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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

For me, both are equally impressive actually. Europe has some great clean-energy countries.

Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me.

This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.

Population of China is 1404 milions, population of France is 66 milion, so per capita France produces more electricity.

95% and 50% show that France has electric grid with much lower carbon emissions per unit of energy then China.

France build most of its nuclear reactors in 1980s (54 reactors within 15 years), as a reaction to oil schocks in 1970s. This transformation was faster then what is currently in China (again when compared per capita).

This is HN. This is a site for engineers. We’re discussing one of the largest and fastest energy buildouts in the history of humanity, larger by orders of magnitude than anything that’s come before. You can hate China if you want, but then you should be scared and worried. Minimizing the scale of what they’re doing isn’t interesting.

I don't hate China, in fact I have many colleagues from China. Energy buildout in China is big, because everything in China is big, because it's a country of 1,404 million people. And India is on the same trajectory as China, only 20 years delayed:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...

What I'm worried is that people don't understand the energy priorities of China, they are first and foremost: energy independence and cheap plentiful energy. Any decarbonization efforts are pursued only if they are not conflict with the first goal. This is very different from the goals of many European governments of phasing out nuclear energy, fossil energy, even when it causes dependence on energy imports and high energy prices (high when comparing with China, US).

When comparing growth of low-carbon energy in China, France. In 15 years (2010-2015) China's share of energy from low-carbon sources changes from 4% to 12 %. In France (1976 - 1991) from 5% to 38%.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&time=...

The biggest difference between China and France is: China has plentiful coal reserves and mines a lot of coal, France has only small coal reserves and had to import lot of coal.

"Despite its wealth, France has never been self-sufficient in coal, and even at the peak of production in the 1960s, it always imported foreign coal (from Belgium, the UK, Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland, etc.)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_France

I'm perfectly aware that we (we as the whole humanity) are turning our planet to hell with our CO2 emission, but Asian countries is not following the path of European countries of decreasing energy production and Asian countries are building renewables not to replace fossil energy production, but to add to fossil energy production.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Germany/coal_production/

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/France/coal_production/

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/india/coal_production/

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/china/coal_production/

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/indonesia/coal_production/

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