Iran threatens to hit Gulf states if US launches new strikes

You can bet that all TSMC chip factories in Taiwan have strategic installs of explosives just for this scenario, China will get nothing, and the US has multiple TSMC chip factories now and will gladly accept Taiwan victims.

Cold War is back on, by the way…

Yes thousands have died from the war. You say they can stomach that more than the US but for them it is a defensive war. The US could stomach such losses in a defensive war, but an offensive war against an enemy that has never once attacked US soil is a different matter

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> That’s the theory, at least. The problem is that those rising middle powers do have alternatives to meet their energy needs, thanks to the growth of renewables. Asia’s LNG-to-power market was already being aggressively undercut on price by solar, batteries and wind. The war in Iran has demonstrated that clean energy is more reliable, too. If Woodside’s main projects ever get built, they’ll find themselves trying to sell into a glutted market, which has lost all appetite for their product.

> Consider the numbers. A new gas-fired power plant in Asia needs to sell electricity for more than $100 per megawatt-hour to break even. Even existing plants, whose construction costs have long since been paid off, need $70/MWh or more if they’re fueled with LNG. Photovoltaic solar power, or PV, can be had for half the new-build price, at around $50/MWh or less. You can even add a battery and wind turbines and have round-the-clock clean electricity for less than what established gas plants are paying just for their fuel and maintenance.

> Have a look at recent announcements from utilities and generators, and you can watch bullish forecasts for Asia’s gas demand being shredded in real time. Just nine days after the start of the Iran war, a company that spent nearly a decade building a 650 megawatt LNG generator in the Philippines announced it was considering abandoning it. The gas turbines are now being sold to the US, where they’ll serve a data-center site in Indiana — not an ideal market for oceangoing LNG ships. A few weeks after that, Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup cancelled plans to build a 4.8 gigawatt LNG power plant which would have been one of the world’s biggest, vowing to replace it with solar, batteries and wind instead. Pakistan has been backing away from LNG for several years, driven by a boom in small-scale solar and surging prices for chilled gas after the 2022 Ukraine war. LNG deals in Bangladesh and South Africa have similarly been cancelled or delayed in recent months. India’s gas generation, meanwhile, has been in decline for nearly two decades.

> These days, gas can’t even make the argument that it’s a quick route to power. All those data centers being built in the US are outbidding Asian utilities in a tight market for gas turbines, meaning the only way to acquire generators is to wait longer, or pay yet more for them. Gas is “much riskier in execution compared to PV and wind,” Abdulhameed Al Muhaidib, Chief Financial Officer of Saudi Arabian power engineer ACWA Power Co., told investors last year.

And in more northern latitude you’ll still need to turn those plants back on since just won’t at all for at least a couple of months in winter.

Coal is already here but most places worked really hard to move to cleaner sources (oil being one of them) and wind down the existing coal infra.

This is part of the reason why people have been pushing nuclear SMRs (small modular reactors) given they can often be set up in existing coal plants and they just replace the coal part of the plant and reuse the existing turbines, etc since just like coal nuclear is basically a glorified steam boiler.