Hacker News Reader

Comment by triceratops | Hacker News Reader

> China is building an absurd amount of new [coal] plants

Fossil fuel advocates in the West love repeating this "fact" and omit another, rather more inconvenient fact. 80+% of all new electricity generation in China is solar or other renewable. China builds coal plants but they don't really use them much.

These coal plants either replace older ones shutting down or are mostly left idle. Why? My guess: to keep the jobs and skills around, to juice GDP, and as a backup.

View on HN

China has lots of coal (to mine from the ground), and most of their solar/wind is out west, and most of their huge hydro is south, but is not enough anyways. They are able to reduce the amount of coal they depend on for their rising energy needs, but not eliminate them. It isn't just to keep the jobs/skills around, actually that would be easily transferred, they just can't pragmatically stop using coal yet.

Right they're gonna continue using as much coal they were already using. Because they have coal. People like the commenter I responded to repeat the talking point about "more coal plants". Because that automatically makes others think China is burning more and more and more coal and we're the only suckers who try to "go green". When in reality China's manufacturing prowess is responsible for solar power becoming so cheap in the first place and they're the biggest users of it by far.

They're going to operate a coal-backed renewable grid, while we (were up until recently) trying to build a natgas-backed renewable grid. They just have coal instead of natural gas, and they're actually building the renewables.

Natural gas isn't an option for them, but they can use coal. The biggest problems with renewables is that they exist too far away from where electricity is being used, and moving much more industry out west isn't very viable because it doesn't have enough water.

They are addressing that with HVDC transmission lines. They currently have around 48 000 km of such lines and are 2-3000 km more per year. They cross much of the country, including a 3300 kM line that runs between the Northwest and the middle of the East that operates at +/- 1100 kV and carries 12 GW.

It will take the, a few decades to build what they need, and they still need to add capacity until them for the east coast. Also, there is loss from moving power all the way from gansu to say hebei. Nuclear combined with renewables should make coal obsolete in a few decades, but they have to make do until then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com