Comment by slashdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slashdev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The developing world, including especially China and India are building out massive amounts of coal power still: You can see the data for yourself: https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...

It's possible that will turn negative at some point, but I think that would only be through innovation when coal power isn't economically competitive anymore.

> We are going to reach a point very soon where 90%+ of any modern nation’s energy can be supplied using renewables, nuclear and storage. It’s actually coming very fast.

That's exactly my point. We have to get there. Until we do, regulations will just move the consumption around. If it's not Europe it's China, if it's not China it's India, if it's not India it's Africa, etc.

I still think the only we get out of this is make green energy much more economically competitive - the full cost of green energy including the cost of dealing with it's intermittent nature. We're not there yet, and it's a very hard problem to solve, because the more intermittent energy you add to the mix, the more expensive it gets to solve the intermittency.

I don't see regulation ever getting us there, except for those cases where it helps drive the innovation faster. Which comes back to my premise that the only way out is through innovation.

If you look closely at what China is doing, you’ll see that they’re building out a massive fossil-backed renewable grid. The new coal they’re constructing consists of modern dispatchable coal that can be spun up and down quickly to supplement the variability of renewables. They’ve also proposed a scheme of capacity payments [1] to pay coal plants for not generating. This is more or less the same as what Europe and the US have been doing, except we’ve been using natural gas instead of coal (and of course the scale of China’s renewable buildout utterly dwarfs what the West has done.)

The important thing here is that this makes economic sense. Coal is not cheaper than renewables and doesn’t really compete well with them when both are available (especially as the price curve for new renewables keeps dropping) but until storage is vastly more available, fossil backing is pretty much the only way to build out a renewable grid.

My big worry is not that “regulation won’t work” (I think we’ve already pushed ourselves over the economic tipping point where renewables and storage are pretty much inevitable.) My fear is that it will come too late, and that we’ve been much too optimistic about our carbon budgets.

[1] https://www.raponline.org/blog/changing-how-coal-power-plant...

That’s the official narrative out of China, and it’s a hopeful one. It doesn’t fit the data though, at least so far. China is constructing record amounts of coal power and consuming ever increasing quantities of coal. https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

But even if they manage to turn that around decades from now, the coal will go to India or Africa, it’s not going to stay in the ground until it’s really uneconomical (and even then more likely to be replaced by natural gas than renewables.) Again, some countries may achieve success with regulation in isolation, but what matters is what the whole world does. There I think regulation doesn’t work because we don’t have one government, but instead many competing nations. Tragedy of the commons rules more often than not. This is where we disagree. The data is currently on my side, fossil fuel consumption is at record levels and increasing still. I think your position is this will change at some point in the future, with the help of regulation.

Renewables are way cheaper than coal power in many places, but at the extreme they basically need backing by equal fossil fuel infrastructure as they come to dominate the grid. Because you have to have electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. When you add that to the costs, then they don’t currently win. Fixing that is the innovation that can solve this, which I think we both agree on.

According to the same source (site), it looks like emissions in China have plateaued in Q3 2024 as compared to Q3 2023. So we’re already seeing some effects. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-no-growth-for-chinas-em...

I agree with you that the coal capacity buildouts are worrying. The best we can hope is that China has just structurally misallocated a bunch of funds, and when it comes time to burn that coal, continued improvements in renewables and storage will make all those plants unprofitable. That’s what’s happening most other places.

I don’t share your optimism, but I admire it. For all our sakes, I hope you’re right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com