China is also building the equivalent of five nuclear reactors worth of wind and solar per week. They're actually quite far ahead of their targets and are closing in on the 2030 target right now.
The reality is that world energy use is still quickly increasing, which obviously reflects in China as it's the world's manufacturing hub.
I'm not making this comment to defend spiraling world energy use, coal, or China — China has scaled down its nuclear build-out which is an arguably dubious decision when the substitution for the planned base load increase is coal since China is short on nat gas — but it must be considered that a true green energy build out is extremely energy and resource intensive. Huge amounts of new mining. Huge amounts of new manufacturing capacity.
China's plan is to start the phase out of coal near the end of the decade. Until that point, there will still be new plant approvals granted. Essentially, a mega-scale green energy transition is a gigantic optimization problem, combined with other variables in the equation, like national energy security, energy constraints, financial constraints, and also political constraints like regional government and industry considerations/influence. Because a true trillion dollar plus scale energy transition is highly resource intensive and involves slowing the slope growth of a lot of lines that are each like turning a cruise ship, while the sum total/net energy use is trending up, it's not surprising at all that dirty power is still being built. Actually, it's mandatory when you look at the math for it, unless China is willing to put a moratorium on net energy use, which would mean that energy use outside of the actual transition would need to be ratcheted down, majorly, every year. That obviously isn't going to happen because China's internal economy is already in a pretty horrible stagnation and such a requirement would mean dismantling the new EV industry among other things.
I do wish I had the source available) it's been a few years), but I read some great charts and analysis on the requirements for a true global green energy transition from a Goldman Market Intelligence Research report. Pretty high grade. The sort of stuff that a hedge fund would use to manage a green energy transition book or what have you. What struck me was just how large the delta was between the political discourse and consensus general understanding, and what the actual numbers were. Sort of like how people downplay the difference between 100 billion and one trillion (Humans, and actually all animals, have this built-in flaw/feature where they see 100 billion as halfway between 10 and 1000. Life sees the world exponentially, including babies which is extremely interesting, and then we train ourselves to see math and numbers linearly, which creates some interesting psychological effects, but I digress.) If a major economy is going to commit to a true green energy transition and not beat around the bush, but go for a plan that pushes closer to 100% than 10%, it's going to be an unfathomably huge project, and it's going to involve a staggeringly, almost incomprehensible level of resources (in a general sense and literal sense).
AFAIK China also has a relatively ready-to-go carbon cap-and-trade system. Businesses already need to report their emissions.
But they have no incentive to enable it, since countries can't reach close enough consensus to get to effective global climate accords.
(I commented in hopes of getting someone who knows more to reply.)
China is also building the equivalent of five nuclear reactors worth of wind and solar per week. They're actually quite far ahead of their targets and are closing in on the 2030 target right now.
The reality is that world energy use is still quickly increasing, which obviously reflects in China as it's the world's manufacturing hub.
I'm not making this comment to defend spiraling world energy use, coal, or China — China has scaled down its nuclear build-out which is an arguably dubious decision when the substitution for the planned base load increase is coal since China is short on nat gas — but it must be considered that a true green energy build out is extremely energy and resource intensive. Huge amounts of new mining. Huge amounts of new manufacturing capacity.
China's plan is to start the phase out of coal near the end of the decade. Until that point, there will still be new plant approvals granted. Essentially, a mega-scale green energy transition is a gigantic optimization problem, combined with other variables in the equation, like national energy security, energy constraints, financial constraints, and also political constraints like regional government and industry considerations/influence. Because a true trillion dollar plus scale energy transition is highly resource intensive and involves slowing the slope growth of a lot of lines that are each like turning a cruise ship, while the sum total/net energy use is trending up, it's not surprising at all that dirty power is still being built. Actually, it's mandatory when you look at the math for it, unless China is willing to put a moratorium on net energy use, which would mean that energy use outside of the actual transition would need to be ratcheted down, majorly, every year. That obviously isn't going to happen because China's internal economy is already in a pretty horrible stagnation and such a requirement would mean dismantling the new EV industry among other things.
I do wish I had the source available) it's been a few years), but I read some great charts and analysis on the requirements for a true global green energy transition from a Goldman Market Intelligence Research report. Pretty high grade. The sort of stuff that a hedge fund would use to manage a green energy transition book or what have you. What struck me was just how large the delta was between the political discourse and consensus general understanding, and what the actual numbers were. Sort of like how people downplay the difference between 100 billion and one trillion (Humans, and actually all animals, have this built-in flaw/feature where they see 100 billion as halfway between 10 and 1000. Life sees the world exponentially, including babies which is extremely interesting, and then we train ourselves to see math and numbers linearly, which creates some interesting psychological effects, but I digress.) If a major economy is going to commit to a true green energy transition and not beat around the bush, but go for a plan that pushes closer to 100% than 10%, it's going to be an unfathomably huge project, and it's going to involve a staggeringly, almost incomprehensible level of resources (in a general sense and literal sense).