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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

>Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it.

China brought 80GW of new coal power online last year. The US added 0, and plans to add 3GW next year (we all know why).

China doesn't care about climate change, they care about energy independence, and conveniently have very little natural fossil fuels besides coal. Which they heavily mine and utilize.

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The new coal plants are not planned to run a full capacity (or at all) they are meant for backup in case of environmental disaster and geopolitics (war, sanctions, tariffs, etc). So the actual amount of coal being burned is still going down.

Although it is highly suspicious why they are building so much unused capacity, it is as if they expect something to happen soon.

We have a very top level strategy design and plan to make safety of our energy supply chains, I can even tell that in my hometwon we also designed and implementated a Pumped-storage hydroelectricity power station in the inner part of China.

Also suggest a very good book which details our past decades hard work on energy saftey design: 筚路蓝缕世纪工程决策建设记述 (Blazing a Trail: How China Decided and Built Its "Projects of the Century")

Book Link: https://book.douban.com/subject/30348776/ 9 out of 10 score for this book.

They commissioned 78 GW of new capacity in 2025, but actual coal-fired generation fell slightly (by 90 TWh, ie 10 GW). It might rise again, but it's expected to peak by 2027–28. And of course they added 440 GW of renewable capacity, 64% of global installations.

I certainly agree there's other motives (renewables even net them significant trade, like EVs) but it's not as though 'caring about' climate impacts requires selfless virtue, they stand to lose $trillions/year like everyone else.

Woah, I am blown away by these numbers. I did some research using ChatGPT. A coal power plant called Guoneng Qingyuan Power Station is 4GW in total size. (It added 2GW of capacity last year.) Normally, 1GW is considered a large coal power plant by itself. This is a massive plant!

Geolocated here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/24%C2%B024'57.0%22N+113%C2...

I asked ChatGPT how many coal train cars are required per year to fuel this 4GW plant: About 200 coal train cars per day. That is staggering! It is about 5.25 million tons of coal per year. Multiple that by twenty and that only covers new capacity added last year. It is depressing to see these numbers.

Don’t worry I believe AI will figure out how to get fusion energy working any day now and we won’t need these coal plants any more

From my understanding, yea they still stand up coal fire plants because world demand for Chinese manufacturing and the energy demand it creates exceeds how fast they can build reactors. So they build coal fire with the intention to replace that capacity with renewables later. Been awhile since I looked, but China has like 30-some odd plans for nuclear reactor construction with quiet a few of them having already broken ground, but that was about 5 years ago.

No one forces them to increase manufacturing output. They do it to make money, just like everyone else.

World Bank said exports in 2024 were about 20% of China's GDP. AI said 30% of China's petrochemical usage is exported as embedded energy. You're right that it is useful to think in terms of marginal generation, where it is marginally used. But that is more difficult to measure than just making assumptions at the level of the economy.

China builds literally everything for all countries, so why wouldn't they bring coal online? Very tiring arguments IMO.

Are you sending them extra money to fund nuclear?

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