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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively the crisis can be used to accelerate right development - quickly build up solar farms and transmission lines. Both of these can be done quickly if there were a political will. Yet, that will is missing.

So, we're talking 40GW. Lets see what China does:

https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...

"In the first two months of 2026, China added:

32.5 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity, down 18% from last year. 11 GW of wind power capacity, up 19% from last year. 20 GW of thermal power capacity, up 414% from last year. 1.2 GW of hydro power capacity, down 36% from last year. 1.2 GW of nuclear power capacity. "

Edit: to the proponents of nuclear - i think nuclear is very damaging to society as it promotes corrupt crony-government capitalism instead of market forces.

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Right off the top of my head, to power a 500MW Datacenter we need:

2.2-2.5 GWdc solar capacity which at 600W/panel amounts to 14-17sq mi plus additional 8-12GWh of storage to deal with nighttime, two-three days of cloud cover is not going to work with these numbers.

Ballpark 5-7BN$

Nuclear otoh, 1GW continuous - gives constant power, badly managed first of a kind (or first one after decades) build will be at around 10-15BN and that’ll cover two 500MW data centres.

There’s also the second/third degree order effects nuclear power stations have of creating jobs and industrial manufacturing demand. To run a nuclear power station you need to employ 1000 people (engineers plus support staff) - that’s a small town’s worth of adults. So you’ll need a town with a school, hospitals, stores - those need staffing as well.

Unfortunately building nuclear is not something that’s currently a feasible path as it requires patient capital and long term vision and planning.

So gas turbines it is at around ~1BN$

> is not something that’s currently a feasible path as it requires patient capital and long term vision and planning

HN arguing in favour of a planned economy - see, we aren't free-market cultists!

I like how balanced their energy mix is. It is very obvious that China is optimizing for capacity and availability. There isn't really a push for clean energy sources for political, or climate, reasons. They are deployed when it makes sense, backed up by robust coal and nuclear sources.

In Europe, we approach energy generation as a political, or climate problem. We are building solar and wind power sources, not to make energy cheaper, or to make grid more resilient, but to fulfill an ideological goal.

The results are, not great, to be honest. The energy prices have increased substantially, and are now driving our chemical industry bankrupt.

Edit: I do not dispute the climate change. I am only highlighting impacts of current policy.

>I like how balanced their energy mix is. It is very obvious that China is optimizing for capacity and availability. There isn't really a push for clean energy sources for political, or climate, reasons. They are deployed when it makes sense, backed up by robust coal and nuclear sources.

yes, they don't seem to fall for the "solar is unstable" trap and recognize new reality - the solar + wind smoothed by nuclear/gas is the new baseline

To the comment on the coal below : not really. You don't need that much as a smoothing capacity.

You mean + coal, they don't have a meaningful amount of nuclear (just under 5% of electricity mix and 2% of energy). 50% of electricity is coal.

China is building all types of generation because they are rapidly growing their electric network (generation doubled from 2014 to 2024).

Europe's generation is roughly flat during the same period.

It doesn't make sense to build a lot of everything in a system without growth in generation. Replacing decommisioned generators would be enough. Growth in solar and wind generation (for ideological or economic reasons) means there's less reason to build new capacity of other types. There's complications there with firm vs intermittent capacity, but that's a different discussion.

US electrical generation was also flat from 2000 to 2020, but seems to be growing again since then, but not anywhere near China's growth rate.

They're not really building anything other than renewables. Nuclear is a rounding error and new coal is just replacing old coal.

Stats on wikipedia [1] stopped breaking out coal from other fossil fuel ('thermal') production in 2021.

But coal was 4.1 million GWh in 2014 and 5.0 million GWh in 2021; that's a lot of (relatively) new coal. Fossil fuel growth since 2023 is a lot less than earlier years, so maybe they have hit saturation for fossil fuel generation. I would expect high fossil fuel prices so far this year would drive usage lower, the stats for 2026 should be interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

Stats on additional generation for the last few years:

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

China is still installing much more new coal power capacity then is decommissioning old coal power capacity.

Also the average age of Chinese coal power plants is much lower then the average age of US coal power plants. These new Chinese coal power plants could be used for decades.

Last available data from 2025.

https://www.statista.com/chart/36007/power-capacity-of-new-d...

https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...

What you said does not technically contradict what I said. We have to decide what it is that we wish to measure.

I do not pay attention to the "decommissioning" statistic, because a binary on/off switch is an arbitrary threshold.

Example -- China reduces the output of every coal plant to 1%, they would be "decommissioning" nothing, yet it would be fair to say they've abandoned coal.

That's why it's a better metric to look at change in net coal usage (which is flat or going down in China last year), which factors in non-binary underutilization of old coal plants, as new coal and renewables come online.

From ZeroGravitas in the parallel thread: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

You wrote "new coal is just replacing old coal", in terms if of coal power capacity this is incorrect, as many new coal power plants are build in China.

The utilization of coal power plant fleet is decreasing, the total amount of produced electricity from coal is decreasing.

"Coal usage" in China is different from "Coal usage for electricity production" in China, as the coal use as a feedstock for chemical and liquid fuels will increase in China.

https://www.reuters.com/commentary/reuters-open-interest/chi...

In 2025 China mined more coal than in 2024, at the same time China produced less electricity from coal in 2025 than in 2024.

"China's coal output rose to a record in 2025, statistics bureau data showed on Monday, as lower domestic prices prompted buyers to cut imports and rebuild stockpiles with cheaper local supply, although the rise was limited by regulator efforts to curb production growth.

Production in 2025 reached 4.83-billion metric tons, up 1.2% from 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics."

https://www.miningweekly.com/article/china-2025-coal-output-...

Energy prices globally spiked in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine (again). I conclude that energy is tied more closely to fossil than solar. Happy to stand with you and throw rocks at stupid solar policy, though.

If we build a terawatt of green energy capacity then turn around and immediately use it for datacenters rather than to replace fossil fuel generation, we haven’t gained anything. If anything we’ve lost out.

You gained the datacenter, which is providing a highly desired service... Are you European?

Personally I prefer a livable climate and affordable power over yet another datacenter for AI or mining crypto.

Proponents of solar power always like to equate 1 GW of solar power capacity with 1 GW of wind power capacity or 1 GW of thermal power capacity, ignoring capacity factors, ignoring need for reliable backup.

Sometimes they ignore the transportation costs, as for example: capital costs for transporting 1 GW of electricity over 1,000 km using High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) technology costs more then the 1 GW peak solar power plant attached to the power line.

China builds everything solar, coal, wind, hydro, nuclear. So if you want follow the example of China, then you have to, like China, build everything and don't just pick one part of Chinas energy strategy.

Also I would not present China as an example of market capitalism, they have a very strong government capitalism. Probably the strongest government capitalism in the world.

solar farms are worst kind of power source for constant loads like datacenters running AI training

I'm hoping the kind of gas turbines being installed on these datacenters are capable of quickly responding to a load change, meaning the primary source of energy could be solar during the day and complement when there isn't enough energy.

But I haven't looked into where these datacenter are being placed, I'm assuming that although solar is cheap now, the surface needed would make the purchase of nearby land probably not worth it. These new categories of datacenters are becoming very energy dense...

That's why we are getting clean, beautiful coal the likes of which nobodys ever seen before!

you're just incorrect. You probably missed 2 points :

- battery storage

- and in the article

"However, AI labs and some hyperscalers have relaxed those requirements as there is now a lower uptime tolerance applied to both inference and training, not just training. Many of Meta’s self-built AI datacenters, for example, target just two nines of uptime and forgo backup generators entirely, as detailed in our Industrials Model."

but you can't trust especially hyperscalers with securely sealed HEUs in shipping containers

Solar power still can take a certain amount of load from any other source and saving money and CO2 while doing so.

And grid battery works and is cheap enough now.

Why? Unlike loads involving a real physical process there is absolutely no need for AI-training to be constant.

If you invest into chips that deprecate in value really fast, not utilizing them to their full capacity because of power constraints would be counter productive.

You are correct in the sense that they can stop work in a way many generic server use cases can't (which is seen in lowering power supply reliability requirements as the article mentions), but running expensive servers at 50% utilization would dramatically affect the revenue generated per capital invested - IE you couldn't afford to buy the servers.

If it just costs more, similar to how it's possible to have a low water use datacenter, then in a perfect spherical cow economic universe then the lower cost option is better.

In the real world you'd need to add some cost to account for the externalities on water and GHG.

Do the numbers still work out for the gas powered plant? If not then you're just exploiting unaccounted for externalities.

Yeah and the richest person on the planet with full vertical integration (with partner) Elon musk and Tesla aka solar roof and power wall wants to sell DC in space and hasn't fixed any use of gas turbine for Colossus 1&2.

Without enforcement it will happen continuously with snail pace

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