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Comment by 0xfedcafe | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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