in Xinjiang. They have more potential for it than any other western province if we go by culture since Uighurs are just as industrious and educated as Han (economic competition is where a lot of the conflict stems from, if they could fix that the autonomous region would boom).

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