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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

Those are nice pictures but I can take the same pictures in the USA.

Note: I'm not suggesting China is not doing better here. Rather, I'm going off the title "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout" and I'm not seeing anything in those photos I haven't seen in the USA.

Driving down the 580 from SF to Tracy you pass several hundred windmills. Driving through Mojave the same. Also solar. Driving toward Vegas as well. And those are just the ones I've seen with my own eyes. There's many others.

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=altamont+pass+windmill...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=mojave+windmills&sa=X&...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=palmdale+solar+farm&sa...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=desert+stateline+solar...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=barstow+solar+plant&sa...

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The current administration is actively shutting down in-progress wind projects.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/11/how-the-wind-indust...

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/22/trump-leaves-wind-i...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo

Those windmills in the East Bay are decades old.

And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.

The article here starts with: Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.

Is the US anywhere in this ballpark?

The concentrated solar plant is getting shut down because it's failing to compete with the massive rollout of photovoltaic panels. We've made solar so cheap that the old ways of gathering it are becoming redundant, which, no matter how incredibly cool it was to see a second sun rise over the horizon on the way to Vegas, is a good sign.

The California Public Utilities Commission moved last month to prevent the shutdown of the Ivanpah solar concentrator. They cite data centers, grid reliability, and the state's clean energy goals as reasons to keep it online.

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M586/K...

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2026-01-11/trump-b...

My point was the photos. They aren't convincing to someone who's seen US installations. If that was the goal then the article failed.

A graph comparing China to the US would have been better.

The pics show renewable energy integrated with other activity (e.g. sheep grazing among solar panels); integrated into urban environments (on every rooftop and streets) and contrasted against ancient Chinese culture (e.g. temples). I think this makes the imagery substantially different from the alternative-offered US RE installations.

We’re doing better than they are. Our new power generation is about 90% renewable, theirs is 70.

The difference is just scale, China has 3x our population but very many of them had little or even no electricity available so they’re playing catch up. Americans are functionally all served by the power grid already. So of course they’re building more of it as an absolute number.

But I’d also bet they built more coal plants last year than the entire world built in a decade.

Last year, PRC new generation is functionally >100% renewable (as in over 100%), new advanced coal plants serve as cleaner coal peakers not base load. New renewables now displaces existing coal (new trend last year) - nameplate coal is up due to new plants, but actual utilization of coal down in absolute terms.

Meanwhile what doesn't get captured in accounting is US increasing fossil exports (crude, lng etc), and PRC exporting renewables. Assuming 25 year lifecycle, PRC exports solar last year displaces ~5 years worth of US fossil exports in barrels of crude equivalent (400 GW of solar = 14000TWh electricity, or 8B barrels of oil, i.e. 22m barrels per day). TLDR PRC is reducing absolute fossil use, MASSIVELY increasing global renewable use. US is simply increasing net fossil use, much of it hidden from domestic balance sheets because it's exported globally.

The current US “leadership” is working as hard as it can to prevent any progress and to even dismantle some of the gains we have made.

Meanwhile, China has made the obvious realization that independence from oil and gas is economically, geopolitically, and environmentally beneficial.

China's betting on renewables while Republicans are betting on nuclear fusion and gutting the NRC.

Hardly. China is also betting on nuclear fission and nuclear fusion:

1. Fission: TMSR-LF1 (a thorium breeder, molten salt research reactor)

Based on US work in 1960s and independent Chinese Sinap work in 1970s. They recently published that they had detected Protactiunium in the salt - a new milestone.

2. Fusion: EAST tokomak

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chin...

We would all be better off if the US and China just collaborated.

I know that China's actively researching Nuclear fission, fusion and even have the world's first thorium reactor pilot - in fact, they might even be having a lot more effort and investment being put into nuclear than the rest of the world combined. But they aren't putting all of their chips and actively betting with a Hallelujah on fusion to provide energy. They're ramping up renewables production side by side while still funding fusion research.

Republicans on the other hand are hoping somehow that a gutted NRC will pave the way for looser regulations that will help ramp up conventional nuclear fission and nuclear fusion timelines (all efforts invested into by the current president's family and his fellow cronies of course), while abjectly gutting down any progress in renewable energy in the present moment.

China knows better than to weaken their position in the global theater by having large dependence on other nations for energy. They are aiming for domination and they are well on their way.

China is fine with dependence on other nations, it just can't rely on sea-based imports when the US could easily block them by blockading the strait of Malacca. That's why China has invested so heavily into their Belt And Road initiative (which is notably a giant land-based shipping route).

Actually, it seems China has given up on the feasibility of BRI because they don't control all the variables in their partner countries. Which is why Xi has been super focused on creating an autarkic economy dependent on domestic demand and encouraging production for the native population, as a back up. Failures in helping industrialize countries such as Pakistan and those in Africa due to systemic and unavoidable issues have soured on the Chinese. That autarkic vision hinges strongly on a solid renewables energy production base.

Has Nuclear Fusion received massive funding improvements in the last ~12 months?

Well the Trumps, Thiel, etc are all invested heavily in a bunch of publicly traded nuclear fusion and nuclear fission companies, so those presidentially-backed firms are seeing outsized funding gains.

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