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Comment by avsteele | Hacker News Reader

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avsteele·

Beautiful pictures. To be clear: China runs on coal and will for the foreseeable future.

https://www.iea.org/countries/china

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...

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By showing only your provided data it seems. But when looking at the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources it looks totally different!

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=line&facet=n...

That metric doesn't answer the same question. It isn't saying 18% of their needs are being met by renewables.

If you look at the growth rate of renewables it should be pretty clear that coal will not play a major role in the foreseeable future. Why is it not saying 18% of the needs are being met by renewables? That's exactly what it does

This is not energy output (production, usage), it is that plus an adjustment for the in->out energy efficiency. It would only == production if all energy sources in the mix has the same factor.

Because fossil fuels have higher in/out losses this is number is larger than usage. This metric is generally used to track decarbonization.

Using the IEA number you can see the hydro+solar+wind production is about 9.5% of the total, not 18%.

ChatGPT or you favorite LLM can explain in greater detail, just send it the plot image and ask.

The adjusted graph is a better reflection of "meeting their needs" than raw primary energy, since more than half of fossil primary energy is lost as waste heat.

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