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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile China is becoming entirely energy independent and electrifying their economy. I don't understand how the US doesn't see that they won't be top dog forever especially in this multipolar age.

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As a proportion of total energy use, the US is ahead of China in moving away from fossil fuels by about 5 full percentage points. Most of the "energy independence" that China has is just based on burning coal.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=stacked-di...

Wanna know a great way to lose a race? Check your rear view mirror and see how far ahead you are and then let off the gas. Or worse, start braking.

so we win the race by burning petrol /s

This is the second time this week I have seen this website misrepresenting data using this same trick.

Primary energy is not total energy generated its total energy in the fuel used.

On average coal / gas plants are only ~35% efficient so the graph does not correctly represent the useful energy generated as percentage.

The graph is basically putting actual energy generation of solar and wind next to actual energy generated by coal and gas multiplied by 3.

If they want to be even close to representative of reality they should multiply the solar power generated by 4. The same has to be done for the wind energy but I am not sure what the efficiency of that is.

From their page:

> Each source is measured by its physical energy content: fossil fuels and biomass by the heat released when they are burned; nuclear and geothermal by the heat they produce; and wind, solar, and hydropower by the electricity they generate.

This graph is far more representative of reality: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=stack...

China is still behind in percentage but by only 1-3%

We see a lot of competing views on the modern right and the most dominant one is the sort of peace through strength dominate the world stance, but I think one that doesn’t get talked about as much is that actually being the global hegemon and competitive in the world shifts power away from traditional power structures like the church.

So losing to China is a feature not a bug. I think This explains Republican obsession with countries like Russia and Hungary that are certainly a few steps down the economic ladder from us.

They still mostly rely on coal. Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal, whereas in the US, it's only 15%. The renewable energy share in generation is roughly the same in the US and China, but not for capacity.

> Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal,

So this means, slightly less than half is other sources (hydro, solar, etc)

China is also ~4x the population of the US and accounts for 30% of the worlds manufacturing and energy production.

The scale is so crazy that these numbers rarely make sense on their own.

ie. China is the future, US is the past.

Well, China is already "the past". They're past the Lewis turning point. We'll have to look somewhere else for "the future".

If China is declining more slowly than the rest of the world, that's still relative progress.

German Climate scientists are claiming with 98% statistical certainty that warming has accelerated significantly since 2015, and believe we are looking at 3°C of warming by 2050, 5°C by the end of the century. That does not bode well for the future of anything.

https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...

this should be closer to the top. (everywhere)

The direction of travel is clear though. China is making massive investments in renewable energy (and dominating sectors like solar in the process) while the US seems hell bent on going the other way.

They're also making massive investments in coal.

China is concerned with not having to import energy. They don't care much about climate change.

I'd be interested to see some sources. My understanding is that they're aiming to peak greenhouse gas emissions before 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2060.

Things are changing. Look at starting points and direction, not just things as they currently are.

That said, renewable sources are so cheap and consequently economically appealing that not even the incredibly dumb Trump admin can stop them.

You can look at current levels, or look at trends. China has stopped increasing coal. They're building a small number of new coal plants, but this is outstripped by the coal plants being underutilized or decommissioned

China is really only building new renewables, almost 100x as much net renewable capacity per year compared to nuclear.

Plus they are building coal plants as backups for when other sources fail.

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, coal plants take at least 10 hours (but can take up to 48 hours) to start, warm up and synchronise from cold. That’s why hydro, gas, and increasingly large batteries are generally used for peaking.

That is legacy coal plants. The ones China are building are specifically built to complement renewable while keeping the energy security domestic.

It makes sense for China because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_dilemma

The modern coal plants they're building support faster changes, and they have enough indigenous coal but they don't have gas.

China is continuing to build a shitload of coal alongside being the world's leader in renewable. It takes time.

Only as recently as last year did China stop increasing its net electric generation from coal. And if you look at all primary energy (not just electricity), their dependence on fossil fuels is something like 90%.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?stackMode=rela...

This is misleading, because China has no gas, and they use coal power as dispatchable source with lower capacity factor (similar to gas elsewhere).

Coal+gas electricity is basically the same fraction in China than in the US.

But countries like Germany or Spain are significantly ahead in this regard, with much higher fraction of electrical energy coming from solar/wind.

See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

Burning natural gas instead of coal should result in about half as much carbon emissions theoretically, although methane leaks will narrow the advantage.

Absolutely. Gas is a lot less problematic than coal.

But my point is that it fills (in China) a very similar role for the electric grid and countries don't get to choose what fossils are in their soil.

The US using relatively more gas than coal is not any kind of laudable achievement, it's simply whats cheaply available.

Norway does not get any credit in my book for being full renewable either (because they have "free" hydro power literally everywhere).

Maybe they should get some credit for taking full advantage of whatever assets they have? It's better than not using them.

Slightly less than half now as of the most recent figures.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...

> That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed.

> Renewable energy's share grew to 41.2% — topping 40% for the first time — and of that wind and solar accounted for 24.6%, Xing added. Wind and solar's share was up from 9.7% in 2020.

GP was talking about energy independence. They use domestic coal not imported coal, so the goal of energy independence is still achieved.

On the other hand only 3% of China's electricity comes from natural gas whereas 43% of US electricity does.

When combined coal and gas provide about 62% of China's electricity and 58% of US electricity. (Sources differ slightly on percentages. When you add in all fossil fuel electricity sources, China and the US get about the same percentage of electricity from them).

It is this way because China has plenty of coal and very little natural gas, whereas the US thanks to fracking has a lot of natural gas and it is much cheaper than coal so since then gas has rapidly replace coal.

That's the static picture. Now look at the first derivative. China is not just massively ahead at building renewables, they are massively ahead at building support infrastructure.

Look at UHV transmission lines for example: China has 60 000 km, quite a bit ahead of the 0 km in the US.

China thinks long-term, the US administration, especially the current one doesn't.

And who is to blame them (or to hold them accountable)? Some won't live long-term... I mean, being 80 and fat, what are the chances...

China thinks, the US administration doesn’t.

The US is the biggest oil producer in the world. Consumption does exceed production, but obviously this changes the calculus around energy independence.

It is the third largest coal producer, behind India and China.

Oh great. You've summoned the Sinophobes. You literally cannot say anything positive about China without these people coming out of the woodwork with their tired talking points.

The people running the government literally do not care. They only care about evading responsibility for decades of crimes by smashing all accountability mechanisms, disabling all oversight so they can loot the government, increasing dysfunction, feeding the culture war to keep us fighting each other over wedge issues instead of rising up, and flattering some utterly insane religious freaks so they have an immutable core of cult members. They're financed by America's arch enemies, easily manipulated, vain, and stupid. To them, America is a golden opportunity for naked theft of power and money.

Yes. Where is this money coming from anyway? If it was from the clean energy legislation, then surely this will be overturned

The US government is undoubtedly aware that renewables are the future.

I assume they're still cooking up a backup plan to the petrodollar system and it will be business as usual until they have one.

Expect the US to double down with weird gestures like this and to find ways to remind the world that oil is relevant for some time.

US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.

> US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.

China isn't rich in fossil energy? That's news to me.

They are the world's largest coal producer and still create over half of their electricity from coal. The difference to the US is that China seems to realize that this strategy isn't a long term solution.

US exports energy, China imports it. Not sure what is there to argue.

Someone who is "rich" in a consumable asset and therefore chooses to just consume that instead of investing in a renewable or compounding asset is colloquially known as "a dumbass."

And it's called "dutch disease".

We did it with gas. Now look at Norway. We could've been like Norway.

We couldn't have been like Norway. Norway is super duper rich due to.... Oil rights elsewhere in the world.

They play the best kid in class with electrification but their funding comes directly from contributing to the problem.

And when Holland found the gas reserves in Groningen, global warming was really not known about yet.

Norway invested their oil winnings in a nation wide fund. The Netherlands spent their gas money on hookers and booze.

But US seems to be doing a bit of everything no?

But of course it doesn't have the same incentives of China.

You are commenting on an article in which the US is deciding (and paying immense costs) in order not to do everything. The current administration is actively trying to squash several proven-valuable ways of converting non-renewable resources into renewable ones.

the current administration is the key word.

In any case, you can't expect stable policies in a country with a winner-takes-all democracy.

Not sure how that's relevant to the topic here.

Your initial comment seemed to imply that these actions are the rational downstream consequences of the US's incentives. Now you seem to be suggesting that maybe it's not, but it's just the actions of the current administration?

Not sure what policy stability has to do with anything. If anything it's a further indictment of your point. A successful energy project will span multiple administrations to come to fruition. It takes just one administration to kill a project... as illustrated by TFA. This is not in fact explainable as a rational response to the US's incentives.

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