It genuinely makes me so sad to see the US not doing the same. Having grown up to the constant beat of “energy independence” as the core goal of a party it seemed obvious that the nearly limitless energy that rains down from the sky would be the answer. But instead we’ve kept choosing the option which requires devastating our, and other’s around the world, community. That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns. But it’s difficult to compare localized damage to war and globalized damage.
Up to the 2008 election the Republican party platform called for reducing fossil fuel use, establishing a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change, a long term tax credit for renewable energy (with specific mentions of solar and wind), more recycling, and making consumer products more energy efficient.
They wanted to aggressively support technological advances to reduce the dependence of transportation on petroleum, giving examples of making cars more efficient (they mention doubling gas mileage) and developing more flex-fuel and electric vehicles. They talked about honoraria of many millions of dollars for technological developments that could eliminate the need for gas powered cars.
They also mentioned promoting wireless communication to increase telecommuting options and reduce business travel.
All that was gone by 2012. I'm not sure what caused the change.
Fracking. Before fracking people were worried about "peak oil", and being dependent on unfriendly governments for our basic energy needs. Then with fracking we realized we are actually sitting on huge available oil reserves, and peak oil quickly became a quaint outdated concept.
Not that it changes your point, but the other day I met a republican who said he doesn’t think climate change is a thing but peak oil, now that’s something to worry about.
The longevity of this plus the “no anthropogenic climate change” nonsense is astounding. Armchair climate sceptics are happy to seriously stick to talking points that are so out of date that even the oil industry doesn’t use them anymore.
So you met a person, they told you their Party Affiliation, then went to tell you how it isn't "real".
Sorry I don't believe your paraphrasing of this person's real thoughts and ideas. I'm sure these people exist, but it doesn't mean anything. I could equally go find someone crazy saying the world is going to end this year.
That may be part of it, but as your parent comment mentioned, the Republicans weren't only worried about peak oil and being dependent on unfriendly governments, but also about climate change. Of course, none of these three problems went away, the point where fossil fuels will be exhausted just got pushed further into the future, and the fact that it will take more and more effort and environmental damage to get to the remaining resources is also undeniable.
But yeah, I guess your answer still applies indirectly: Fracking -> stronger interests by US oil companies -> money to the Republican party -> fossil fuel friendly regulations.
Fracking has nothing to do with energy. When you look at EROI oil from a gusher is around ~100:1. For solar 10-25:1, wind 20-50:1, Fracking is 10:1 and most of that doesn't end up as diesel
It's useful for the plastics and petrochemical industry, but it's not going to make the country energy independent, even including battery costs wind still trounces.
So John McCann did run on reducing fossil fuel usage and promoting a greater mix of energy technologies but I wouldn't say that changed by 2012 per se. McCain himself was the anomaly that didn't match earlier or later candidates. For example, Bush did open up ANWR to drilling, even though that was purely symbolic and nobody is going up there to drill or has done in the 20 intervening years (apart from some minor exploratory drilling by Chevron).
Also, I'd say McCain's policy was more based on a national security argument than a climate argument. As others have pointed out, fracking changed everything. In 2008 we were a huge net importer of oil. Now we're a huge net exporter.
Mines (including oil wells) are huge wealth concentrators. A handful of very wealthy people benefit hugely from resource extraction. And the US government, as a whole regardless of party, represents the interests of large corporations both domestically and overseas.
Anyway, Bush (either one) didn't run on renewable energy. Neither did the candidates that came after. 2012 was just a reversion to mean.
Obama was elected, which made some people very angry:
> Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
> Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Sure Trump took everything to an absurd level of "do the opposite of biden no matter what", but it started back then.
> The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
I remember that day vividly.
It was the middle of the Great Recession, it was the worst our economy was doing in a long time. Millions were out of work. People were looking to the government to see what the plan was to get the country back on track.
A reporter asks McConnell what the senate’s number one priority was.
The answer? Not fixing the economy, not helping out every day Americans. Not finding the root cause of the crash and making sure it doesn’t happen that way again.
No, the answer was “make sure Obama is a one term president.” That’s all we would expect from the senate for the next 6 years.
The day McConnell said that, I said out loud: “I will never vote Republican again for the rest of my life.” (Prior to that point I mostly voted D but not 100% of the time.)
In 2008-9 Republicans did not even make the pretense of Obama being a threat to democracy. (Which would have been absurd in a way it isn't for Trump, who tried to overthrow an election he lost.)
I remember when some lady called Obama "Muslim" (in the same tone of voice as she'd say "demon" or something) and Mitt Romney took the microphone from her and said "no, no, we disagree politically but he's a good man."
Shows how poorly those politicians understood the constituency they were fomenting. He was boo'd for it by people that had come to see him specifically, and about 15 years later, republican voters built a scaffold outside the Capital they were breaking into while chanting about hanging the Republican vice president.
I feel like American politicians often play with fire without understanding its nature as something that burns.
I recommend John Boehner's book. He complimented Obama often, stated he & his team were far more ready than McCain to work with Bush on the economy. They were smoking buddies.
Didn’t help that he showed up at his first couple Senate meetings gloating about winning the election. And tried to set working hours for his former colleagues. Among other things.
Obstructionism as a core tenet of the (former) Republican platform is reprehensible, and retrospectively probably led to quite a bit of discontent with the government’s inability to address problems that Americans face. That same discontent fomented the current reactionary swing, so in the end maybe they really got what they wanted. Shameful.
Right on. That's probably the worst part of the debilitating self-own we're currently going through. Even if conservatives (aka Democrats) gain back Congress, then gain back the Presidency, then overcome their controlled opposition dynamic where enough inevitably defect and undermine anything meaningful from getting done, so much has been broken that we will be lucky if they even manage to stop the hemorrhaging. Even if the Republicans that got "dragged into" the fascist fever start to have a bit of self-reflection to realize the damage they've done. We've got what, maybe 8 years until the malcontents' dog whistle refrains start to have credence again and then we're right back to staring down the destructionists - with a trail having already been blazed.
"Other things" most obviously being the racism caused in part by significant cognitive dissonance that uniquely affects white supremacists when having a black president.
In a word: Greed. In two words: Crony Capitalism. The spend on “non-renewable“ energy is significant to the domestic economy. In 2023 (most recent year I could find), consumer spend on energy in the US was $1.6T (https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener...) with at least 82% of that being fossil fuels - the remainder being “renewables” and nuclear energy (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62444). This does not include billions in subsidies and infrastructure investment.
“Going green” would threaten the American Greed Machine by cutting upwards of $150B in taxes annually, interfering with the individual, corporate, and government gains from the stock and commodities markets, causing short-term inflation due to commodity value spikes, and long-term deflation due to renewable energy being relatively very low cost to generate after the infrastructure is in place. Last, but certainly there is more, the US exports a massive amount of oil and gas. Divesting from fossil fuel production would have a significant impact on GDP (find your own source).
This is why the US doesn’t invest in infrastructure that doesn’t generate significant ongoing income like it once did - it simply doesn’t make enough money. We only act once it is falling apart.
It is all about the money, man. That money is power. It keeps the Corporatocracy and those at the top of it in charge, the US as the primary reserve currency and allows the US to have a huge, formidable military.
Oh, I thought you were being sarcastic. It was clearly Citizens United (2008) and the explosive growth of Super PACs that followed.
Unlimited spending from the fossil fuel industry basically standardized Republican candidates on climate denial talking points. Plus whatever bizarre fetishes random Republican billionaires had, like Adelson keeping Gingrich's primary campaign on life support for months. That fucked up Romney's pivot to the general election for no perceivable gain to any of them. According to Wikipedia Adelson spent over $90 million on losing candidates in 2012!
Well - greed explains this though. Plus, you can also run fake-policies - the USA has done so numerous times before. Flip-Flopping happens in both parties there.
Big coal got involved. Undoubtedly one or more billionaires in the dirty energy industry would have seen their substantial wealth dwindle to the mere single-digit billions and started paying politicians a lot of money. There's simply no other explanation because to actively kill clean energy projects that are 90% complete and is not only cleaner than coal but also now cheaper is simply illogical and irrational.
It's manufactured grievance. Opportunists politicize losing positions for political gain because they're inherently anti-elite, anti-establishment and upset experts and the informed.
Upon this antagonization is conflict which brings on drama, eyeballs, and advertisers.
It's an attention flywheel that brings loyalty, builds a moat, and sets a differentiator...
I recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben.
There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs.
This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year.
The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.
Solar panels etc. will last decades and can and will be recycled afterwards. Further, most materials needed for renewable energy infrastructure (iron, lithium) are highly abundant on earth. Most of the suppliers work to use cheaper (=more abundant) materials in their products, replacing lithium with sodium in batteries and silver with copper in solar panels. Wind turbine blades are produced now using re-solvable resins.
Not only are older solar panels recyclable, but efficiency gains in panel construction mean that multiple newer panels can be created with the resources from older panels.
Wind turbines are not recyclable[1]. Besides, the foundations use a massive amount of concrete (nowadays often extracted from the seabed, with all the problematic ecological consequences involved), that stays forever in the ground.
Existing wind turbines turbines are not recyclable - new wind turbines are.
Except, that's not even true. Some existing wind turbines are not recyclable.
Except that's not entirely true either! The tower portion of the turbine is usually steel, and easily recyclable! The nacelle, too. It's the base and the blades that can't be recycled.
Except that's not entirely true either! Existing turbine blades are made (mostly) of fibreglass, which is made of the fibre and the resin. The fibres aren't reliably as strong when recycled (which makes them not-very-useful when recycled), but the resin is just fine. And of course, if the blade is e.g. carbon fibre, then you can either re-use it or just burn it.
So, you statement should be that some (components of) existing wind turbines cannot be profitably recycled with current technology.
The wind turbine's concrete base doesn't need to be smashed up or ignored, incidentally - it can be re-used. Concrete is much sturdier than the e.g. gearbox.
None of this is economically profitable, which is why right now it ends up in massive landfils. The concrete base is reinforced with steel beams and weights so much that you can't move it.
Also sorry but I would require a citation for "new wind turbines are recyclable". That the tech exists doesn't mean that all installed turbines have it.
Concrete recycling is actually a pretty big deal. For most of building history here the standard material to put behind basement walls, retaining walls, and so on, for drainage was crushed scoria. Now it's crushed concrete. Some amount of effort but you're recycling existing stuff, and they recover the reinforcing steel as well.
Who cares? Those blades and that concrete are totally inert and just sit in the ground after their useful life. The ground already has lots of rocks in it.
The problem is that those power sources are marketed as "renewable" (they aren't as they quickly end in landfills), are intermittent, require fossil fuels for when the wind doesn't blow, and are not profitable.
One could also say that they change heavily natural landscapes, but this is a matter of taste.
The finiteness of fossil fuels isn't real in a practical sense.
The globe burnt about 8.8 billion tons of coal in 2024. Which is a huge amount. This is the peak, most estimates are that we will reduce from there.
Australia alone estimates that it has 147 billion tons of economically recoverable coal. That is Australia alone could supply the entire globe at peak usage for over 16 years. And Australia only has about 14% of the globes coal reserves, we can keep burning coal at this pace for at least the next hundred years. And it a hundred years the scope of what we consider to be economically recoverable will have expanded greatly, further increasing our supply.
A more sci-fi apocalyptic angle on this fact is the argument that fossil fuels, especially easily accessible ones, are necessary to bootstrap a futuristic multi-planetary civilization. They provide the easy energy necessary to support an industrial revolution and the society and technology level necessary for more advanced and renewable forms of energy necessary to really build and sustain an advanced civilization long term.
But because they take so long to form, stumbles along the path of energy advancement mean a planetary civilization could run out of fossil fuels before reaching the level of advancement necessary to move beyond them. At that point, the civilization is essentially doomed since they lack the technological ability to move beyond fossil fuels and they lack the energy resources necessary to develop that technology.
CO2 can be converted to methane. It just isn't profitable to do so yet. After the fossil fuels are depleted, it will be a viable niche for storable energy where renewables aren't practical.
Once fossil fuels run out, most exclusively-fossil-fuel-based activities will simply cease to be economically feasible.
That doesn't contradict your statement, of course. But in the long term the fossil fuel niches will start looking more like today's rocket-fuel niches.
Methane synthesized from excess renewable power can store that renewable power for years, handily fixing the whole "Sun don't shine every day" problem.
It's durable energy storage and can be easily moved around like liquid fuels.
It also would remove CO2 emissions from things like airplanes, which won't be able to be battery powered in the near future, and could renewably replace chemical feedstocks in lots of industrial processes.
But this requires immense industrial capability, probably some serious innovation in absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere because that's basically an unsolved problem right now, and a massive oversupply of solar power which cannot happen under market systems because nobody builds infrastructure to sell power at below market rates.
True. The situation for both off-gassing and plastic recycling is rather bleak.
Sorry for being vague; I was only referring to economically valuable minerals used in electric batteries.
Aqua Metals has previously said they'll be able to reuse battery quality graphite (from batteries) as well (vs releasing it as CO2). But my recent scan of their progress wasn't very encouraging.
Learning more about Redwood Recycling stack is on my to do list.
Yep. It's not just oil rigs in the desert. Chevron in Ecuador destroyed the Amazonian rainforest. Oil pipelines and open pit mines destroying Canadian primordial forests. Probably tons of untold stories.
Similar to the idea that electric cars are net worse for the environment because some of the materials used to make them. Worse than 20 years of burning gasoline in an ICE car? It's so ridiculous.
it depends where your electricity comes from actually. In west Virginia it comes from coal so is worse than a hybrid but still better than non-hybrid gas cars (in terms of CO2)
No it's not. The efficiency of an EV Motor > efficiency of ICEV motor. Even with 100% black coal. The carbon is reduced by about 30% IIRC (that number can and does improve as the grid greens).
It’s so interesting seeing some of the comments about this. The sentence I wrote after that blames war and global devastation on fossil fuels. I was expecting to get flak for being too harsh to fossil fuels but somehow it swung the other direction. Which, as someone who shouts at the radio when the greenwashing oil ads play on NPR, is heartening.
Those are nice pictures but I can take the same pictures in the USA.
Note: I'm not suggesting China is not doing better here. Rather, I'm going off the title "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout" and I'm not seeing anything in those photos I haven't seen in the USA.
Driving down the 580 from SF to Tracy you pass several hundred windmills. Driving through Mojave the same. Also solar. Driving toward Vegas as well. And those are just the ones I've seen with my own eyes. There's many others.
And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.
The article here starts with:
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
The concentrated solar plant is getting shut down because it's failing to compete with the massive rollout of photovoltaic panels. We've made solar so cheap that the old ways of gathering it are becoming redundant, which, no matter how incredibly cool it was to see a second sun rise over the horizon on the way to Vegas, is a good sign.
The California Public Utilities Commission moved last month to prevent the shutdown of the Ivanpah solar concentrator. They cite data centers, grid reliability, and the state's clean energy goals as reasons to keep it online.
The pics show renewable energy integrated with other activity (e.g. sheep grazing among solar panels); integrated into urban environments (on every rooftop and streets) and contrasted against ancient Chinese culture (e.g. temples). I think this makes the imagery substantially different from the alternative-offered US RE installations.
We’re doing better than they are. Our new power generation is about 90% renewable, theirs is 70.
The difference is just scale, China has 3x our population but very many of them had little or even no electricity available so they’re playing catch up. Americans are functionally all served by the power grid already. So of course they’re building more of it as an absolute number.
But I’d also bet they built more coal plants last year than the entire world built in a decade.
Last year, PRC new generation is functionally >100% renewable (as in over 100%), new advanced coal plants serve as cleaner coal peakers not base load. New renewables now displaces existing coal (new trend last year) - nameplate coal is up due to new plants, but actual utilization of coal down in absolute terms.
Meanwhile what doesn't get captured in accounting is US increasing fossil exports (crude, lng etc), and PRC exporting renewables. Assuming 25 year lifecycle, PRC exports solar last year displaces ~5 years worth of US fossil exports in barrels of crude equivalent (400 GW of solar = 14000TWh electricity, or 8B barrels of oil, i.e. 22m barrels per day). TLDR PRC is reducing absolute fossil use, MASSIVELY increasing global renewable use. US is simply increasing net fossil use, much of it hidden from domestic balance sheets because it's exported globally.
Hardly. China is also betting on nuclear fission and nuclear fusion:
1. Fission: TMSR-LF1 (a thorium breeder, molten salt research reactor)
Based on US work in 1960s and independent Chinese Sinap work in 1970s.
They recently published that they had detected Protactiunium in the salt - a new milestone.
I know that China's actively researching Nuclear fission, fusion and even have the world's first thorium reactor pilot - in fact, they might even be having a lot more effort and investment being put into nuclear than the rest of the world combined. But they aren't putting all of their chips and actively betting with a Hallelujah on fusion to provide energy. They're ramping up renewables production side by side while still funding fusion research.
Republicans on the other hand are hoping somehow that a gutted NRC will pave the way for looser regulations that will help ramp up conventional nuclear fission and nuclear fusion timelines (all efforts invested into by the current president's family and his fellow cronies of course), while abjectly gutting down any progress in renewable energy in the present moment.
China knows better than to weaken their position in the global theater by having large dependence on other nations for energy. They are aiming for domination and they are well on their way.
China is fine with dependence on other nations, it just can't rely on sea-based imports when the US could easily block them by blockading the strait of Malacca. That's why China has invested so heavily into their Belt And Road initiative (which is notably a giant land-based shipping route).
Actually, it seems China has given up on the feasibility of BRI because they don't control all the variables in their partner countries. Which is why Xi has been super focused on creating an autarkic economy dependent on domestic demand and encouraging production for the native population, as a back up. Failures in helping industrialize countries such as Pakistan and those in Africa due to systemic and unavoidable issues have soured on the Chinese. That autarkic vision hinges strongly on a solid renewables energy production base.
Well the Trumps, Thiel, etc are all invested heavily in a bunch of publicly traded nuclear fusion and nuclear fission companies, so those presidentially-backed firms are seeing outsized funding gains.
In 2025, > 90% of new energy capacity built in the US is from renewable [0]. So the US isn't building that much solar not because they're not building solar, but that the US has been generating and consuming so much energy per capita that there isn't that much incentive to increase energy capacity dramatically.
The US has done well historically, roughly on par with China on per capita renewable rollout, slightly ahead of China between 2019-2023 but probably falling behind now.
China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.
edit: looked it up, US is still ahead of China as of 2024:
Bear in mind that pre 2000 is likely hydro, in the early years of solar and wind that confused matters if lumped in together but I think it's now obvious when the new tech kicks in.
People regularly talk about how much new coal capacity China has been building.
Quite often this is followed by "capacity, sure; they're not using all that capacity, those plants exist and are mostly not running", or some variation thereof. I've never bothered fact-checking the responses, but this conversation happens is most of the Chinese renewables discussions I've seen in the last few years.
I don't understand this? A couple of people responded with clear charts showing nuclear way behind on solar/renewables with solar/renewables growing faster too.
It looks like you've been misled but are having trouble admitting that to yourself?
These are new electric power plants. The US is still ramping up oil and gas production, and is now producing more than ever before. No signs of transitioning away from fossil fuels for transport, industry, export.
> The US is still ramping up oil and gas production
This also happens in China. With better ratio for renewables but still. Globally there was more energy from coal than before. Much more was from renewables but in context of climate change absolute numbers of CO2 are what matters.
EU is also reverting it's green targets because of this new situation. So near future does not look good.
That's production, not consumption. The US exports huge amounts of oil and gas now. The EU/Russia sanctions and the Red Sea blockade are a huge gravy train for American oil and gas companies.
The us president held a fundraiser for petroleum execs late in 2024. He promised to kill as many renewable energy projects as possible. They donated a billion dollars to his campaign. And he followed through.
The rhetoric around "energy independence" always sounded like it was pointing exactly toward renewables, and it's hard not to see the missed opportunity in hindsight
Can’t power the military with renewables. Need nuclear and fossil fuels for that. One doesn’t want to be dependent on foreign nations to power their military.
What are you talking about? Renewables don't require fuels, unlike the fossil fuels that the US has invaded several countries for (most recently taking actions against another country just this month).
Got a way of using that tasty oil cleanly? Maybe we want to reserve those complex hydrocarbons for some other use like growing crops, making solid rocket fuel, or some other national priority.
Nuclear - Yes, craft regulations that make sense and squeeze all the damned energy possible out of that 'waste'. No, I don't mean burn the fuel the easy way only - I mean send it back to military run reprocessing centers to concentrate the power and make the (effective) half life of the waste decades rather than civilizations of time (yes, concentrating it, there will also be some super mild things that decay slowly enough to be useful in other applications rather than waste).
We want to maximize energy in the long, medium and short term. Try Everything.
Seeing fewer rooftop solar installations when I visit my home state (Texas) than I see in the one I live in (Bavaria) is a trip. Yes, I know that electricity is far cheaper there than here, but as much electricity as air conditioning eats, and as big as those roofs are (panels are cheap; it's the system that's expensive), it should balance out.
Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...
My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.
Grid level renewables are more economical than rooftop solar by a significant stretch, and Texas has a lot of that, especially wind. The lifetime cost of rooftop solar just doesn't work out very well when you also have cheap electricity.
My 65yo parents installed Solar panels on the roof of their house in a Tier 2 city in the poor parts of India. So did pretty much most of their neighbours.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
In the UK, it's expensive, and it's not the technology, it's everything else. I don't see how that can improve unless the installation costs come down, and I don't know how that could/would happen.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
I wasn't ripped off, but I didn't go for the cheapest quote either. I wasn't trying to suggest my installation was typical or what someone could expect to pay in the UK, the point I was trying to make was the cost of labour adds significantly, and overall even if you paid half what I did, it's still too much to expect the majority of UK households to take it up.
My system is larger than typical for a UK home, I also paid a premium to have it installed by a company with an excellent reputation for their work, I'd had a new roof the week before and wanted a high quality installation.
I also went with a company that let me decide how I wanted it installed; other companies wanted to put the batteries in my loft or under the stairs which was an absolute no from me, I don't want them inside my home, and I had them install the batteries and inverter in a brick out house on the opposite end of the property to where the consumer unit is, again, at a premium.
I had per-panel optimisers and monitoring hardware installed, and because I wasn't aware of it until later, I added the bird-mesh on after signing the contract and did get ripped off on that part (NOTE: if you get solar in the UK, and have ever so much as seen a pigeon, get bird mesh).
It's also worth noting that checking today, all of the hardware has dropped in price, my panels are now 20% cheaper, batteries are 15% cheaper, inverter is 10% cheaper, and I imagine installations and labour might be cheaper in the winter than the peak of summer like I had mine installed.
All of that said, the total cost of installation doesn't really matter so much as the ROI, which for me works out at most ~6 years, if none of the hardware fails in the meantime.
EDIT: There's a mistake in my previous comment which I based all of the subsequent numbers on; the cost of 2 batteries + inverter was closer to £5k not £3.5k.
Absolutely. A local company is currently advertising 12 470w panels, 10kwh storage for £7695 fully installed with additional pannels fully installed for £200 each. /r/uksolar is a great resource for comparing quotes.
There are a lot of variables that need to be factored in, and they don't cover many of them in these cheaper quotes.
What size inverter? Is it a hybrid inverter? 10kWh of Storage is 8-9kWh usable because batteries are only warrantied to 80-90% depth-of-discharge, is that enough?
Since there's only ~5.6kWp of panels in that quote it's probably over-provisioned, and it will likely come with a smaller inverter, say 3.6kW, which is what a lot of these cheaper companies will do, and export will be limited under G98 to 3.68kW.
That also means that in peak sun, your 5.6kW of panels are going to clip at the inverter capacity and you won't be able to access more than that limit in power.
£200 per extra panel isn't bad, the company I went with charged £300, but mine came with per-panel optimisers (at my request, mainly for the monitoring functionality rather than optimisation). If I wanted to add an additional elevation though, that would be per-panel cost plus ~£2000 for the additional elevation of scaffolding.
If you're going for one of these installations and haven't already, ask these questions, and if you can get a decent price that's great, I wish you luck. I'm not on reddit so I can't comment on the quality of that sub.
That quoted price is nuts I did it cheaper in Canada in 2007. And that was with tracking panels (which I would never do again, I'd just buy more panels).
To be fair Australia also has approximately infinitely more sun than most of Europe does. But true, we could be doing a lot better in the EU regardless
I guess at some level it is a matter of incentives. In their city, we have electricity 20-22 hours per day (used to be 12-18 when i was growing up) and we can’t rely on the state to provide us electricity consistently.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
I would say 10% of the homes in my estate in Derbyshire have rooftop solar. We haven't gone for it yet because I still think the cost is too high. It might work out when electricity gets even more expensive.
Is there any truth to the climate sceptic claim that solar in the UK can’t generate useful power with our bad weather and cloud cover? I always said that it’s not like Germany has better weather but they have tons of solar. However it would be great to have an answer from the UK.
It definitely generates useful amounts of power, especially in the summer. The problem is that we still need gas plant, and the distribution infrastructure ready for the rest of the year when it isn't so effective.
Some of our neighbours had home solar, wind, and battery storage in the 1990s.
They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.
It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.
We're getting there: California does[1] require solar installation on many new builds, and has followed Australia in doing automatic permit processing[2] to streamline installation. It's possible to pay around $20k for an average home, and in as little as one week have 100% of your power bill covered by solar.
But what surprises me most in this entire debate is how little we talk about the biological cost of CO₂ itself. We focus so much on the globalized damage to the climate that we’ve overlooked the direct, physiological tax that combustion is levying on our bodies. For some reason conservative governments want us to continue to trade our atmospheric oxygen for carbon dioxide through the burning fossil fuels. I wrote more about this topic on substack:
Over 90% of new power generation being built (both domestically and globally) is renewables. We do it for the same reason China and everyone else is: it’s just cheaper now.
That’s the best reason because it’s the one that gets the job done. Renewable energy prices will keep falling while fossil fuel prices rise, widening the gap.
In 25 years there will be little fossil fuel generation left.
Meanwhile in Italy, the whole renewables discussion is gaslighted by "we should actually consider nuclear" and "wind turbines ruin the panorama".
I'm not against nuclear per se, but it's like this part of italians don't realize that:
1. if you decide to make a power plant today, it won't be online before the 2050s, in the best case scenario. It's very difficult to bring nuclear plants online, especially in the west. Even the countries with the capital and know-how (US and France) see more projects cancelled than brought online. I think US has put online a single nuclear plant in 20 years, France not a single one.
2. Nuclear needs tons of water, we have less and less of it as it rains less and global warming doesn't accumulate enough snow in the alps (which generally melts in the summer), our rivers are literally dry stone most of the year.
3. Renewables can be attached to the grid (or close to where they are needed) in the span of few months and with very little know-how required.
4. Money isn't limitless, building a 20B+ nuclear plant (realistically 50 knowing these projects + Italy) means this budget won't be available for the next decade on projects that could bring benefits immediately.
I'm sure that Italy and Germany, which are manufacturing heavy countries that need lots of energy cannot rely renewables alone, of course nuclear should be considered, but hell, in my region (around Rome), 95% of our energy comes from imported natural gas, I'm sure we could invest some more in that.
I’m anti nuclear on cost reasons but that’s excessively pessimistic. Nuclear can use seawater for cooling, and being colder offsets the cost premium of using salt water.
Your 2050’s comment assumes a level of dysfunction that’s presumably exaggerated. Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.
The cost of canceled nuclear projects is generally quite low compared to lifetime subsidies of nuclear. Nuclear may be an inefficient use of government resources, but it’s also offset a staggering amount of emissions and the subsidies tend to end back up in the local economy recuperating some of the expense. IMO, there’s probably dumber things your government is doing that are worth fighting instead.
> Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.
The average time globally is 14 years. The latest point of reference in the west, Vogtle was announced in 2006 and came online in 2025, 19 years later. It took 7 years alone just to start building it.
There's no chance this would take less time in Italy, where you need to also find a suitable place, you don't have the know-how and there's an anti-nuclear referendum that's been voted 3 decades ago. So there is a lot that needs to be changed, starting from having a public voting.
Hinkley Point C, in UK, has ballooned it's cost from the planned 18B pounds to a 43B pounds in the span of a decade. These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Depends on what you consider the start date. Practically speaking there’s some investigation into building nuclear in Italy that already occurred but using that as a start date isn’t meaningful here. Similarly the announcement you point to was a long way from having everything required to actually build a power plant.
Until there’s actual funding talking about nuclear doesn’t really mean anything. Vogal was a boondoggle but it didn’t get construction approval until 2012 and like many projects ran into COVID delays on top of everything else.
> These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Using the worst examples means there’s something very wrong with each of them.
The 10 year estimate comes from a range of projects including some that go very badly and others that didn't.
You can always pick worse numbers by using a smaller sample of projects, but it isn’t necessarily meaningful to do so. California’s high speed rail has gone far worse than Italy’s projects, America is currently comically bad at large construction projects.
They go over budget because regulatory burdens are very high, not because of any fundamental unknowns in deploying the technology. A motivated national government could reduce the cost substantially.
Regulations of course have a purpose but they are often (a) out of date with respect to current technology (b) not well well designed to accomplish their intended purpose in the first place or ignored 2nd and 3rd order effects and (c) perverted to extract rents for incumbents at the expense of new market entrants. Certainly (a) is true in most places with respect to nuclear technology.
Australia fortunately has a political neutral research organisation (CSIRO) whose job is to estimate the net cost benefit for various government programs.
Needless to say not at all cost effective to go nuclear at this point. There's no reason that wouldn't hold similarly in other nations since the scale of the difference in costs are so huge too.
Hasn't stopped certain parties from doing the same thing as Italy though, the CSIRO being credible really hurt their efforts though, Murdoch press tried & failed to discredit them with ferocity.
Worst part is, even if price comes down I think they further poisoned the idea of nuclear in Australia because their plan was brazenly to keep the coal & gas plants running in the meantime rather than spend money on wind/solar. They didn't even make an effort for their timelines and costs to be remotely believable.
We're only energy independent in the sense that we export more oil than we import. We're still reliant on foreign oil because we haven't retooled (or built enough new) refineries for a lot of the oil we produce. Allowing the Saudis to own refineries is probably a strong factor there. If the middle east and Canada cut us off, we're SOL. Venezuela barely produces anything right now.
Retooling refineries to a different flavor of crude is expensive, but not that expensive. If push came to shove, the US could transition to oil independence in less than a year.
I thought the same thing, ... where is the "and Greenland!"?
The amount of hard, soft and economic power that are being burned for the bedtime stories of one person is unreal. As are all the cooperators and lobby harnessing conspirators whose actual dreams are getting implemented.
It isn't the fall of the USSR, but it is still a dramatic ceiling bounce.
I mean Venezuela is a touch iffy on how strongly we commit but saying the USA basically owns Canada isn't exactly controversial maybe controls is a more acceptable way of phrasing it? They are a "sovereign" with a lowercase S at best.
Canada fucking hates the US right now and are actively in discussions to deepen their relationship with China, and cut back on their relationship with the US.
It’s about incentives. We are “energy independent” compared to China and the EU. With China, if its relations with Russia sour and if they get cut off in Djiboutis by any number of powers, they will be a world of hurt.
And it would have been possible if not for the support on this platform and similar ones for people like Elon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, like the youth says these days: FAFO
We chose this path because the U.S. dollar is underpinned by fossil fuel markets. Also, batteries do not have the energy density to mobilize a mechanized military.
Our elites refuse to concede dominance of the affairs of the world, so they will never allow the fossil fuel infrastructure to decline unless forced.
By contrast, China has every incentive to do the right thing.
The USA doesn't (over any long historical time) push for anything much like corporatism, but instead for capitalism ("corporate capitalism” or “crony capitalism” to those who view “capitalism” as a utopian free market system and not the concrete real-world system for which the name was coined by its critics, I suppose.)
The US has been pushing toward something blending corporatism and kleptocracy under Trump II, but I suspect that people using "corporatism” to refer to a longer-term effort of the US are misusing "corporatism” (where the body—“corpus”—actually refers to the aggregate of government, business, and social institutions, all of which are interlocking and working together, with interlocking formal control structures for that end) to mean “capitalism oriented specifically around the interests of corporations”, i.e., "corporate capitalism”.
China has also just launched a megawatt scale wind generator a the helium-lifted balloon, the S2000 , they have active thorium rector the TMSR-LF1 and GW/h Vandium flow battery. The scale , speed and breadth of what they are doing is incredible and I think missed my people
Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.
The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.
That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.
It totally is. I don’t remember where I heard it from but there’s a saying that all poverty is energy poverty. Not enough food for your citizens? That’s because you don’t have enough energy to run the Haber Bosch process for fertilizer production.
And thank god they have this incentive alignment! Chinas greentech buildout and export is the only thing with a chance of getting us out of this climate mess. Imagine how fucked we’d be if they had their own oil.
>And thank god they have this incentive alignment! Chinas greentech buildout and export is the only thing with a chance of getting us out of this climate mess. Imagine how fucked we’d be if they had their own oil.
IIRC that list of companies that polluted the most on the planet, 1 and 2 were Chinese state owned entities. China Coal and China Petroleum from memory.
sure. But today china is the #1 producer of solar panels (80% of global production capacity), #1 producer of wind turbines (40%), #1 producer of batteries (~80%), #1 producer of EVs (75%).
Noone has done more for global clean energy, and its not even close. Sure they polluted a lot up until now, but honesty who cares about the past, times change fast.
The trend is clear that if we keep using fossil up, then soon nobody will have a good source for it. And it’s clear that for geopolitical reasons in addition to environmental reasons, energy independence will be a core necessity everywhere on earth. It’s handy that the sun is sending us enough energy, directly (solar) and indirectly (wind, hydro), that nobody has a good reason not to be “green focused” and phase out fossil fuels for energy. Any country that leads and shows the rest of the world that it can be done deserves applause.
Who is going to pay for it? Even when it was cheap, solar uptake was low except in Texas. EV adoption is still poor outside of California. Then there’s the issue of a K Shaped economy. Outside of our bubble in Silicon Valley, a lot of people can barely afford necessities let alone go green.
You might be confusing consumer purchasing choices with the national energy policy and infrastructure we were talking about. Going green personally is only more expensive to consumers in places where our country isn’t building and offering green power by default. EVs are a bit of a different topic. But what difference does it make when fossil fuels run out? Left unchecked, sooner or later market forces will make oil much more expensive as it becomes scarce, and eventually there is no choice. Yes we might be decades or even hundreds of years away from that, but in the big picture that’s not far away, and it doesn’t matter because the eventuality is obvious. Eventually there will be no such thing as non-renewable energy. Might as well start now.
Solar panels are being built like crazy in really poor developing countries like Pakistan, simply because it's cheaper than the alternatives. If they can afford it, average American surely should too.
But coal is the worst fossil fuel from a practical stance. It's really only good for energy generation. You can't really power tanks or warships with it.
Sure, I’m just pointing out that 24% share of power being nuke by 2060 is never going to happen now. Renewables got too cheap, and it’s not “on target”
If I have zero wives yesterday and one today, by next week I will need a new house for all my new wives.
Like I said in the original post:
>Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.
>The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Only capitalists are so penny wise and pound foolish to bet their civilization on the lowest bidder while hoping the inevitable doesn't happen in the next quarter.
I agree with you, china is building risk mitigation in a way that no one else is, and it will serve them well. However, in this thread I’m solely replying to your comment on the “24% nuke by 2060” plan. That particular plan is not going to happen any more, nuclear is not competitive enough, even for china.
I disagree. They’re not going to go the battery energy storage route, instead they will just fill in intermittent gaps in renewable electricity production with nuclear as they ramp down coal.
But where is the evidence to back up this 4D chess move? They have been failing to meet their nuclear roll out plans year after year? Why would they magically hit a ridiculously high goal of 24% by 2060?
4D chess? This is not some memery. They’re essentially building out aiming for a 100% redundant capacity. Renewables and coal are much faster to build, nuclear takes longer (7 years for standardized ones, 10 for newer kinds).
Demography. They're soon going to run out of "young" workers, which mean they have to invent the robotics of the 2100s to ensure the few remaining people will have machine to harvest crops and wage wars.
Also, they're soon going to run out of women, so they need to perfect artificial wombs.
The few remaining party elites will want to live practically forever, so biology will be on the programs once fusion and robots have been cracked.
And it doesnot even seem like china will make ussr-level mistakes.
Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.)
> Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.)
Might be more accurate to say that the PRC has successfully done an opium wars situation to the USA with e.g. fentanyl precursors.
I think a major factor is politics - when China's leadership sets out to do something, they go out and get it done. Look at China's high speed rail (now more than the combined rest of the world), renewable energy growth, and their recent investment in chips. They commit to it, and make incredible progress - far outpacing everyone else. China's leadership seems to plan for the long term in infrastructure.
Compare that to something like the California High Speed Rail, or our every 4 year tug of war for elections (and mid term elections). Everything is short sighted "wins" for the next reelection, of one party vs another party, instead of making actual progress.
Its almost like when there is a good benevolent leadership in charge, for a long term, then progress comes much faster. (Singapore, China, ?)
Are you joking? It looks just as ugly as mountaintop removal to me.
They could preserve all that scenery by just building out nuclear. That's without mentioning the horrible ecological impact of blanketing an entire ecosystem in panels.
Is your building listed or something? In most cases it doesn't require planning permission even in a conservation area, and some councils are actively installing them on council houses.
Not quite accurate anymore. The UK was indeed the world leader from 2008 until around 2021, but has since fallen to second place behind China. China now has over 41 GW installed (>50% of global capacity), while the UK sits at ~15 GW (~22%). [1][2]
Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.
I guess we are. But who are the plants owned by, who built the and where did the components come from, are we also switching them off because our grid cannot handle transmit huge volumes of renewable energy from Scotland to London, and turning on gas power plants to make up for it.
You also have situations, like today, where a German developer has handed back a seabed lease for 3GW of offshore power because they didn’t get a contract for power from government (CFD) and their lease fees are approx £400m/yr if they want to continue developing the windfarm. This is after spending £1B already on lease fees with nothing to show for it.
Their price was too high because it had to include paying back £1B of lease fees that were made as part of another government policy. Comes back to priorities being confusing, if the intention is lower bills why the lease fees, if the purpose is good jobs and independence, why compete on price? If their purpose is national wealth why not partial state funding / ownership?
In Ireland all the rooms came with a substantial hole in the wall, mandated in case you decided to put something like a kerosene heater in your room, although the heating was electical. I generally had to block them off to stop the wind whistling through.
I would love to see photos like these from Australia too one day. We have so much inhospitable land that would be perfect for solar and wind farms. Suncable is trying to do this on a small(er than China) scale. We are just too politically confused and too deep in the belief that mining is the only thing we can do here.
> I would love to see photos like these from Australia too one day.
You may never see them. Not because we aren't adding renewables, but because South Australia was at about 80% renewable last year (average, not peak) so if you were going to get those sort of pictures anywhere in Australia, you would be getting them from SA now.
You probably don't see them because while the countries are about the same size in land area, but China has 50 times the population so it needs about 50 times more power.
This is true, and I'm a big fan of SA leading the charge, having grown up there.
However, we could also build out more green energy technology to become a large energy exporter. (You could argue we are kind of that now, with the amount of coal we export.)
Especially given we have strong but complicated geopolitical ties to both China and the USA, it feels like guaranteeing our own energy sovereignty, plus gaining the ability to export power directly, would be a strong political as well as environmental move.
I only just learned about SunCable. I think using our vast swathes of empty, sun-drenched land to provide power to our Southeast Asian allies is a great idea.
I was just saying this to my colleagues after seeing these. Decades of political sabotage has done significant damage to our transition to renewables. I'm hopeful (perhaps a bit too wishful) that we'll see more of a push for renewables in the coming election cycles, but I'm staying realistic as the last 20 years of climate debate has been frankly shameful. At least rooftop solar is so ubiquitous.
I'm hopeful that the advent of the Teals might generate some momentum here. I believe there are some very large wind farms in progress across NSW too, which is good news. Home solar / battery installations also seem to be on the rise in low density areas (I don't have hard data to back that up though).
I'd also love to see solar panels on top of every Bunnings, Westfield, and other warehouses/complexes, as well as above every outdoor carpark, which would have the added bonus of preventing hand roasting in summer.
"The US Geological Survey estimates that onshore northeast Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains around 31 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in hydrocarbons – similar to the US’s entire volume of proven crude oil reserves."
Also, Idk what that source is but the US has way more barrels than that. Proven reserves mean that’s what’s been proven via drilling, not speculative (which is what the Greenland barrels are). There is a lot more “unproven” oil out there but it doesn’t make for a sensationalist statement that fools readers.
Another 30 second search would show you that their oil is not readily available and is unproven. Otherwise Denmark would already be an even wealthier petrostate like Norway.
> "Denmark would already be an even wealthier petrostate"
Denmark does not (since 2009) control Greenland's minerals, nor take revenues from resource extraction[0,1]; and Greenland's democratic government has in fact totally banned oil exploration[2].
[1] https://english.stm.dk/the-prime-ministers-office/the-unity-... ("Revenues from mineral resource activities in Greenland are to accrue to the Self-Government. Such revenues will have influence on the size of the Danish Government subsidy, cf. section below on the economic arrangement.")
> "Global warming means that retreating ice could uncover potential oil and mineral resources which, if successfully tapped, could dramatically change the fortunes of the semi-autonomous territory of 57,000 people."
> ""The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect we have much more to gain," the Greenland government said in a statement. The government said it "wants to take co-responsibility for combating the global climate crisis."
Let’s be honest with ourselves. If there were hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of accessible oil underneath Greenland they would start drilling tomorrow.
He’s correct there is oil but there is oil everywhere. Whether it’s feasible to extract it is another thing. Do you really think if they had worthwhile oil reserves that someone wouldn’t have thought to extract it? So I would say Greenland doesn’t have any oil which means they don’t have any worthwhile oil to extract.
Regardless, the US isn’t taking over Greenland for its oil. That is just ridiculous and there would be far easier targets to go after if that was the case.
Chinas policy around energy works and it has allowed them to become the world’s engine for renewable power. They get the benefit of energy efficiency and being a critical trade partner for every country in the world.
My experience is that the UK (for example) doesn’t really know why it is building offshore wind. Is it to reduce bills to consumers (OFGEMS remit), is it to create local jobs in manufacturing (Clean Industry Bonus Scheme), is it to stimulate national wealth by ownership of projects (British Energy). It’s a mess unclear picture for me.
It would be nice if politicians could spend some time trying to work together, cross parties a come up with some sensible resolutions and long term plans instead of trying to score points for soundbites and clips.
We're building offshore wind to provide clean power, that will be cheaper than gas and we won't have to rely on largely autocratic countries for that gas
Got a long way to go as electricity is only a portion of our energy consumption - heating and transport are still largely fossil fuel based ATM
The cfd auctions are competitive on price, but things like clean industry bonus and supply chain plans expect some local content. You can’t compete on price and also use expensive UK suppliers.
One of the solar farms is in a tidal flat. Are those solar panels meant to be waterproof? I’d imagine they may not last as long from sea salt exposure too.
Solar panels are waterproof (how else would they survive rain) as are insulated electric wires. The only challenge is connectors, and there are ways to make connectors submersible-safe.
"meant to survive rain storms" doesn't really mean the same as "meant to survive flooding", especially not "meant to survive flooding with salt water". For example, a car survives outdoor weather year-round, but you probably wouldn't want to buy one that was submerged in a flood zone. This plant seems to be floating, though, so they stay above water regardless.
Putting aside the salt water, you'll also just have lots of crud and debris on the panels if they get over topped, which then requires cleaning. Unless the rain in that area is strong and consistent enough.
Seems like a weird location to me, but what do I know.
I love this. I recently found a few solar panels dumpster diving that put out a good load. Just basic scratches and that is all. I am building out my own system to power my house and in the next 2 years will be energy off grid in the city.
Power is quite literally power, in both the physical and political senses. The Chinese know this, and Europe is catching up fast. American private enterprise knows it too.
Battery storage isn't quite where it needs to be, yet, so there's still some need for fossil and nuclear power, but when it is, decommissioning the remaining fossil power system is a no-brainer, and those with the biggest existing solar and wind estates will benefit most, and fastest.
For a German none of those photos are particularly remarkable or impressive.
Especially wind mills - they are all over the place. Outside of cities and forests it would be difficult to not see at least one ... and they like to flock.
> Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
How can Germany achieve it? It is 10x less people?
So what if you read his emotions correctly? It’s not like your response will change his mind?
In a world of 1 > 0, someone needs to be looked down upon. Why not look down on me? Why can’t others look down on China? And why would looking down based on “truth”, which you seem to so much value, change anything?
The "100 panels per second" number sounded a little high so I did a bit more reading. Apparently this was the peak pace of installation around May 2025, when there was a change in pricing structures associated with solar power so developers were rushing to finish projects so they could get in on the old structure.
Average pace across 2024 was closer to 25-30 panels / second (which is still incredibly high!)
One neat thing is that solar/wind farms can be multi-use. You can position panels to provide shade and wind-break to provide micro-climates for plants and animals.
The fact that parking lots in the south of US aren't just covered in those makes no sense at all. Vast expanses of mostly empty pavement, bathed in sun all day? Shaded parking? No?
The Cincinnati Zoo covered all their parking lots with solar panels last year. Your car stays cool in the summer, and there's motion activated lighting under the panels after dark. It's awesome.
One can only admire China's progress in this area. These days, if I got to choose between American and Chinese product, I always choose the latter for ethical reasons. I don't want to support anything American as long as its regime remains a puppet to fossil fuel companies.
Meanwhile the US is using its remaining carbon budget to bomb and burn in one last effort to expand its dying empire. Eventually this system will fall, and the west will realize they wasted all their energy (literally) on non-civilian hardware that needs massive amounts of cheap oil.
This is more or less what we thought the 21st century infrastructure would look like in the 20th century. The only minor detail is it was supposed to happen in this country first.
On the one hand, the geometry is beautiful and almost serene; on the other, it's a reminder that decarbonization at this scale is still an industrial transformation of landscapes
The photos demonstrating the scale of China's solar arrays are impressive. The wind farms are beautiful, but don't show a scale unfamiliar to me. Driving through the Columbia Gorge on the Oregon and Washington border, or through the Coachella Valley in Southern California, you will see wind farms of larger scale than depicted here.
All this praise around China's buildout is just encouraging others ignore a problem to sell the solution. When the major nations started coming together to reduce emissions it was agreed that they would all aim to reduce emissions. However China did the opposite and purposefully scaled coal at record rates for nearly a decade and implemented no environmental regulations so as to outcomplete the nations who were transitioning and to be the ones to sell the solution. So now that its 2025 and they are finally starting to deploy some solar and wind im just not impressed. Its a dirty move and going forward I doubt we will see global trust in tackling these kind of problems again.
>it was agreed that they would all aim to reduce emissions
No, it was agreed during Kyoto that developed nations would reduce emissions, and developing nations (aka PRC, India) would not. Developing nations could keeping scaling fossil to industrialize until Paris where all countries had to submit climate plan (again not explicitly to reduce), and PRC's was to peak emissions by 2030s, which they're on trend to do early. PRC did what was legally permitted / agreed upon, and if developed nations want to cope / be butthurt and label following the agreement as dirty and not cooperate in the future global projects because they're not financial beneficiaries then that's on them. Also "some" solar and wind is ~ROW combined, which surely is very unimpressive.
> sell the solution
Selling solution to problems is solving problem, selling solutions to problems cheaply is solving said problem faster. As if developed economies did not decarbonize by selling clean tech solutions... which btw PRC bought. PRC simply doing globe a favor by selling real climate solutions at cost and scale that makes global difference, instead of scaling retarded paper solutions like carbon credits from countries that primarily scales spreadsheets.
China is not a developing nation. At that time they were more than wealthy enough to implement the same regulation as other nations and their industry was already developed.
They are not on trend to peak emissions pre 2030. Here is what happens Reliable china emission data takes a long time to verify and collect. So during the times where good data is not available china makes a ton of claims that will not line up with the next emissions study that comes out.
Ok then why does every country scale up their manufactering to make clean tech solutions. Im sure US, EU, India and Africa could use a few more steel mills and some coal plants to power it, we can handwave the emissions if they end up producing clean tech.
China WAS a developing nation in Kyoto 1997, GDP per capital $800, high income $7000.
China WAS a developing nation in Paris 2015, GDP per capita $11000, high income $13000 USD.
China JUST around developed nation in 2025, GDP per capita $14000, high income $14000.
They're on trend to peak emissions last year, see study below for PRC emissions trending down for last 18 months. What happens is we have these things called satellites that can detect emissions live, so you get the PREVIOUS study that confirms they have likely already peaked emissions.
Every country SHOULD scale manufacturing, no other country can scale as much as PRC into making stuff commodity tier. If PRC peak domestic emissions and global clean tech exports displaces 5x more emissions than US oil and produce net global reduction in emissions then that's aggregate emission reduction. If other countries can/wants to do that they ought to. It's not about handwaving emissions, it's about realizing 50% of world are developing, they're going to consume and generate massive amounts of shit, aka poverty alleviation, which is moral good, which will require magnitude increase in power and the most sustainable pathway to that is use as much clean tech as possible, clean tech that net displaces more emissions, which is only possible by making clean tech cheap, which PRC is uniquely able to do.
>The 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP) aims to cut energy intensity by 13.5% and emissions intensity by 18% by 2025 from 2020 levels (Xinhua News Agency, 2021) . As of November 2025, China is unlikely to achieve the targets, as emissions intensity is projected to decline by only 16–17.
1% off according to dashboard analysis for 2025 5 year plan target. There's study from Q4 that PRC emissions has been stalled/trending, i.e. peaked for past 18months. Functionally they've peaked emissions before 2030 NDC commitment.
What sort of risk of environmental poisoning comes from having that many solar panels in an area? Is there any risk that it can contaminate the area or are the environmentally safe?
I speak this having lived south of Moffett airfield where the entire area was poisoned from the degreasers used on the military planes in Moffett Field. It's one of the largest Superfund sites in the US and there are thousands of families living there. It might seem innocuous but I'm wondering whether solar panels in the environment leak any chemicals.
China is far more incentivized to champion renewable considering that they do not have the same access as the US. US is also on a path to quite literally invading other countries to extract crude and other resources. I don’t think China is in a position to do this, yet. If China invades Brunei or arrests Bolkiah, they will face irreversible repercussions.
All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers. Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.
>All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers
Found the Oil & Gas lobbyist / apologist.
China might not have oil, but at least they are trying to figure something else out. Credit to them. Say what you want about The Party (I certainly have) but gotta give credit where and when its due. They have an interest in pushing alternative fuels, and by god they are doing it.
What is the question to which fusion and geothermal is the answer? From a climate perspective those will come too late to aid our planet much until decades of further change, if fusion even comes at all.
Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.
Fusion is the answer to "how can we extract R&D money for decades without ever actually delivering anything." There is little prospect it's going to be competitive, particularly DT fusion. The engineering/economic obstacles are profound even if all the plasma physics problems are solved. Most of the efforts being touted are obvious nonstarters.
So, no technology is impossible? Every dream can come true? That's what I'm getting from the logic of the argument you're making there.
Sometimes technologies really do have showstoppers. There are fundamental reasons to think fusion is not going to be competitive. I know of no fundamental reason self driving cars would be impossible. The analogy doesn't work.
I know nothing about the topic.
Although it seems a better alternative than coal or petrol, is it free of side effects for the nature?
I wonder if the heat that would be spread around the atmosphere and back to space can actually gradually serve as a trap for heat?
No it doesn't make sense. Every photon that hits the Earth is eventually either absorbed as heat, reflected back into space or both (eg. partially absorbed and partially re-emitted as lower energy photons.) There is no net global increase in heat from a wind turbine or solar panel. (There might be slight local shifts.)
The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.
It would actually be much better than nuclear. Remember, for every kWh of electrical energy delivered from a nuclear plant, 2 kWh of waste heat goes up those cooling towers. This is not the case with solar, particularly if it were built on ground that was already fairly dark.
Direct thermal pollution like this is not yet globally significant, but if demand increased to the point that land constraints actually applied then it would become important.
Sure, everything has downsides. Even breathing. But none of the alternatives have downsides that are as big as taking carbon from the soil and pumping it in an already stressed ecosystem.
The NEXT more challenging part is to build the necessary storage and "power network transmission lines" so that the supply can be made ( Large Scale ) reliable - 24/7 , independent of the weather.
Meanwhile POTUS has his head stuck in the sand [0]:
> “All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”
We've learned that lesson. Not to toot our own horn too much but we to a large extent kickstarted the thing in Germany with very little reward for it. 50% of Europe's energy produced is now reneables[1]. China's progress is incredibly impressive, but they are also the largest consumer of middle eastern oil in the world. Not really to their own fault, countries are going to be dependent on oil for a long time to come. (it's used in many more things than energy production)
I like Musk's lens: the sun is 99.8% of the galaxy's total mass and over 99.99% of its energy production. Pretty straight-forward where you want to be getting your energy from.
> With a maximum take-off weight of about 16 tons, a 25-meter wingspan and an operational ceiling of 15,000 meters, Jiutian can remain airborne for roughly 12 hours and reach targets up to 7,000 kilometers away
Okay, you're right... their military capabilities are still laughable. Thanks for the reassurance, that'll help me sleep at night a bit better.
It is incredible to see just how many big-oil talking points there are in this thread. From renewable energies resource costs, to their land use impact. I didn't realise just how effective their propaganda was in the tech space till reading this thread. That is not to say that these projects should be free of criticism, but anyone who believes these negatives are remotely close to the damage that fossil fuels are doing needs to re-evaluate their world view.
I was just about to make precisely the same comment. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt about renewables here is ridiculous, and I expected better. I suppose everyone watched too much Landman.
China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy industry like mining and processing, chemicals, ship-building.
Let's not even get into semiconductors. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.
Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.
Whoa boy. I caught Landman for the first time today because my partner was watching it.
Oil, cigarettes and alcohol were all clearly being pushed and promoted. Pretty sure it was episode four where a women rather matter-of-factly stated that one alcoholic beverage when pregnant was perfectly fine - inso much that it was good because it helped her body generate breast milk. Such a weird statement to shoe-horn into this soap opera.
Coupled with BBT chain smoking the coffin nails, the rampant shit-canning of renewables and incessant self promotion of how large and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is the money behind the show was as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Plus the sexual objectification of women in this show is ludicrous.
I haven't seen Landman, but I have heard of it. My understanding is that all the characters are pretty miserable, but that it nonetheless weirdly glorifies their lifestyles.
I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.
never heard of this show, I wonder who produces it
oh Paramount
the ones that just decimated CBS News, put talentless propagandist Bari Weiss in charge, and censored a critical report on human rights abuses ordered by POTUS
With China's huge resources both natural and human it's only expected that China will again reclaim its position as the leading country in science, technology, production and generally everything.
If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars.
There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China.
There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.
China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.
And in 2032 everyone just crosses their fingers this doesn't happen again? Unless 2029 includes a structural overhaul of the entire government I really don't see how the US regains it's status as the capital of the world. We are doing everything in our power to permenantly isolate ourselves from the rest of the world at the moment. Attacking a nato state, even threatening to attack a nato state really, is not something everyone will overlook in a years time. The wheels are turning now to divest from the us.
My optimistic take is that we will learn from the mistakes we are making now to make sure it does not get repeated ever again. Trump will be gone and will be too old to have any influence. But Elon Musk and people like Marc Andreessen will continue to be a problem we need to find a solution for.
And what do you expect the rest of the world to do? Pretend it never happened? They were willing to give another chance after Trump I, I highly doubt that it will be the same this time around.
The American people did this twice in fairly quick succession.
Unless there's a serious reckoning afterwards, the rest of the world is gonna operate on the assumption that it can and probably will happen again soon.
I wouldn't count these chickens before they hatch.
I keep wondering where the line in the sand is for the wider GOP base. We keep crossing what I think "this is the line … right?" and nope, that wasn't it, either.
I really hope so but honestly, what lessons have Democrats learned so far that will allow them to take the votes of those who are not right-wing radicals? Because there was a lot of unnecessary stuff that was going on that pissed off those who don't lean too far either side. Trump exploits this by, say, "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" and scores high not just on the right. This theme will be very difficult to deal with by the Democrats.
And on the foreign front, well, the trust has been broken and I don't think it can be repaired easily. The remaining NATO allies are very stable, they understand mutual respect and collaboration is the foundation of their survival, whereas attacking each other breaks trust completely. Even if a new fantastic president is chosen that understands his huge responsibility both for Americans and the world, other countries learned their lesson hard and understand there is no guarantee in a few years the USA become their enemy again.
Yes, Democrats have to move towards the center. But that's not enough. You can't have one good party and one evil party. Both parties have to be basically good, even if they disagree on policy. You can't have the country decline each time Republicans gain power.
> We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.
Don't count on it.
Some people may be willing to uproot their lives and move continent in the hope that 4 years later you won't re-elect another one like Trump, but it won't be as many as before. Heck, there was a brief window where I had the opportunity to migrate to the USA, but just the US electing Trump the first time ruled it out for me.
Not that I'd call myself "the best", but I was good enough if I'd wanted to. But I do also know some really good Cambridge graduates who were expressly asked by their American employer to relocate to the US, declined.
I think people generally vastly underestimate the negative effect of "nativism"/anti-immigration rethoric on desirable foreign workers. Even if those desirable foreigners are completely unaffected by actual policy.
I personally know at least two highly qualified STEM workers that went back to Europe after Brexit/Trump2 and from what I can tell this was at least 70% pure "spite" (instead of being affected by actual anti-foreign regulation or somesuch).
I used to live in Cambridge. Only one person I knew there was pro-Brexit, call him C. In the run-up to the referendum, I'd already told C I was looking to move out of the UK due to the entirely native political choices of the UK. The domestic political nonsense was necessarily only going to get less constrained by a policy decision (Brexit) specifically about getting less constrained.
One of my last memories of C was that a group of us were in a local pub discussing it, one said they were worried Brexit would make Cambridge smaller. C shouted "Good!".
Given my plans, obviously when C shouted "Good!" at the idea of Cambridge shrinking, I was shocked, took it somewhat personally. Then the referendum came, and I was both angry with him and far too busy, so I stopped talking to C entirely.
Other people report that C was very confused by this, did not understand at all.
All the above above in itself sounds like propaganda. You forget other political (authoritarian system making massive mistakes), demographic (1.0, probably less in reality, birth per woman), psychological (disillusioned young population), and geographic (food and other imports) aspects, among other things.
> And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.
Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten salt, thorium, and more.
It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.
> Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, night is a thing, it might not be windy
Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.
Nuclear is transcedental.
If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.
One of the problems with nuclear is, um, it's ability to cause an "extinction event". Sort of.
In that:
* Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative.
* What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.)
* Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such.
This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere.
The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still.
(There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.)
(Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)
Fusion will be its own extinction event as things go. At our development level, if we develop fusion, we'll have to live underground after boiling the oceans to generate crypto tokens and undress videos.
Okay... and? I'm not saying 'let's only do nuclear, and not bother about wind/solar/tidal'. I'm saying there is plenty of money to go around, and it doesn't hurt to spend some of that to diversify our power generation and have some reliable, non-polluting, highly power-dense, high-tech base load (nuclear) that can be quickly throttled to meet demand, and is generally resistant to most environmental conditions.
The Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, French, British, and even Singaporean[1] (of all places, one might expect a tiny equatorial city-state to be the last place to think about nuclear, but it is all the same, because nuclear is ridiculously power-dense) governments seem to agree with me.
Nuclear isn't getting built at any significant scale in the US after Vogtle. We might get a couple of plants opened up (like 3MI) but large scale new buildouts aren't happening until SMRs are available at scale. Anything else is an Internet fantasy.
> Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy
...which is why China has 40 000 km of UHV transmission lines forming a vast network to move the energy from where it is abundant to where it is needed. They have 8 new UHV projects that started in 2024 or 2025 that will add another 10 000 km.
If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers?
I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons.
Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.
Alphabet (Google) buys 'Intersect' which "delivers ((...)) infrastructure for data centers and other energy-intensive industries by co-locating industrial demand with dedicated gas and renewable power generation". 4.75 billion USD.
https://abc.xyz/investor/news/news-details/2025/Alphabet-Ann...
Landman is fascinating because it goes out of its way to bring up valid claims about renewables or criticisms of oil/gas but then spits an insane amount of propaganda and lies at you in quick succession to falsely "debunk" these criticisms or sweep them under the rug. This is definitely not being done for the character's benefit in the show, so its quite impressive how effectively and frequently its tossed in there.
That would be nice. It looks more like the early 1900s with naked imperialism and crony capitalism right now. Possibly staring down the barrel of a 1930s economic collapse.
Good point. Reality is more nuanced than simple overbuilding and underbuilding. Still, we aren't really still building enough housing and mass transit infrastructure.
That may hamper us more than anything else. If AI proves to be as beneficial as its proponents hyped, the economic gains will just mostly get soaked up by landowners. Even UBI won't save us, because it will just get absorbed by landowners. Ditto for renewable energy.
>It is incredible to see just how many big-oil talking points there are in this thread. From renewable energies resource costs, to their land use impact. I didn't realise just how effective their propaganda was in the tech space till reading this thread.
What makes this more valid than something like "it's incredible how many YIMBY talking points there are" in a thread about housing, aside from you agreeing with the YIMBYs? Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
Oil and gas have used, between drilling and refining, over 7 million acres of land in just the US. Yes, it provides more electricity, but at the cost of destroying the entire planet's biosphere, global warming, etc.
Current US estimates for solar land usage are 500,000 acres.
The land use arguments are bunk. Anyone who complains is repeating oil and gas propaganda.
I call them True Bird Lovers. You only see them in numbers when windmills come up. They've never seen any pictures of oil-covered birds from the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon disasters.
> Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
It is. I've read dozens of comments like this on HN, and repeatedly see the "it's incredible that...", "talking points"/"propaganda", and "wow look at how much bad stuff there is in this thread"/"I'm so disappointed in HN" memes, and every single time it's because the author is trying to dismiss the opposition's arguments without responding to them individually and actually addressing their points.
This kind of thing clearly fits into the "sneering" category of things that aren't allowed on HN and so is valid for flagging. I do it and I highly encourage anyone else to do it who wants to preserve the culture of HN.
> Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
For me, yes it is. It wouldn't if policy discussions were purely technical and well informed. In the arena of public discourse they aren't. The majority of the population (including HN) is tribal, ideologically biased, emotionally driven and badly informed. Public discourse, particularly in America, is contaminated by propaganda of established economic powers (i.e.: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Tech companies). They can easily advance their talking points because they have much more economic resources for propaganda and lobbying.
I agree that, eventually, most people will discover that oil & coal are doomed and destroying the world. Reality has a way to force itself into ideologies.
But that will take a long time. I need truth and certainty now.
Why is that a failure of the green agenda as opposed to a failure of Germany?
Edit: I don't have the facts about reliability of green energy (though you didn't provide any evidence against it either), but it's clear the "not knowing where your energy comes from", "having messy grid" and "not investing in nuclear" are unrelated to renewable energy.
Germany's grid is an absolute mess because their nat gas pipelines have been cut off. Renewables are preventing a worse disaster, saving their limited LNG storage capacity to cover for dankelflautes.
It's incredibly how common it is these days to see valid criticism dismissed as "X talking points" or "Y dog whistle". I guess that's easier than providing an argument.
Fossil fuel could be heading for a big cliff where most countries that currently import a lot of oil/gas will be year on year reducing their imports. China is ahead of the curve here and is already importing less oil year on year. That's likely going to spread. If you extrapolate growth curves trending up for EVs a few years you can draw similar curves for oil demand trending down.
We can speculate about how quick/slow all this will progress. But it's worth pointing out that e.g. IEA, EIA and similar institutes have been repeatedly wrong and overly pessimistic with their predictions for things like adoption and cost of renewables. People are still basing policy and important decisions on their reports. So this matters. The "What if they are wrong, again?" question might have some uncomfortable answers if you are betting on them not being wrong.
A lot of developing markets are skipping oil/gas/coal completely and are going straight to renewables. They are not first building a grid using coal/gas plants but working around what little they have in terms of unreliable grid by going straight for solar/batteries and microgrids. That's a pattern you see all over parts of Africa with historically very little/flaky power infrastructure and countries like Pakistan. These are growth economies showing much quicker economical growth than the world average. That's going to spread.
Lots of countries are going to be decimating their oil/gas imports over the next 20 years. That includes transport and power generation. They'll be installing wind/solar/batteries and buying lots of EVs. Fossil fuel usage won't go all the way to zero. But it won't stay at current levels or anywhere close to that. Some countries will be faster some will be slower. Being slower isn't necessarily good for economies.
Good advice here is to take an economic point of view and be aware of things like growth trends, cost curves, learning effects, technological changes, etc. You don't have to be an early adopter or believer. But there's a lot of data out there that supports an optimistic view. And a lot of pessimistic wishful thinkers that are not really looking at data or just cherry picking reports that support their believes. The fossil fuel industry sponsors a lot of reports research. And they are about as trust worthy as the Tobacco industry is when it comes to the pros/cons of smoking. That's why the IEA and EIA keeps getting it wrong. It helps to understand who pays for their reports (hint: fossil fuel companies and countries that depend on those).
A healthy personal perspective is maybe considering what happens if your pension fund bets on fossil fuel and that cliff I mentioned turns out to be very real in about 10-20 years. Because if you bet wrong, that affects the value of that. Before you knee jerk to an answer, take a close look at what institutional investors have actually been doing for a while. Hint: coal plants were written off as good investments ages ago and gas plants aren't looking much better at this point. I think you'll see them move on oil funds next.
Your point about developing markets resonates for me in a different area. Instead of layering mobile phones on top of landlines, many developing markets went straight to mobile phones. Another thing to consider is that solar/wind is an incremental expansion of power capacity, versus the "big bang" expansion of nuclear capacity.
To your point about the fossil fuel cliff, I think it was either a Bloomberg or Forbes article that discussed how China's deep involvement in the EV/battery/solar/wind Expansion in dozens of countries around the world gives it a chance to put a serious dent in oil consumption as well as locking American interests out of developing markets.
It's kind of bizarre to see the far right and far left circle to the same misguided big oil conclusions, although for different reasons. The right doesn't want their traditional oil/coal industries threatened. The left is kind of... just against the continued growth of technology/industry/humanity.
Really? I don't think I have a dog in this hunt but my judgement of comments is that it's maybe 70/30 (with the 30 being critical in one way or the other) and anyone critical is getting down voted to oblivion.
That said "you're just repeating what you're told" is a comforting argument but doesn't go all that far.
> Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular
Interesting because most of the critiques, especially to electric cars come from boomers. Also to Solar and Wind, the kind of silly criticism like "Why are we filling our barely-arable lands with Solar?!"
Now we'll watch how the European car manufacturers get swallowed by Chinese electrical manufacturers.
I think what you're seeing is the criticism from those in the older generartions who are well-published and media savvy with decades more experience than average in that regard. Some of the old-timers can be expected to be better connected when it comes to available incentives too.
Not unlike anybody else who gets more attention from pointing out any possible controversy rather than more mundane non-critical analysis.
But not so much in the prevailing common sense of the actual baby boomers who for the most part are older and more ambivalent about these energy technology milestones and take them in stride pretty easily along with all the other progress over the decades they have seen.
I am with far more people over 70 all the time who wish they could afford a Tesla or some extensive solar panels than those who have negative feelings about it.
But you've also got negative "influencers" in older generations trying to appeal specifically to those who lived through similar (outdated or nearly forgotten) experiences, especially when the target demographic is known to be one that votes more often than average.
Looks to me like it's even more selected younger voices among those who stand to gain so much more over an upcoming lifetime without any upset from alternative energy that are doing more actual complaining. Like the incentive coming from somewhere is overwhelming, I can't deny.
"China bots everywhere" or generally making renewable energy seem like a nefarious foreign plot is itself a big oil talking point. When your argument can't stand on the facts, deploy the Big Bad Bogeyman.
Do you have ANY datapoints or arguments to underpin that renewables "destroy all wilderness". Or even more that they are worse than fossil fuels? This claim - especially in your harsh tone - could need at least some reason.
> We look back and curse our ancestors for their unbridled use of fossil fuels. Who is to say future generations won't look back and curse us for destroying all wilderness?
I curse my ancestors for destroying all wilderness to get at fossil fuels.
Ok, I'll bite. What if solar panels turn into breeding grounds with perfect environmental temperatures to create viruses that kill us all? Who is to say the sun won't blow up tomorrow? Why not enumerate all the things that might happen to distract? There is a nice quote going around re a weather scientists who gets asked annually what's it going to be like this year? He's tired, and notes "this year, and every year for the rest of your life is going to be the hottest ever." That's in large part to oil, full stop.
Uranium requires mining and is recyclable at most once (solar panels components are way better).
Recyclable wind turbines blades are appearing (RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...) and even existing ones (today, decommissioned blades are burned in cement plants, thus providing energy) may become so (check the 'CETEC initiative')
Uranium actually does not require mining. Most uranium is extracted using underground wells where water is pumped underground and the Uranium is extracted from the water. Also extracting Uranium from sea water (which would be basically unlimited) is close to being commercially viable and has received a lot of lab-scale research.
Also, Uranium is only recyclable once with light water reactors. With breeder reactors (which have been built in the past) it can be recycled a hundred times.
It would be interesting to see how Carrier Strike groups fare against hypersonic weapons, as well as witnessing what the modern fighting doctrine is when there is no absolute air superiority.
Or massive industrial hacking that destroys enough transportation, farming, and supply chain integration that there is mass starvation when food delivery and production stalls - and it all comes crumbling down.
However had, there is one thing working for China: decision-making steps.
I don't have any illusion about the sinomarxist party and I don't suggest that their model - which is a dictatorship, just like the USA has transitioned into now too under an orange-painted TechBro minion - replaces democractic processes. But you do have to ask yourself what the EU is doing here, other than failing in epic ways. You can not assume that current wealth will be retained in the future; and while "green energy" is great, what we in reality see right now is simply price increases. That ultimately means wealth is deducted from a majority, and only a very few profit from this. That is a design-by-failure process now.
All I see is missed opportunities to build a bunch less nuclear power plants and call it a day, without messing up with the landscape. Am I the only one? I believe if we Europeans and Americans start building nuclear power plants again we could finally compete. Renewable energy is not constant and has a storage problem
I also lament the landscapes covered by solar panels. Even deserts are not dead barren ecosystems. Some of these installs are only slightly better than paving the whole area.
But I get it, and tradeoffs are necessary.
Another reason China may prefer this to more concentrated nuclear power is that is is much more distributed and resilient to targeted attacks.
>Some of these installs are only slightly better than paving the whole area.
Utter horseshit.
Putting up what amounts to a bunch of shade on steel pillars just doesn't harm the environment. There are more than a few contexts where it improves the environment.
There's no identified or predicted harm from large scale photovoltaic installations.
France decarbonized way before the rest of Europe with nuclear and it wasn't expensive. 50 reactors for $200 billion. Gernamy has spent twice that on intermittents and still relies on coal
Such a tired point. It’s not the 1970s anymore, and the west can build any large projects cheap. Go look at the projected costs for France’s new fleet, and that’s before the inevitable cost overruns
"EDF estimates EPR2 programme cost at EUR72.8 billion"
France's EDF has said its preliminary cost estimate for the project to build six EPR2 reactors at Penly, Gravelines and Bugey totals EUR72.8 billion (USD85.3 billion).
Each reactor outputs 1650 megawatts of electricity running at full power. Assuming they run at 92% capacity factor, that's $9.38 per real annualized watt.
Great. So 538TWh per year is 61 GW so roughly 61 GW * $9.38 = $576 billion staggered over the 80 year life of nuclear plants is $7.2 billion per year of capital expenditure.
For comparison, wind is about $5/W. Assuming a 35% capacity factor and a 30 year expected lifetime for the latest turbines that comes to $10.0 billion per year of capital expenditure with no storage or fossil backup systems or extra capacity given weather variability.
PV solar is between $.97 and $1.16 per watt, so that's going to be the front line. With storage you can get from $1.60 to $2. This is already the bulk of the power generation in Europe and is only going to increase. The idea that you're going to run nuclear plants at 95% capacity factor economically is also very suspect in a continent saturated with cheap PV solar.
US NREL Puts it at $2/W with no storage and ~20% capacity factor. Lifetime of latest panels is unknown but optimistically is 25 years. Assuming perfect and free storage that comes to $24.4 billion per year of capital expenditure for a country the size of France to be 100% solar. So no, it would not be more economical to use solar over nuclear. Wind would be better but when you add the full system costs of storage and backup intermittent heavy systems are vastly more expensive and emit more carbon than nuclear ones.
https://discussion.fool.com/t/levelized-full-system-costs-of...
Intermittents are only gaining market share because their unreliable and intermittent power which is less valuable is being purchased by governments at prices that far exceed what it is worth. In other words, massive hidden subsidies. Without those, there would be next to no intermittents on the grid anywhere.
Agree they oppose nuclear, perhaps because of the fear of the unknown radiation or whatever. Reality is all nuclear incidents combined are nothing compared to the health problems oil and gas created(not to mention political implications). To me filling a giant space with solar panels or installing giant bird killing turbines is such a moronic move when you can have unnoticeable small nuclear power plants
If you think wind turbines are a significant cause of bird deaths it shows that you have no clue what you're talking about. Please don't bother commenting on this topic again.
Not as many as cats I certainly know that, it obiovusly was an hyperbole used to underline that all we need is just a nuclear power plant to replace all that wind turbines
Our study, covering 45 species across 91 countries, reveals that human-induced factors—predominantly electrocution, illegal killing, and poisoning—constitute the major threats to bird mortality, highlighting a critical issue in global biodiversity conservation.
and from last year, US specific, endangered species:
A comparative assessment with data from the 2010 Red List reveals an increase in the proportion of threatened species recorded as being impacted by certain threats. Notably, the incidence of hunting and trapping as a documented threat has increased from 34% to 41% of threatened species. Similarly, the proportion of species assessments with fire/fire suppression, climate change, pollution, invasive alien species and energy production have each increased by 3-5 percentage points.
China's willing to provide lots of capital for this, which has sped it up, but this is generally happening at a slower pace in most developed countries (and many non-developed ones, for that matter). It's even happening in the US, despite ol' minihands actively trying to stop it.
We are so done, and are going to be forced to instead fight the rest of the world for the remaining oil left if we don’t wake up. It may even be too late.
It's very easy to do things like this when pesky things like property rights or environmental laws or labor protections don't get in the way.
In the U.S. and EU, if the government takes your land, they have to reimburse you for it, and you can fight them every step of the way. In China, the government can take your land and if you complain, you can spend the rest of your life in a labor camp.
That's simply not true. People are compensated generously for land that is seized. I have friends that have had it happen, and you get a lot more money than if you were to sell the property - so it's a bit like winning the lottery. The amount of room for appeal is dictated by the nature of the seizure and the government "level". (ie if it's a national interest project you have little recourse, but if it's the city government then it's likely different)
Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear? Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it? And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear
If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.
They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.
I don't think the characterisation of this as waste of space is correct. There's a growing body of research suggesting that solar panels are compatible with grazing animals and farming, and the wind farms don't really stop usage of the space unless you are planning to go ballooning.
Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.
Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.
If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.
> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?
No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.
If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.
> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.
Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”
I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.
And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.
Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range.
The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.
Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.
Take too long time and cost.
I honestly perplexed by the fethism towards Nuclear Power Plants. Have you seen the delay and bloating cost of Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Vogtle?
Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.
They'll just blame those delays and cost overruns on greens or liberals.
Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.
PRC Solar is cheaper (LCOE) than nuclear, more distributed, faster to build. Western PRC with good solar is mostly empty/depopulated (2/3 of PRC with 80% of solar/wind potential has like 5% of population, it's empty). Easy to install, lots of transferrable skills from general construction (vs nuclear workforce). Real estate crack down = lots of lower skilled blue collar installing solar as jobs program. Serendipitous synergy. PRC installed renewable capacity exceeds energy required to manufacture same equipment on GW basis, functionally makes production of entire sector carbon neutral/sink, as in will displace more fossil than used in production and sink after. Obviously manufacture works off grid mix, including coal, but broad point is every panel going to save more emissions vs embodied carbon payback through life cycle. There's also plans for recycling / recover materials for circular economy.
This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]
That wikipedia article needs to be updated for the last few years.
2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.
1GW of nuclear is worth about 3 to 6GW of solar if you account for the weather and nighttime. If you also account for nuclear not needing fossil backup its worth even more
But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.
For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
And you can buy them and use them right now, as i can go and shop some solar panels, inverters, batteries, some cables put them about anywhere and just have free electricity after the initial expense?
Plants being built these days are thermal burner reactors. They are no more "full cycle" than any other nuclear power reactors that have been built. And (like earlier reactors) reprocessing their spent fuel has no economic case.
Well if by close to nothing he means waste lasting 300 years instead of 10,000 years and by latest generation he means gen IV reactors like bn-800, superpheonix, oklo, moltex etc sure he is basically correct. Here’s a source where you can read more about breeder reactors: (which is what he is referring to)
These aren't nuclear power plants. They're designs of nuclear power plants. None have been constructed (well, aside from old plants like Superphenix, which was a failure, so much so that the French have mothballed their fast reactor program.)
Moreover, they would be considerably more expensive than existing plants (especially if fuel is to be reprocessed), so they're nonstarters.
Ah yes. “Old” plants. This plant is “old” so we could never build more like it. What an argument. And no, they would not be “considerably more expensive” because we wouldnt build a fleet of them until uranium was expensive enough that they would be cheaper. Thats why most countries have put off breeder reactor development not because they were “failures” whatever that is supposed to mean.
"Old" as in "we built it and discovered it's not wanted". The French basically gave up on the idea of fast reactors (as did the Japanese, although their fast reactor program appears to have been an excuse to obtain a stockpile of separated plutonium in case they need to make bombs). There's no market for them. The Russians have continued to try, but they're selling LWRs.
The big problem with fission is that it's too expensive. Fast reactors make that main problem worse. There is no economic margin to do fancy (and expensive) things to try to address the lesser issue of nuclear waste.
In an economic sense, when compared to burner reactors, this is correct. As the rise of wind and solar has shown however, political will and popularity matter more than pure economics. Burner reactors are more of a 22nd century technology, assuming the grid storage problem doesn’t get solved by then and we just go full renewable on economics. But nothing is set in stone
What nonsense. What solar and wind have shown is the overwhelming importance of economics. They are dominating now because they have become cheap, not because of some sort of "triumph of the will". And they have become cheap because they are inherently the kind of technologies that has good experience curves. Unlike nuclear.
Nonsense? Why was US nuclear built at all in the 60’s and 70’s? Or in France? Because it was cheaper? No. It was built because people thought it was a good idea. The same is true for intermittents today. They are popular with a section of the population so they get the funding. And no, nuclear has fantastic experience curves. Look at any country building lots of reactors and the n-th of a kind is cheap. Building out nuclear and maintaining industry experience works to keep costs low.
They are uninhabited by humans currently. They are not uninhabitable as shown by animals and plants living there. And they can also not be called "big parts of the earth" by any stretch of those words.
Especially Fukushima is more of a political issue than a safety one.
Proven Uranium reserves with breeder reactors will last 10,000 years. With a modest increase in the price of Uranium, extraction from sea water becomes viable and unlocks tens of millions of years of supply. Some geologiats have argued that rock weathering will replenish sea water Uranium concentrations faster than we would extract it making the supply last longer than the expected age of the Earth.
China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
I find the idea of blanketing mountainous wilderness in relatively short-lived e-waste just awful. Surely there are much better terrains for solar panels?
Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".
Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.
Given the vast amount of flat, well-lit terrain within the borders of China, it should be clear that the pictured projects (and the other "blanket a mountain in solar panels" projects that are easily discoverable) are not about the economics of power generation.
At least it's better than sending peasants into the mountains and building solar panels on the flat field that has been growing crops for thousands of years.
In this particular case I believe the mountain is largely karst (limestone) and the panels substantially reduced erosion -- particularly of soil -- leading to an increase in fauna that thrive in the shade.
As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.
Additionally, solar panels can become too hot and that reduces their efficiency. Also, deserts are famously known for dust. Since it rarely rains, you get a dust buildup, further compromising solar efficiency in deserts.
I'm not saying that deserts are a bad place for solar. What I'm trying to say is - it's often worse than people think and it requires special infrastructure.
I love how they’re just building and building, adding more and more capacity and people here are arguing whether it’s in the right location. It’s laughable.
By showing only your provided data it seems. But when looking at the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources it looks totally different!
If you look at the growth rate of renewables it should be pretty clear that coal will not play a major role in the foreseeable future.
Why is it not saying 18% of the needs are being met by renewables? That's exactly what it does
This is not energy output (production, usage), it is that plus an adjustment for the in->out energy efficiency. It would only == production if all energy sources in the mix has the same factor.
Because fossil fuels have higher in/out losses this is number is larger than usage. This metric is generally used to track decarbonization.
Using the IEA number you can see the hydro+solar+wind production is about 9.5% of the total, not 18%.
ChatGPT or you favorite LLM can explain in greater detail, just send it the plot image and ask.
The adjusted graph is a better reflection of "meeting their needs" than raw primary energy, since more than half of fossil primary energy is lost as waste heat.
Not so scenic any more... I get it, electricity good, but man are we destroying places just to get this stuff. In the UK I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it. Fossil fuels gave us too much. If only we could figure out how to want less.
My local beaches on the Yorkshire coast have some of the biggest wind farms in the world.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.
I think there is reason to think that we will reduce energy consumption.
US energy consumption per capita peaked in 1975 and has trended down even as population has increased. There's going to be a peak in global population, likely before 2100 (and it keeps getting revised sooner, not later).
So it stands to reason that as we become more energy efficient (already happening) and we start to have fewer people on earth (likely to happen in your/ your children's lifetime) that overall consumption will in fact go down.
I mean, I think on an infinite timescale we probably will. A middle-class lifestyle today requires less energy than 20 years ago, simply because things have gotten more efficient (if you buy a fridge or a washing machine or a central heating system or a lightbulb today, it's using significantly less energy to do the same thing). But not _soon_. And part of the shift is very much from non-electric to electric power usage (gas heating -> heat pumps, petrol cars -> electric cars, diesel trains -> electric trains, etc etc). Energy use per capita will peak (may already have peaked) _long_ before electricity use per capita.
Every generation thinks they're building a safer future for their kids, including the boomers. If you want to talk about safety then you need to take sustainability seriously.
In the US, "Boomers" made the environmental movement mainstream, created the EPA, started cleanup of superfund sites, and passed the clean water and clean air acts. There are waterways where I live that are swimmable for the first time in generations because of the Boomers. It's not an either/or proposition.
Boomers didn't create the EPA, that was the Greatest and Silent generations. Boomers were no more than 25 in 1970 and hardly in power. Some of them may have been in the activists pushing for change but they didn't actually pass the legislation.
I would rather they not have to be built in the first place. Yet, this is unfortunately the price we must pay today for not reducing our carbon emissions yesterday.
Had we taken a serious effort to do something in, say the mid nineties when the scientific community reached a large consensus regarding the major contributors of climate change it had been less urgent to do something now thirty years later and we would have had a much longer time for the academies and industry to research and improve performance of non-fossil energy production and do the same for energy using applications.
It's not the renewables which are to blame, because if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way we do then these places will either soon be destroyed, or nobody can appreciate them due to civilisational collapse.
It genuinely makes me so sad to see the US not doing the same. Having grown up to the constant beat of “energy independence” as the core goal of a party it seemed obvious that the nearly limitless energy that rains down from the sky would be the answer. But instead we’ve kept choosing the option which requires devastating our, and other’s around the world, community. That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns. But it’s difficult to compare localized damage to war and globalized damage.
Up to the 2008 election the Republican party platform called for reducing fossil fuel use, establishing a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change, a long term tax credit for renewable energy (with specific mentions of solar and wind), more recycling, and making consumer products more energy efficient.
They wanted to aggressively support technological advances to reduce the dependence of transportation on petroleum, giving examples of making cars more efficient (they mention doubling gas mileage) and developing more flex-fuel and electric vehicles. They talked about honoraria of many millions of dollars for technological developments that could eliminate the need for gas powered cars.
They also mentioned promoting wireless communication to increase telecommuting options and reduce business travel.
All that was gone by 2012. I'm not sure what caused the change.
Fracking. Before fracking people were worried about "peak oil", and being dependent on unfriendly governments for our basic energy needs. Then with fracking we realized we are actually sitting on huge available oil reserves, and peak oil quickly became a quaint outdated concept.
Not that it changes your point, but the other day I met a republican who said he doesn’t think climate change is a thing but peak oil, now that’s something to worry about.
The longevity of this plus the “no anthropogenic climate change” nonsense is astounding. Armchair climate sceptics are happy to seriously stick to talking points that are so out of date that even the oil industry doesn’t use them anymore.
So you met a person, they told you their Party Affiliation, then went to tell you how it isn't "real".
Sorry I don't believe your paraphrasing of this person's real thoughts and ideas. I'm sure these people exist, but it doesn't mean anything. I could equally go find someone crazy saying the world is going to end this year.
> I'm sure these people exist, but it doesn't mean anything.
One of those people is the current President of the United States.
Along with most of the people who voted for him.
>I could equally go find someone crazy saying the world is going to end this year.
Given current events, one doesn't have to be crazy to believe this
That may be part of it, but as your parent comment mentioned, the Republicans weren't only worried about peak oil and being dependent on unfriendly governments, but also about climate change. Of course, none of these three problems went away, the point where fossil fuels will be exhausted just got pushed further into the future, and the fact that it will take more and more effort and environmental damage to get to the remaining resources is also undeniable.
But yeah, I guess your answer still applies indirectly: Fracking -> stronger interests by US oil companies -> money to the Republican party -> fossil fuel friendly regulations.
Speaking to the grandparent comment, fracking is precisely what earned US "energy independence" for the first time ever, in 2011.
> earned US "energy independence"
In a very myopic way.
With the benefit of hindsight, yes. A lot of money was lost in the fracking boom after the price of oil crashed
Fracking has nothing to do with energy. When you look at EROI oil from a gusher is around ~100:1. For solar 10-25:1, wind 20-50:1, Fracking is 10:1 and most of that doesn't end up as diesel
It's useful for the plastics and petrochemical industry, but it's not going to make the country energy independent, even including battery costs wind still trounces.
Isn't LNG a byproduct of the fracking process - and natural gas has taken over a good chunk of coal's role in our electricity generation?
Extracting LNG may or may not be via fracking, and may come from conventional or unconvential fields.
The largest LNG gas fields currently producing are not being "fracked", eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pars/North_Dome_Gas-Cond...
The US is now the largest exporter of oil in the world.
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So John McCann did run on reducing fossil fuel usage and promoting a greater mix of energy technologies but I wouldn't say that changed by 2012 per se. McCain himself was the anomaly that didn't match earlier or later candidates. For example, Bush did open up ANWR to drilling, even though that was purely symbolic and nobody is going up there to drill or has done in the 20 intervening years (apart from some minor exploratory drilling by Chevron).
Also, I'd say McCain's policy was more based on a national security argument than a climate argument. As others have pointed out, fracking changed everything. In 2008 we were a huge net importer of oil. Now we're a huge net exporter.
Mines (including oil wells) are huge wealth concentrators. A handful of very wealthy people benefit hugely from resource extraction. And the US government, as a whole regardless of party, represents the interests of large corporations both domestically and overseas.
Anyway, Bush (either one) didn't run on renewable energy. Neither did the candidates that came after. 2012 was just a reversion to mean.
Obama was elected, which made some people very angry:
> Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
> Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Sure Trump took everything to an absurd level of "do the opposite of biden no matter what", but it started back then.
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromis...
> The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
I remember that day vividly.
It was the middle of the Great Recession, it was the worst our economy was doing in a long time. Millions were out of work. People were looking to the government to see what the plan was to get the country back on track.
A reporter asks McConnell what the senate’s number one priority was.
The answer? Not fixing the economy, not helping out every day Americans. Not finding the root cause of the crash and making sure it doesn’t happen that way again.
No, the answer was “make sure Obama is a one term president.” That’s all we would expect from the senate for the next 6 years.
The day McConnell said that, I said out loud: “I will never vote Republican again for the rest of my life.” (Prior to that point I mostly voted D but not 100% of the time.)
And I plan to keep that promise until I die.
have democrats not made similar statements about Trump, him being a danger to democracy and such?
Sure. And Republicans, and many world leaders.
Trump is well outside the norms of POTUS's through history.
In 2008-9 Republicans did not even make the pretense of Obama being a threat to democracy. (Which would have been absurd in a way it isn't for Trump, who tried to overthrow an election he lost.)
I remember when some lady called Obama "Muslim" (in the same tone of voice as she'd say "demon" or something) and Mitt Romney took the microphone from her and said "no, no, we disagree politically but he's a good man."
Shows how poorly those politicians understood the constituency they were fomenting. He was boo'd for it by people that had come to see him specifically, and about 15 years later, republican voters built a scaffold outside the Capital they were breaking into while chanting about hanging the Republican vice president.
I feel like American politicians often play with fire without understanding its nature as something that burns.
Sit down.
You don’t understand, it’s different when the democrats do it - just like when Obama deported more people than Trump.
The way deportations were calculated by the administration was changed to include certain types of border rejections, IIRC.
I recommend John Boehner's book. He complimented Obama often, stated he & his team were far more ready than McCain to work with Bush on the economy. They were smoking buddies.
As far as I can tell they hated Obama not for what he did, said or believed. Those things were quite middle of the road.
They hated him for what he was.
But his tan suit!!
bs. obama fucked up healthcare even more, bombed everyone (even americans) and deported more than trump.
color bait.
He did that before he was elected?
Didn’t help that he showed up at his first couple Senate meetings gloating about winning the election. And tried to set working hours for his former colleagues. Among other things.
Gloating? Oh no! We should impeach him!
The audacity! I’m clutching my pearls.
Obstructionism as a core tenet of the (former) Republican platform is reprehensible, and retrospectively probably led to quite a bit of discontent with the government’s inability to address problems that Americans face. That same discontent fomented the current reactionary swing, so in the end maybe they really got what they wanted. Shameful.
Right on. That's probably the worst part of the debilitating self-own we're currently going through. Even if conservatives (aka Democrats) gain back Congress, then gain back the Presidency, then overcome their controlled opposition dynamic where enough inevitably defect and undermine anything meaningful from getting done, so much has been broken that we will be lucky if they even manage to stop the hemorrhaging. Even if the Republicans that got "dragged into" the fascist fever start to have a bit of self-reflection to realize the damage they've done. We've got what, maybe 8 years until the malcontents' dog whistle refrains start to have credence again and then we're right back to staring down the destructionists - with a trail having already been blazed.
Well, those things sound very quaint compared to what Trump did and does, no matter if you take his first or his second term...
"Other things" most obviously being the racism caused in part by significant cognitive dissonance that uniquely affects white supremacists when having a black president.
History rhymes.
I'd have to be full on, 100% retarded to have voted for Donald Trump.
> All that was gone by 2012. I'm not sure what caused the change.
It was all lies to try and win elections.
You’re not sure?
In a word: Greed. In two words: Crony Capitalism. The spend on “non-renewable“ energy is significant to the domestic economy. In 2023 (most recent year I could find), consumer spend on energy in the US was $1.6T (https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener...) with at least 82% of that being fossil fuels - the remainder being “renewables” and nuclear energy (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62444). This does not include billions in subsidies and infrastructure investment.
“Going green” would threaten the American Greed Machine by cutting upwards of $150B in taxes annually, interfering with the individual, corporate, and government gains from the stock and commodities markets, causing short-term inflation due to commodity value spikes, and long-term deflation due to renewable energy being relatively very low cost to generate after the infrastructure is in place. Last, but certainly there is more, the US exports a massive amount of oil and gas. Divesting from fossil fuel production would have a significant impact on GDP (find your own source).
This is why the US doesn’t invest in infrastructure that doesn’t generate significant ongoing income like it once did - it simply doesn’t make enough money. We only act once it is falling apart.
It is all about the money, man. That money is power. It keeps the Corporatocracy and those at the top of it in charge, the US as the primary reserve currency and allows the US to have a huge, formidable military.
That was all true long before 2008 so doesn't explain why the Republican platform changed nearly 180 degrees on this between 2008 and 2012.
Oh, I thought you were being sarcastic. It was clearly Citizens United (2008) and the explosive growth of Super PACs that followed.
Unlimited spending from the fossil fuel industry basically standardized Republican candidates on climate denial talking points. Plus whatever bizarre fetishes random Republican billionaires had, like Adelson keeping Gingrich's primary campaign on life support for months. That fucked up Romney's pivot to the general election for no perceivable gain to any of them. According to Wikipedia Adelson spent over $90 million on losing candidates in 2012!
All of that was through Super PACs.
Well - greed explains this though. Plus, you can also run fake-policies - the USA has done so numerous times before. Flip-Flopping happens in both parties there.
Human greed has existed as long as humans have existed.
"Grr greed" is an easy answer that's popular these days but by itself it can't explain a change as it's a constant factor in us as a species.
Citizens United legalized bribery. Now the politicians could make real money by ignoring the public.
Oh come on, Bush was the first disaster in the fight against climate warming.
His "win" might be one of the most impactful sliding doors in the human history.
Big coal got involved. Undoubtedly one or more billionaires in the dirty energy industry would have seen their substantial wealth dwindle to the mere single-digit billions and started paying politicians a lot of money. There's simply no other explanation because to actively kill clean energy projects that are 90% complete and is not only cleaner than coal but also now cheaper is simply illogical and irrational.
Fracking and access to cheap gas and oil
A black man was elected president.
I don't think anyone's nailing this right
It's manufactured grievance. Opportunists politicize losing positions for political gain because they're inherently anti-elite, anti-establishment and upset experts and the informed.
Upon this antagonization is conflict which brings on drama, eyeballs, and advertisers.
It's an attention flywheel that brings loyalty, builds a moat, and sets a differentiator...
Republicans. Remember them?
I recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben. There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs. This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year. The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.
Solar panels etc. will last decades and can and will be recycled afterwards. Further, most materials needed for renewable energy infrastructure (iron, lithium) are highly abundant on earth. Most of the suppliers work to use cheaper (=more abundant) materials in their products, replacing lithium with sodium in batteries and silver with copper in solar panels. Wind turbine blades are produced now using re-solvable resins.
Not only are older solar panels recyclable, but efficiency gains in panel construction mean that multiple newer panels can be created with the resources from older panels.
And iron (steel) is the most recyclable material we have.
Wind turbines are not recyclable[1]. Besides, the foundations use a massive amount of concrete (nowadays often extracted from the seabed, with all the problematic ecological consequences involved), that stays forever in the ground.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527...
Existing wind turbines turbines are not recyclable - new wind turbines are.
Except, that's not even true. Some existing wind turbines are not recyclable.
Except that's not entirely true either! The tower portion of the turbine is usually steel, and easily recyclable! The nacelle, too. It's the base and the blades that can't be recycled.
Except that's not entirely true either! Existing turbine blades are made (mostly) of fibreglass, which is made of the fibre and the resin. The fibres aren't reliably as strong when recycled (which makes them not-very-useful when recycled), but the resin is just fine. And of course, if the blade is e.g. carbon fibre, then you can either re-use it or just burn it.
So, you statement should be that some (components of) existing wind turbines cannot be profitably recycled with current technology.
The wind turbine's concrete base doesn't need to be smashed up or ignored, incidentally - it can be re-used. Concrete is much sturdier than the e.g. gearbox.
None of this is economically profitable, which is why right now it ends up in massive landfils. The concrete base is reinforced with steel beams and weights so much that you can't move it.
Also sorry but I would require a citation for "new wind turbines are recyclable". That the tech exists doesn't mean that all installed turbines have it.
The linked article is misrepresented.
Two points regarding blade recycling techniques taken straight from the top of the article:
- Cement co-processing and chemical dissolution are primary viable methods, yielding $27.57/ton and $199.71/ton returns respectively.
- Chemical recycling achieves top circularity (PCI=0.7) and notable carbon reduction (−0.475 t CO₂/ton).
Chemical recycling is not yet ready for industrial use; cement co-processing is.
Concrete recycling is actually a pretty big deal. For most of building history here the standard material to put behind basement walls, retaining walls, and so on, for drainage was crushed scoria. Now it's crushed concrete. Some amount of effort but you're recycling existing stuff, and they recover the reinforcing steel as well.
Cement co-processing is not exactly recycling as the original material (fiberglass) can't be reused for its initial purpose.
Who cares? Those blades and that concrete are totally inert and just sit in the ground after their useful life. The ground already has lots of rocks in it.
It defeats the "renewable" designation, since it is quickly consumed and thrown away. Compare this with hydropower, where a dam can last centuries.
But if you repower the wind mill, the foundation can serve for the next turbine
Curious you're so worried about "ecological consequences" but only when it's window power.
The problem is that those power sources are marketed as "renewable" (they aren't as they quickly end in landfills), are intermittent, require fossil fuels for when the wind doesn't blow, and are not profitable.
One could also say that they change heavily natural landscapes, but this is a matter of taste.
> they aren't as they quickly end in landfills
Do you also lead a zero-plastic, zero-waste lifestyle?
> are intermittent, require fossil fuels for when the wind doesn't blow
Batteries.
> are not profitable.
Let the businesses worry about that.
One point that gets very little coverage is that fossil fuels are a limited resource. Once they used they are gone.
The materials for renewable energy are still in a usable form.
The finiteness of fossil fuels isn't real in a practical sense.
The globe burnt about 8.8 billion tons of coal in 2024. Which is a huge amount. This is the peak, most estimates are that we will reduce from there.
Australia alone estimates that it has 147 billion tons of economically recoverable coal. That is Australia alone could supply the entire globe at peak usage for over 16 years. And Australia only has about 14% of the globes coal reserves, we can keep burning coal at this pace for at least the next hundred years. And it a hundred years the scope of what we consider to be economically recoverable will have expanded greatly, further increasing our supply.
We will cook ourselves before we run out of fuel.
A more sci-fi apocalyptic angle on this fact is the argument that fossil fuels, especially easily accessible ones, are necessary to bootstrap a futuristic multi-planetary civilization. They provide the easy energy necessary to support an industrial revolution and the society and technology level necessary for more advanced and renewable forms of energy necessary to really build and sustain an advanced civilization long term.
But because they take so long to form, stumbles along the path of energy advancement mean a planetary civilization could run out of fossil fuels before reaching the level of advancement necessary to move beyond them. At that point, the civilization is essentially doomed since they lack the technological ability to move beyond fossil fuels and they lack the energy resources necessary to develop that technology.
CO2 can be converted to methane. It just isn't profitable to do so yet. After the fossil fuels are depleted, it will be a viable niche for storable energy where renewables aren't practical.
Once fossil fuels run out, most exclusively-fossil-fuel-based activities will simply cease to be economically feasible.
That doesn't contradict your statement, of course. But in the long term the fossil fuel niches will start looking more like today's rocket-fuel niches.
Why is this conversion desirable?
Methane synthesized from excess renewable power can store that renewable power for years, handily fixing the whole "Sun don't shine every day" problem.
It's durable energy storage and can be easily moved around like liquid fuels.
It also would remove CO2 emissions from things like airplanes, which won't be able to be battery powered in the near future, and could renewably replace chemical feedstocks in lots of industrial processes.
But this requires immense industrial capability, probably some serious innovation in absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere because that's basically an unsolved problem right now, and a massive oversupply of solar power which cannot happen under market systems because nobody builds infrastructure to sell power at below market rates.
It might be a 50 year plan.
You swap a plentiful greenhouse gas for another greenhouse gas that is burnable at no net environmental cost.
I don't think you realize how much OIL we still have. The warnings about running out of oil is long long gone.
You're right, it's not infinite, but we are in no crisis now or in the foreseeable future.
"You're right, it's not infinite, but we are in no crisis now or in the foreseeable future."
Have you not heard of climate change influenced by fossil fuel burning, or are you a climate change skeptic?
The general consensus is that climate change is a crisis, now and in the foreseeable future.
Yes of course, but i have not heard of a reasonable action plan given the world's population and basic human nature.
> One point that gets very little coverage is that fossil fuels are a limited resource
Every time someone uses the term “renewable” they are providing coverage to this notion.
It is deeply bizarre you can think otherwise.
The renewable in renewable energy sources is referred to, indeed, the energy sources.
The user was arguing that the materials to exploit them are renewable too.
But it creates enough cash to redirect all ire away to weakly lobbying industries, like aggrarian-sector or other weakly lobbied sectors like nuclear.
Only there is no forever when you're talking about a finite resource, like fossil fuels.
They're talking about our nascent circular economy.
Recycling now recovers >95% of raw minerals (and will continue to improve).
The learning curves for battery and solar tech will more than make up the for the shortfall.
Meaning at some point in the near future (2050 IIRC), humanity will have mined all the lithium it'll ever need.
Also, in the same time frame, it'll be economical to mine our garbage dumps. Further reducing the need to extract raw materials.
"Recycling now recovers >95% of raw minerals"
Not of plastic - recycling rates are decreasing. This is largely due to the excess ethane begin produced as a by-product of US fracking.
The ethane is converted to ethylene, then to polyethylene as a cost below that of collecting, cleaning, and processing used plastic.
True. The situation for both off-gassing and plastic recycling is rather bleak.
Sorry for being vague; I was only referring to economically valuable minerals used in electric batteries.
Aqua Metals has previously said they'll be able to reuse battery quality graphite (from batteries) as well (vs releasing it as CO2). But my recent scan of their progress wasn't very encouraging.
Learning more about Redwood Recycling stack is on my to do list.
Source? These are big claims and the collective shouldn’t rely on your recall as fact.
> That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns.
This is Big Oil propaganda. The impact from this is massively less than the horrific damage caused by every part of the fossil fuel industry.
Yep. It's not just oil rigs in the desert. Chevron in Ecuador destroyed the Amazonian rainforest. Oil pipelines and open pit mines destroying Canadian primordial forests. Probably tons of untold stories.
> open pit mines destroying Canadian primordial forest
And our lovely tailings: Syncrude Tailings Dam
Similar to the idea that electric cars are net worse for the environment because some of the materials used to make them. Worse than 20 years of burning gasoline in an ICE car? It's so ridiculous.
it depends where your electricity comes from actually. In west Virginia it comes from coal so is worse than a hybrid but still better than non-hybrid gas cars (in terms of CO2)
No it's not. The efficiency of an EV Motor > efficiency of ICEV motor. Even with 100% black coal. The carbon is reduced by about 30% IIRC (that number can and does improve as the grid greens).
Yes it is. Here is the study
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...
That's an 11 year old study that is no longer correct based on the modern electric grid.
Also focusing on only carbon footprint is misleading. EVs pollute far less overall, even on the 2015 electric grid.
I await your updated study to back up your claims
I shall not explain the obvious
In 2023, coal-fired electric power plants accounted for 86% of West Virginia's total electricity net generation
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WV
Looks like west virginia is still a state where hybrid-electric vehicles have lower emissions than all-electric ones. Who knew.
It’s so interesting seeing some of the comments about this. The sentence I wrote after that blames war and global devastation on fossil fuels. I was expecting to get flak for being too harsh to fossil fuels but somehow it swung the other direction. Which, as someone who shouts at the radio when the greenwashing oil ads play on NPR, is heartening.
Absolutely, one single point to confirm what you say, the Niger Delta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St7yWvGTDmo
especially when the most important total cost of ownership over life is considered
Those are nice pictures but I can take the same pictures in the USA.
Note: I'm not suggesting China is not doing better here. Rather, I'm going off the title "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout" and I'm not seeing anything in those photos I haven't seen in the USA.
Driving down the 580 from SF to Tracy you pass several hundred windmills. Driving through Mojave the same. Also solar. Driving toward Vegas as well. And those are just the ones I've seen with my own eyes. There's many others.
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=altamont+pass+windmill...
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=mojave+windmills&sa=X&...
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=palmdale+solar+farm&sa...
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=desert+stateline+solar...
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=barstow+solar+plant&sa...
The current administration is actively shutting down in-progress wind projects.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/11/how-the-wind-indust...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/22/trump-leaves-wind-i...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
Those windmills in the East Bay are decades old.
And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.
The article here starts with: Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
Is the US anywhere in this ballpark?
The concentrated solar plant is getting shut down because it's failing to compete with the massive rollout of photovoltaic panels. We've made solar so cheap that the old ways of gathering it are becoming redundant, which, no matter how incredibly cool it was to see a second sun rise over the horizon on the way to Vegas, is a good sign.
The California Public Utilities Commission moved last month to prevent the shutdown of the Ivanpah solar concentrator. They cite data centers, grid reliability, and the state's clean energy goals as reasons to keep it online.
https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M586/K...
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2026-01-11/trump-b...
My point was the photos. They aren't convincing to someone who's seen US installations. If that was the goal then the article failed.
A graph comparing China to the US would have been better.
The pics show renewable energy integrated with other activity (e.g. sheep grazing among solar panels); integrated into urban environments (on every rooftop and streets) and contrasted against ancient Chinese culture (e.g. temples). I think this makes the imagery substantially different from the alternative-offered US RE installations.
We’re doing better than they are. Our new power generation is about 90% renewable, theirs is 70.
The difference is just scale, China has 3x our population but very many of them had little or even no electricity available so they’re playing catch up. Americans are functionally all served by the power grid already. So of course they’re building more of it as an absolute number.
But I’d also bet they built more coal plants last year than the entire world built in a decade.
Last year, PRC new generation is functionally >100% renewable (as in over 100%), new advanced coal plants serve as cleaner coal peakers not base load. New renewables now displaces existing coal (new trend last year) - nameplate coal is up due to new plants, but actual utilization of coal down in absolute terms.
Meanwhile what doesn't get captured in accounting is US increasing fossil exports (crude, lng etc), and PRC exporting renewables. Assuming 25 year lifecycle, PRC exports solar last year displaces ~5 years worth of US fossil exports in barrels of crude equivalent (400 GW of solar = 14000TWh electricity, or 8B barrels of oil, i.e. 22m barrels per day). TLDR PRC is reducing absolute fossil use, MASSIVELY increasing global renewable use. US is simply increasing net fossil use, much of it hidden from domestic balance sheets because it's exported globally.
The current US “leadership” is working as hard as it can to prevent any progress and to even dismantle some of the gains we have made.
Meanwhile, China has made the obvious realization that independence from oil and gas is economically, geopolitically, and environmentally beneficial.
China's betting on renewables while Republicans are betting on nuclear fusion and gutting the NRC.
Hardly. China is also betting on nuclear fission and nuclear fusion:
1. Fission: TMSR-LF1 (a thorium breeder, molten salt research reactor)
Based on US work in 1960s and independent Chinese Sinap work in 1970s. They recently published that they had detected Protactiunium in the salt - a new milestone.
2. Fusion: EAST tokomak
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chin...
We would all be better off if the US and China just collaborated.
I know that China's actively researching Nuclear fission, fusion and even have the world's first thorium reactor pilot - in fact, they might even be having a lot more effort and investment being put into nuclear than the rest of the world combined. But they aren't putting all of their chips and actively betting with a Hallelujah on fusion to provide energy. They're ramping up renewables production side by side while still funding fusion research.
Republicans on the other hand are hoping somehow that a gutted NRC will pave the way for looser regulations that will help ramp up conventional nuclear fission and nuclear fusion timelines (all efforts invested into by the current president's family and his fellow cronies of course), while abjectly gutting down any progress in renewable energy in the present moment.
China knows better than to weaken their position in the global theater by having large dependence on other nations for energy. They are aiming for domination and they are well on their way.
China is fine with dependence on other nations, it just can't rely on sea-based imports when the US could easily block them by blockading the strait of Malacca. That's why China has invested so heavily into their Belt And Road initiative (which is notably a giant land-based shipping route).
Actually, it seems China has given up on the feasibility of BRI because they don't control all the variables in their partner countries. Which is why Xi has been super focused on creating an autarkic economy dependent on domestic demand and encouraging production for the native population, as a back up. Failures in helping industrialize countries such as Pakistan and those in Africa due to systemic and unavoidable issues have soured on the Chinese. That autarkic vision hinges strongly on a solid renewables energy production base.
Has Nuclear Fusion received massive funding improvements in the last ~12 months?
Well the Trumps, Thiel, etc are all invested heavily in a bunch of publicly traded nuclear fusion and nuclear fission companies, so those presidentially-backed firms are seeing outsized funding gains.
In 2025, > 90% of new energy capacity built in the US is from renewable [0]. So the US isn't building that much solar not because they're not building solar, but that the US has been generating and consuming so much energy per capita that there isn't that much incentive to increase energy capacity dramatically.
[0]: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/us-new-win...
The US has done well historically, roughly on par with China on per capita renewable rollout, slightly ahead of China between 2019-2023 but probably falling behind now.
China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.
edit: looked it up, US is still ahead of China as of 2024:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/renewable-electricity-per...
Bear in mind that pre 2000 is likely hydro, in the early years of solar and wind that confused matters if lumped in together but I think it's now obvious when the new tech kicks in.
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> no one talks about it
People regularly talk about how much new coal capacity China has been building.
Quite often this is followed by "capacity, sure; they're not using all that capacity, those plants exist and are mostly not running", or some variation thereof. I've never bothered fact-checking the responses, but this conversation happens is most of the Chinese renewables discussions I've seen in the last few years.
Coal generation production in China did decline in 2025 vs 2024 - but that was the first year for it to happen.
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You are wrong by a factor of at least 10x
That's utterly wrong. Renewable installs in China are vastly outpacing nuclear installs.
Got any sources for this?
Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison.
Nuclear capacity: +2GW in 2025 (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...)
Solar capacity: ¬300GW capacity
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202512/26/cont...
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Please show your numbers; if you just make a claim and then insult people who disagree, you automatically lost internet arguments.
I don't understand this? A couple of people responded with clear charts showing nuclear way behind on solar/renewables with solar/renewables growing faster too.
It looks like you've been misled but are having trouble admitting that to yourself?
He's a troll. Don't respond.
[dead]
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
Source?
These are new electric power plants. The US is still ramping up oil and gas production, and is now producing more than ever before. No signs of transitioning away from fossil fuels for transport, industry, export.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/chart-the-...
> The US is still ramping up oil and gas production
This also happens in China. With better ratio for renewables but still. Globally there was more energy from coal than before. Much more was from renewables but in context of climate change absolute numbers of CO2 are what matters.
EU is also reverting it's green targets because of this new situation. So near future does not look good.
That's production, not consumption. The US exports huge amounts of oil and gas now. The EU/Russia sanctions and the Red Sea blockade are a huge gravy train for American oil and gas companies.
The us president held a fundraiser for petroleum execs late in 2024. He promised to kill as many renewable energy projects as possible. They donated a billion dollars to his campaign. And he followed through.
The rhetoric around "energy independence" always sounded like it was pointing exactly toward renewables, and it's hard not to see the missed opportunity in hindsight
I vividly recall an episode of Dallas where Bobby was rationalizing to his brother JR about investing in renewables.
For a brief window of time our consensus for decarbonization extended all the way to (the most) popular media.
Can’t power the military with renewables. Need nuclear and fossil fuels for that. One doesn’t want to be dependent on foreign nations to power their military.
What are you talking about? Renewables don't require fuels, unlike the fossil fuels that the US has invaded several countries for (most recently taking actions against another country just this month).
It shouldn't be one thing, or 'only eco thing'.
It should be _every_ thing that isn't a bad idea.
Solar
Wind
Geothermal
Tidal power?
Got a way of using that tasty oil cleanly? Maybe we want to reserve those complex hydrocarbons for some other use like growing crops, making solid rocket fuel, or some other national priority.
Nuclear - Yes, craft regulations that make sense and squeeze all the damned energy possible out of that 'waste'. No, I don't mean burn the fuel the easy way only - I mean send it back to military run reprocessing centers to concentrate the power and make the (effective) half life of the waste decades rather than civilizations of time (yes, concentrating it, there will also be some super mild things that decay slowly enough to be useful in other applications rather than waste).
We want to maximize energy in the long, medium and short term. Try Everything.
Its crazy that in 1999 "home solar" was a fancy, new millennium idea, and now we're still barely any closer.
Honestly, I think building regulations should mandate solar energy for homes.
Seeing fewer rooftop solar installations when I visit my home state (Texas) than I see in the one I live in (Bavaria) is a trip. Yes, I know that electricity is far cheaper there than here, but as much electricity as air conditioning eats, and as big as those roofs are (panels are cheap; it's the system that's expensive), it should balance out.
Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...
My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.
Grid level renewables are more economical than rooftop solar by a significant stretch, and Texas has a lot of that, especially wind. The lifetime cost of rooftop solar just doesn't work out very well when you also have cheap electricity.
Something is deeply wrong with the home solar market in the US. It comes out about 3x more expensive than Australia despite similar labour costs.
My 65yo parents installed Solar panels on the roof of their house in a Tier 2 city in the poor parts of India. So did pretty much most of their neighbours.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
Maybe his "we" is more USA-centric than your "we".
It happens all the time...
My "We" is Australia and UK-centric.
People have home solar, but it's hardly widespread. It's still a "fancy" thing to have.
In the UK, it's expensive, and it's not the technology, it's everything else. I don't see how that can improve unless the installation costs come down, and I don't know how that could/would happen.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
You were ripped off.
I wasn't ripped off, but I didn't go for the cheapest quote either. I wasn't trying to suggest my installation was typical or what someone could expect to pay in the UK, the point I was trying to make was the cost of labour adds significantly, and overall even if you paid half what I did, it's still too much to expect the majority of UK households to take it up.
My system is larger than typical for a UK home, I also paid a premium to have it installed by a company with an excellent reputation for their work, I'd had a new roof the week before and wanted a high quality installation.
I also went with a company that let me decide how I wanted it installed; other companies wanted to put the batteries in my loft or under the stairs which was an absolute no from me, I don't want them inside my home, and I had them install the batteries and inverter in a brick out house on the opposite end of the property to where the consumer unit is, again, at a premium.
I had per-panel optimisers and monitoring hardware installed, and because I wasn't aware of it until later, I added the bird-mesh on after signing the contract and did get ripped off on that part (NOTE: if you get solar in the UK, and have ever so much as seen a pigeon, get bird mesh).
It's also worth noting that checking today, all of the hardware has dropped in price, my panels are now 20% cheaper, batteries are 15% cheaper, inverter is 10% cheaper, and I imagine installations and labour might be cheaper in the winter than the peak of summer like I had mine installed.
All of that said, the total cost of installation doesn't really matter so much as the ROI, which for me works out at most ~6 years, if none of the hardware fails in the meantime.
EDIT: There's a mistake in my previous comment which I based all of the subsequent numbers on; the cost of 2 batteries + inverter was closer to £5k not £3.5k.
Absolutely. A local company is currently advertising 12 470w panels, 10kwh storage for £7695 fully installed with additional pannels fully installed for £200 each. /r/uksolar is a great resource for comparing quotes.
There are a lot of variables that need to be factored in, and they don't cover many of them in these cheaper quotes.
What size inverter? Is it a hybrid inverter? 10kWh of Storage is 8-9kWh usable because batteries are only warrantied to 80-90% depth-of-discharge, is that enough?
Since there's only ~5.6kWp of panels in that quote it's probably over-provisioned, and it will likely come with a smaller inverter, say 3.6kW, which is what a lot of these cheaper companies will do, and export will be limited under G98 to 3.68kW.
That also means that in peak sun, your 5.6kW of panels are going to clip at the inverter capacity and you won't be able to access more than that limit in power.
£200 per extra panel isn't bad, the company I went with charged £300, but mine came with per-panel optimisers (at my request, mainly for the monitoring functionality rather than optimisation). If I wanted to add an additional elevation though, that would be per-panel cost plus ~£2000 for the additional elevation of scaffolding.
If you're going for one of these installations and haven't already, ask these questions, and if you can get a decent price that's great, I wish you luck. I'm not on reddit so I can't comment on the quality of that sub.
This is the reason there hasn’t been greater proliferation in the US. There’s a ton of premium added on top of cost.
That quoted price is nuts I did it cheaper in Canada in 2007. And that was with tracking panels (which I would never do again, I'd just buy more panels).
Australia has the highest per capita solar capacity in the world :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia
Also ridiculously far ahead on grid connected battery storage.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
Australia > all of Europe (yes all of Europe, not just EU) combined on that one.
To be fair Australia also has approximately infinitely more sun than most of Europe does. But true, we could be doing a lot better in the EU regardless
The thing to look at is C02 equivalent emissions from electricity generation.
Despite Australia's high solar and battery penetration Australia's electricity generation is fairly high emissions.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/5y/monthly
France and Sweden have considerably lower emission electricity generation than Australia does.
~39% of Australian homes have solar as of 2025. Seems pretty widespread
There's so much home solar in Australia that the electricity price goes negative at midday.
https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...
And as a follow on for anyone curious about "can't you just store it and make bank" Australia now leads the world in per capita grid storage. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
I guess at some level it is a matter of incentives. In their city, we have electricity 20-22 hours per day (used to be 12-18 when i was growing up) and we can’t rely on the state to provide us electricity consistently.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
I would say 10% of the homes in my estate in Derbyshire have rooftop solar. We haven't gone for it yet because I still think the cost is too high. It might work out when electricity gets even more expensive.
Is there any truth to the climate sceptic claim that solar in the UK can’t generate useful power with our bad weather and cloud cover? I always said that it’s not like Germany has better weather but they have tons of solar. However it would be great to have an answer from the UK.
It definitely generates useful amounts of power, especially in the summer. The problem is that we still need gas plant, and the distribution infrastructure ready for the rest of the year when it isn't so effective.
In the last year, 2.11% or 308 MWh of our electricity came from solar: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/GB/12mo/monthly
By way of comparison, that same source shows Germany generating 2.16% (527 MWh) of its electricity from solar so its pretty similar: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/12mo/monthly
Some of our neighbours had home solar, wind, and battery storage in the 1990s.
They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.
It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.
We're getting there: California does[1] require solar installation on many new builds, and has followed Australia in doing automatic permit processing[2] to streamline installation. It's possible to pay around $20k for an average home, and in as little as one week have 100% of your power bill covered by solar.
[1] https://www.greenlancer.com/post/california-solar-mandate
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/programs-and-topics/programs/calif...
Barely any closer? I can see it on every fourth roof in western Slovak village.
Sorry to disagree, but we are not just closer, we’ve been there for a while.
You can go out and buy solar panels to cover your roof for a few thousand dollars/pounds/euros. You could definitely not do that in 1999.
You can achieve near total energy independence for 20 years minimum for the price of a new Camry (or less in specific context).
That's insane. I cannot fathom how anyone with a home isn't doing it ASAP.
Even here in Maine, a smaller system will pay for itself rapidly and offset the high energy costs.
But what surprises me most in this entire debate is how little we talk about the biological cost of CO₂ itself. We focus so much on the globalized damage to the climate that we’ve overlooked the direct, physiological tax that combustion is levying on our bodies. For some reason conservative governments want us to continue to trade our atmospheric oxygen for carbon dioxide through the burning fossil fuels. I wrote more about this topic on substack:
https://minimallysustained.substack.com/p/beyond-the-greenho...
it seems us is fighting yesterday's war
wars / empires etc are built on mastering an energy source
the Brits on Coal
the US rose on Oil
China is rising on renewables
my worry is can renewables be quickly brought online to power industry / power hungry Data Centers etc at a reasonable cost
China did most of its rising on fossil fuels. I think they are fairly pragmatic as to what to use.
But now their ascendance will be largely built on renewables which, due to our ineptitude here in the west, we've handed them the ball.
Good luck to them, because someone has to.
Everyone's rising on renewables. Renewable energy is just a victim of a heavily polarizing political atmosphere.
> my worry is can renewables be quickly brought online to power industry / power hungry Data Centers etc at a reasonable cost
I mean, clearly the answer is yes. The problem is political, not economic.
Could you spell out the “clearly yes” part of this? I’d love it to be true but even more than that I’d like to have an answer to the climate sceptics.
We're commenting on an article that discusses how quickly and cheaply large scale renewables can be brought online.
Well I have good news for you, we are.
Over 90% of new power generation being built (both domestically and globally) is renewables. We do it for the same reason China and everyone else is: it’s just cheaper now.
That’s the best reason because it’s the one that gets the job done. Renewable energy prices will keep falling while fossil fuel prices rise, widening the gap.
In 25 years there will be little fossil fuel generation left.
Meanwhile in Italy, the whole renewables discussion is gaslighted by "we should actually consider nuclear" and "wind turbines ruin the panorama".
I'm not against nuclear per se, but it's like this part of italians don't realize that:
1. if you decide to make a power plant today, it won't be online before the 2050s, in the best case scenario. It's very difficult to bring nuclear plants online, especially in the west. Even the countries with the capital and know-how (US and France) see more projects cancelled than brought online. I think US has put online a single nuclear plant in 20 years, France not a single one.
2. Nuclear needs tons of water, we have less and less of it as it rains less and global warming doesn't accumulate enough snow in the alps (which generally melts in the summer), our rivers are literally dry stone most of the year.
3. Renewables can be attached to the grid (or close to where they are needed) in the span of few months and with very little know-how required.
4. Money isn't limitless, building a 20B+ nuclear plant (realistically 50 knowing these projects + Italy) means this budget won't be available for the next decade on projects that could bring benefits immediately.
I'm sure that Italy and Germany, which are manufacturing heavy countries that need lots of energy cannot rely renewables alone, of course nuclear should be considered, but hell, in my region (around Rome), 95% of our energy comes from imported natural gas, I'm sure we could invest some more in that.
I’m anti nuclear on cost reasons but that’s excessively pessimistic. Nuclear can use seawater for cooling, and being colder offsets the cost premium of using salt water.
Your 2050’s comment assumes a level of dysfunction that’s presumably exaggerated. Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.
The cost of canceled nuclear projects is generally quite low compared to lifetime subsidies of nuclear. Nuclear may be an inefficient use of government resources, but it’s also offset a staggering amount of emissions and the subsidies tend to end back up in the local economy recuperating some of the expense. IMO, there’s probably dumber things your government is doing that are worth fighting instead.
> Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.
The average time globally is 14 years. The latest point of reference in the west, Vogtle was announced in 2006 and came online in 2025, 19 years later. It took 7 years alone just to start building it.
There's no chance this would take less time in Italy, where you need to also find a suitable place, you don't have the know-how and there's an anti-nuclear referendum that's been voted 3 decades ago. So there is a lot that needs to be changed, starting from having a public voting.
Hinkley Point C, in UK, has ballooned it's cost from the planned 18B pounds to a 43B pounds in the span of a decade. These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Depends on what you consider the start date. Practically speaking there’s some investigation into building nuclear in Italy that already occurred but using that as a start date isn’t meaningful here. Similarly the announcement you point to was a long way from having everything required to actually build a power plant.
Until there’s actual funding talking about nuclear doesn’t really mean anything. Vogal was a boondoggle but it didn’t get construction approval until 2012 and like many projects ran into COVID delays on top of everything else.
> These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Using the worst examples means there’s something very wrong with each of them.
> Vogal was a boondoggle but it didn’t get construction approval until 2012 and like many projects ran into COVID delays on top of everything else.
Well there you are, then: projects experience delays in construction approval and run into other unexpected delays, which extends a ~10yr estimate.
The 10 year estimate comes from a range of projects including some that go very badly and others that didn't.
You can always pick worse numbers by using a smaller sample of projects, but it isn’t necessarily meaningful to do so. California’s high speed rail has gone far worse than Italy’s projects, America is currently comically bad at large construction projects.
They go over budget because regulatory burdens are very high, not because of any fundamental unknowns in deploying the technology. A motivated national government could reduce the cost substantially.
You make it sound like the regulatory burdens don't have a purpose and are merely annoyances.
Regulations of course have a purpose but they are often (a) out of date with respect to current technology (b) not well well designed to accomplish their intended purpose in the first place or ignored 2nd and 3rd order effects and (c) perverted to extract rents for incumbents at the expense of new market entrants. Certainly (a) is true in most places with respect to nuclear technology.
Australia fortunately has a political neutral research organisation (CSIRO) whose job is to estimate the net cost benefit for various government programs.
Detail and detail on cost benefit analysis https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2024/December/Nucl...
Needless to say not at all cost effective to go nuclear at this point. There's no reason that wouldn't hold similarly in other nations since the scale of the difference in costs are so huge too.
Hasn't stopped certain parties from doing the same thing as Italy though, the CSIRO being credible really hurt their efforts though, Murdoch press tried & failed to discredit them with ferocity.
Worst part is, even if price comes down I think they further poisoned the idea of nuclear in Australia because their plan was brazenly to keep the coal & gas plants running in the meantime rather than spend money on wind/solar. They didn't even make an effort for their timelines and costs to be remotely believable.
If it is not in the interest of people over the age of 60, it will not happen in the US.
Texas… look at Texas where the amount of electricity generated from the solar farms has outgrown the amount generated by coal
Gas still dominates but wind and solar are both increasing
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/chart-solar-is-fi...
The US invented fracking.
Arguably the US is energy independent. It has Texas, Canada and Venezuela.
They never did discover any large oilfields in China despite decades of frantically searching for it.
The US does not have Venezuela.
It does. It may be illegal, immoral etc., but it does as of now.
The Bolivarian revolution kicked us out before, they can do it again.
We're only energy independent in the sense that we export more oil than we import. We're still reliant on foreign oil because we haven't retooled (or built enough new) refineries for a lot of the oil we produce. Allowing the Saudis to own refineries is probably a strong factor there. If the middle east and Canada cut us off, we're SOL. Venezuela barely produces anything right now.
Retooling refineries to a different flavor of crude is expensive, but not that expensive. If push came to shove, the US could transition to oil independence in less than a year.
"It has Texas, Canada and Venezuela", eh.. excuse me?
I thought the same thing, ... where is the "and Greenland!"?
The amount of hard, soft and economic power that are being burned for the bedtime stories of one person is unreal. As are all the cooperators and lobby harnessing conspirators whose actual dreams are getting implemented.
It isn't the fall of the USSR, but it is still a dramatic ceiling bounce.
I mean Venezuela is a touch iffy on how strongly we commit but saying the USA basically owns Canada isn't exactly controversial maybe controls is a more acceptable way of phrasing it? They are a "sovereign" with a lowercase S at best.
Canada fucking hates the US right now and are actively in discussions to deepen their relationship with China, and cut back on their relationship with the US.
I don't blame them.
Canada is actively pursuing more pipeline capacity to the west coast, in order to sell more oil to China.
However, it's also true that if the US builds a new pipeline to the Canadian border, Canada will happily fill it with heavy crude.
I mean the problem with the bed Canada has made is they don't really get a choice.
Alaska
It’s about incentives. We are “energy independent” compared to China and the EU. With China, if its relations with Russia sour and if they get cut off in Djiboutis by any number of powers, they will be a world of hurt.
Interesting, could you elaborate?
And it would have been possible if not for the support on this platform and similar ones for people like Elon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, like the youth says these days: FAFO
It's particularly sad, we've known about the greenhouse effect caused by CO2 since 19th century, and now its branded as radical pseudoscience
Fake news!
We chose this path because the U.S. dollar is underpinned by fossil fuel markets. Also, batteries do not have the energy density to mobilize a mechanized military.
Our elites refuse to concede dominance of the affairs of the world, so they will never allow the fossil fuel infrastructure to decline unless forced.
By contrast, China has every incentive to do the right thing.
The USA keeps pushing for corporatism, so that's what we get: corporatism. Not a good environment or safe energy, but corporatism.
The USA doesn't (over any long historical time) push for anything much like corporatism, but instead for capitalism ("corporate capitalism” or “crony capitalism” to those who view “capitalism” as a utopian free market system and not the concrete real-world system for which the name was coined by its critics, I suppose.)
The US has been pushing toward something blending corporatism and kleptocracy under Trump II, but I suspect that people using "corporatism” to refer to a longer-term effort of the US are misusing "corporatism” (where the body—“corpus”—actually refers to the aggregate of government, business, and social institutions, all of which are interlocking and working together, with interlocking formal control structures for that end) to mean “capitalism oriented specifically around the interests of corporations”, i.e., "corporate capitalism”.
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The mountaintop panels add shade to those regions and actually reverse desertification, increases water retention and create useful agricultural land.
Mountaintops are already cold and shaded places by definition.
And regardless of whether it's beneficial for humans, it's still changing the local ecosystem.
Have you driven around anywhere rural lately? The US is doing a ton of renewables development.
China is also building unfathomable amount of coal plants as well.
China has also just launched a megawatt scale wind generator a the helium-lifted balloon, the S2000 , they have active thorium rector the TMSR-LF1 and GW/h Vandium flow battery. The scale , speed and breadth of what they are doing is incredible and I think missed my people
Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.
The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.
That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.
I feel like energy is the most critical aspect to any economy and military. It's the beginning of anything and everything you want to achieve.
It totally is. I don’t remember where I heard it from but there’s a saying that all poverty is energy poverty. Not enough food for your citizens? That’s because you don’t have enough energy to run the Haber Bosch process for fertilizer production.
short of the defense of energy infrastructure, of course.
People worship China for being "green focused".
The reality is that they don't have a good source of fossil fuels, and energy independence is a core necessity.
And thank god they have this incentive alignment! Chinas greentech buildout and export is the only thing with a chance of getting us out of this climate mess. Imagine how fucked we’d be if they had their own oil.
>And thank god they have this incentive alignment! Chinas greentech buildout and export is the only thing with a chance of getting us out of this climate mess. Imagine how fucked we’d be if they had their own oil.
IIRC that list of companies that polluted the most on the planet, 1 and 2 were Chinese state owned entities. China Coal and China Petroleum from memory.
OFC they are dwarfed IIRC by the US Military.
sure. But today china is the #1 producer of solar panels (80% of global production capacity), #1 producer of wind turbines (40%), #1 producer of batteries (~80%), #1 producer of EVs (75%).
Noone has done more for global clean energy, and its not even close. Sure they polluted a lot up until now, but honesty who cares about the past, times change fast.
Oh I dont care so much. Its more that:
A. Where would we be without China, well with a significantly reduced problem. But they are doing their part and doing it well.
B. That list gets used as a bludgeon against free enterprise and a great deal of the entities on the list dont represent free enterprise.
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The trend is clear that if we keep using fossil up, then soon nobody will have a good source for it. And it’s clear that for geopolitical reasons in addition to environmental reasons, energy independence will be a core necessity everywhere on earth. It’s handy that the sun is sending us enough energy, directly (solar) and indirectly (wind, hydro), that nobody has a good reason not to be “green focused” and phase out fossil fuels for energy. Any country that leads and shows the rest of the world that it can be done deserves applause.
Who is going to pay for it? Even when it was cheap, solar uptake was low except in Texas. EV adoption is still poor outside of California. Then there’s the issue of a K Shaped economy. Outside of our bubble in Silicon Valley, a lot of people can barely afford necessities let alone go green.
You might be confusing consumer purchasing choices with the national energy policy and infrastructure we were talking about. Going green personally is only more expensive to consumers in places where our country isn’t building and offering green power by default. EVs are a bit of a different topic. But what difference does it make when fossil fuels run out? Left unchecked, sooner or later market forces will make oil much more expensive as it becomes scarce, and eventually there is no choice. Yes we might be decades or even hundreds of years away from that, but in the big picture that’s not far away, and it doesn’t matter because the eventuality is obvious. Eventually there will be no such thing as non-renewable energy. Might as well start now.
Solar panels are being built like crazy in really poor developing countries like Pakistan, simply because it's cheaper than the alternatives. If they can afford it, average American surely should too.
China isn't "going green" to go green. They're doing it because it's cheaper.
The elites are pinning us to fossil fuels and driving up the cost of necessities.
They have a large coal mining industry.
And consume 50% of global coal production.
But coal is the worst fossil fuel from a practical stance. It's really only good for energy generation. You can't really power tanks or warships with it.
Oh, you can convert coal to liquid fuels if you have to. Germany produced low single digit millions of tons per year during World War 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergius_process
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
Something something Black cat or white cat, doesnt matter as long as it catches mice.
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What's the hard part?
Nuclear build out, wires and transformers.
China has been building 5% extra nuclear capacity every year for the last 30 years. On target for making up 24% of their energy mix in 2060.
Everything I’ve read says their nuclear share is actually declining y/y, due to the crazy growth of renewables. I think that target is out of date?
If they build out wind and solar first then yes, the nuclear share will have declined year over year.
Declining because they’re building out everything else so rapidly. I believe they have 30+ reactors being actively constructed right now.
Sure, I’m just pointing out that 24% share of power being nuke by 2060 is never going to happen now. Renewables got too cheap, and it’s not “on target”
If I have zero wives yesterday and one today, by next week I will need a new house for all my new wives.
Like I said in the original post:
>Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.
>The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Only capitalists are so penny wise and pound foolish to bet their civilization on the lowest bidder while hoping the inevitable doesn't happen in the next quarter.
I agree with you, china is building risk mitigation in a way that no one else is, and it will serve them well. However, in this thread I’m solely replying to your comment on the “24% nuke by 2060” plan. That particular plan is not going to happen any more, nuclear is not competitive enough, even for china.
I disagree. They’re not going to go the battery energy storage route, instead they will just fill in intermittent gaps in renewable electricity production with nuclear as they ramp down coal.
But where is the evidence to back up this 4D chess move? They have been failing to meet their nuclear roll out plans year after year? Why would they magically hit a ridiculously high goal of 24% by 2060?
4D chess? This is not some memery. They’re essentially building out aiming for a 100% redundant capacity. Renewables and coal are much faster to build, nuclear takes longer (7 years for standardized ones, 10 for newer kinds).
Climate change, and having an abundance of energy allows a country to offset some of those challenges.
Weathering the knock-on effects of ecological overshoot, probably. It's going to be interesting.
Demography. They're soon going to run out of "young" workers, which mean they have to invent the robotics of the 2100s to ensure the few remaining people will have machine to harvest crops and wage wars.
Also, they're soon going to run out of women, so they need to perfect artificial wombs.
The few remaining party elites will want to live practically forever, so biology will be on the programs once fusion and robots have been cracked.
And it doesnot even seem like china will make ussr-level mistakes.
Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.)
> Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.)
Might be more accurate to say that the PRC has successfully done an opium wars situation to the USA with e.g. fentanyl precursors.
I think a major factor is politics - when China's leadership sets out to do something, they go out and get it done. Look at China's high speed rail (now more than the combined rest of the world), renewable energy growth, and their recent investment in chips. They commit to it, and make incredible progress - far outpacing everyone else. China's leadership seems to plan for the long term in infrastructure.
Compare that to something like the California High Speed Rail, or our every 4 year tug of war for elections (and mid term elections). Everything is short sighted "wins" for the next reelection, of one party vs another party, instead of making actual progress.
Its almost like when there is a good benevolent leadership in charge, for a long term, then progress comes much faster. (Singapore, China, ?)
That's GWh and vanadium flow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
Technological, manufacturing and energy advancements aside (congrats China on those), the pictures look beautiful. Amazing work from the photographer.
Same sentiment! The one photo from Mongolia is going as my desktop background
Are you joking? It looks just as ugly as mountaintop removal to me.
They could preserve all that scenery by just building out nuclear. That's without mentioning the horrible ecological impact of blanketing an entire ecosystem in panels.
Yeah! Pretty sure the person silhouette in the first photo is fake, so we can understand the scale. Great touch.
Came here to appreciate the same. Not only it truly captures the scale, but does it in a great way.
Meanwhile, in London, UK, local council doesn't allow you to put anything on your rooftop that doesn't gel with the Victorian look..
It's a big town. You might want to specify which of the 33 boroughs this stupid policy exists in. There's no problem with solar where I live.
Is your building listed or something? In most cases it doesn't require planning permission even in a conservation area, and some councils are actively installing them on council houses.
The UK is actually world leading in wind electricity generation (especially offshore). So it's not all bad.
Not quite accurate anymore. The UK was indeed the world leader from 2008 until around 2021, but has since fallen to second place behind China. China now has over 41 GW installed (>50% of global capacity), while the UK sits at ~15 GW (~22%). [1][2]
Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.
[1] https://www.renewableuk.com/energypulse/blog/uk-wind-and-glo... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1489147/uk-offshore-wind...
ps.: Per capita it's also not #1 — Denmark and the Netherlands both have higher offshore wind capacity per person.
I guess we are. But who are the plants owned by, who built the and where did the components come from, are we also switching them off because our grid cannot handle transmit huge volumes of renewable energy from Scotland to London, and turning on gas power plants to make up for it.
You also have situations, like today, where a German developer has handed back a seabed lease for 3GW of offshore power because they didn’t get a contract for power from government (CFD) and their lease fees are approx £400m/yr if they want to continue developing the windfarm. This is after spending £1B already on lease fees with nothing to show for it.
The interconnection problem is being solved by several large cables down the east coast
Leasing the seabed before you win a CfD auction is a commercial risk but they probably didn't win because their bid price was too high
Their price was too high because it had to include paying back £1B of lease fees that were made as part of another government policy. Comes back to priorities being confusing, if the intention is lower bills why the lease fees, if the purpose is good jobs and independence, why compete on price? If their purpose is national wealth why not partial state funding / ownership?
For more amusement, look to Limerick, in Ireland, whose council tried to mandate all new homes have chimney stacks.
In Ireland all the rooms came with a substantial hole in the wall, mandated in case you decided to put something like a kerosene heater in your room, although the heating was electical. I generally had to block them off to stop the wind whistling through.
Right - I think it was to handle Carbon monoxide (and general ventilation). If you look at part F here I think current regs are 6500 square mm for most rooms https://www.seai.ie/sites/default/files/publications/Domesti...
(TBF Irish standards have gotten much better for airtightness)
That's more for ventilation to prevent damp etc (Ireland has humidity issues). Modern houses typically have MVHR instead.
Also worth checking out some of the mega projects on Open Infrastructure Maps like this one in central China.
https://openinframap.org/#9.12/36.0832/100.4215/A,B,L,P,S
This planet-scale map of the global electricity network is incredible.
OpenStreetMap (the DB behind this map) is incredible. It has so much useful information inside it.
I expect to see it on the front page of HN by the end of the day
4 years ago, 47 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948473
7 days ago, 93 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536866
I would love to see photos like these from Australia too one day. We have so much inhospitable land that would be perfect for solar and wind farms. Suncable is trying to do this on a small(er than China) scale. We are just too politically confused and too deep in the belief that mining is the only thing we can do here.
> I would love to see photos like these from Australia too one day.
You may never see them. Not because we aren't adding renewables, but because South Australia was at about 80% renewable last year (average, not peak) so if you were going to get those sort of pictures anywhere in Australia, you would be getting them from SA now.
You probably don't see them because while the countries are about the same size in land area, but China has 50 times the population so it needs about 50 times more power.
This is true, and I'm a big fan of SA leading the charge, having grown up there.
However, we could also build out more green energy technology to become a large energy exporter. (You could argue we are kind of that now, with the amount of coal we export.)
Especially given we have strong but complicated geopolitical ties to both China and the USA, it feels like guaranteeing our own energy sovereignty, plus gaining the ability to export power directly, would be a strong political as well as environmental move.
I only just learned about SunCable. I think using our vast swathes of empty, sun-drenched land to provide power to our Southeast Asian allies is a great idea.
I was just saying this to my colleagues after seeing these. Decades of political sabotage has done significant damage to our transition to renewables. I'm hopeful (perhaps a bit too wishful) that we'll see more of a push for renewables in the coming election cycles, but I'm staying realistic as the last 20 years of climate debate has been frankly shameful. At least rooftop solar is so ubiquitous.
I'm hopeful that the advent of the Teals might generate some momentum here. I believe there are some very large wind farms in progress across NSW too, which is good news. Home solar / battery installations also seem to be on the rise in low density areas (I don't have hard data to back that up though).
I'd also love to see solar panels on top of every Bunnings, Westfield, and other warehouses/complexes, as well as above every outdoor carpark, which would have the added bonus of preventing hand roasting in summer.
That looks significantly more like a long-term energy strategy than grabbing oil from Venezuela and Greenland.
Greenland's appeal is more about expanding the US military's presence in the Arctic rather than petroleum.
US military already has a base there.
If you think there is oil in Greenland I think you should not contribute to these types of discussion for lack of knowledge on the topic.
Was curious, so I did a 30 second search:
"The US Geological Survey estimates that onshore northeast Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains around 31 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in hydrocarbons – similar to the US’s entire volume of proven crude oil reserves."
Source: https://theconversation.com/greenland-is-rich-in-natural-res...
Also, Idk what that source is but the US has way more barrels than that. Proven reserves mean that’s what’s been proven via drilling, not speculative (which is what the Greenland barrels are). There is a lot more “unproven” oil out there but it doesn’t make for a sensationalist statement that fools readers.
Another 30 second search would show you that their oil is not readily available and is unproven. Otherwise Denmark would already be an even wealthier petrostate like Norway.
> "Denmark would already be an even wealthier petrostate"
Denmark does not (since 2009) control Greenland's minerals, nor take revenues from resource extraction[0,1]; and Greenland's democratic government has in fact totally banned oil exploration[2].
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-neglect-greenland-min... ("In 2009, Denmark handed Greenland's inhabitants control of their natural resources...")
[1] https://english.stm.dk/the-prime-ministers-office/the-unity-... ("Revenues from mineral resource activities in Greenland are to accrue to the Self-Government. Such revenues will have influence on the size of the Danish Government subsidy, cf. section below on the economic arrangement.")
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27871672 ("Greenland bans all oil exploration (cbc.ca)" (2021))
> "Global warming means that retreating ice could uncover potential oil and mineral resources which, if successfully tapped, could dramatically change the fortunes of the semi-autonomous territory of 57,000 people."
> ""The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect we have much more to gain," the Greenland government said in a statement. The government said it "wants to take co-responsibility for combating the global climate crisis."
Let’s be honest with ourselves. If there were hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of accessible oil underneath Greenland they would start drilling tomorrow.
OK, so...there is oil in Greenland, and your snarky response was actually completely incorrect. Got it.
He’s correct there is oil but there is oil everywhere. Whether it’s feasible to extract it is another thing. Do you really think if they had worthwhile oil reserves that someone wouldn’t have thought to extract it? So I would say Greenland doesn’t have any oil which means they don’t have any worthwhile oil to extract.
Regardless, the US isn’t taking over Greenland for its oil. That is just ridiculous and there would be far easier targets to go after if that was the case.
Chinas policy around energy works and it has allowed them to become the world’s engine for renewable power. They get the benefit of energy efficiency and being a critical trade partner for every country in the world.
My experience is that the UK (for example) doesn’t really know why it is building offshore wind. Is it to reduce bills to consumers (OFGEMS remit), is it to create local jobs in manufacturing (Clean Industry Bonus Scheme), is it to stimulate national wealth by ownership of projects (British Energy). It’s a mess unclear picture for me.
It would be nice if politicians could spend some time trying to work together, cross parties a come up with some sensible resolutions and long term plans instead of trying to score points for soundbites and clips.
We're building offshore wind to provide clean power, that will be cheaper than gas and we won't have to rely on largely autocratic countries for that gas
Got a long way to go as electricity is only a portion of our energy consumption - heating and transport are still largely fossil fuel based ATM
But at its core, what is the most important?
The cfd auctions are competitive on price, but things like clean industry bonus and supply chain plans expect some local content. You can’t compete on price and also use expensive UK suppliers.
One of the solar farms is in a tidal flat. Are those solar panels meant to be waterproof? I’d imagine they may not last as long from sea salt exposure too.
China has has Megawatt-scale floating PV at sea too.
Solar panels are waterproof (how else would they survive rain) as are insulated electric wires. The only challenge is connectors, and there are ways to make connectors submersible-safe.
This is how floating solar is a thing.
I would suspect they are floating on pontoons.
You can see the pillars they are built on in for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-13/china-s-s...
(direct link to image: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iy93Jvbye2e...)
Solar panels are meant to be water proof, after all they are meant to survive rain storms and melting snow and coastal weather.
"meant to survive rain storms" doesn't really mean the same as "meant to survive flooding", especially not "meant to survive flooding with salt water". For example, a car survives outdoor weather year-round, but you probably wouldn't want to buy one that was submerged in a flood zone. This plant seems to be floating, though, so they stay above water regardless.
Do you have any specifics about the implementation that makes you say that the engineers have not considered this?
Putting aside the salt water, you'll also just have lots of crud and debris on the panels if they get over topped, which then requires cleaning. Unless the rain in that area is strong and consistent enough.
Seems like a weird location to me, but what do I know.
I love this. I recently found a few solar panels dumpster diving that put out a good load. Just basic scratches and that is all. I am building out my own system to power my house and in the next 2 years will be energy off grid in the city.
This sounds interesting, are you sharing your journey anywhere?
Power is quite literally power, in both the physical and political senses. The Chinese know this, and Europe is catching up fast. American private enterprise knows it too.
Battery storage isn't quite where it needs to be, yet, so there's still some need for fossil and nuclear power, but when it is, decommissioning the remaining fossil power system is a no-brainer, and those with the biggest existing solar and wind estates will benefit most, and fastest.
For a German none of those photos are particularly remarkable or impressive.
Especially wind mills - they are all over the place. Outside of cities and forests it would be difficult to not see at least one ... and they like to flock.
For example:
- https://www.google.com/maps/place/Energiepark+Witznitz+MOVE+...
- https://www.erneuerbareenergien.de/energieversorger/stadtwer...
- https://www.erneuerbareenergien.de/energieversorger/stadtwer...
> Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
When did German achieve that?
How can German achieve it? It is 1 person?
How can Germany achieve it? It is 10x less people?
So what if you read his emotions correctly? It’s not like your response will change his mind?
In a world of 1 > 0, someone needs to be looked down upon. Why not look down on me? Why can’t others look down on China? And why would looking down based on “truth”, which you seem to so much value, change anything?
The "100 panels per second" number sounded a little high so I did a bit more reading. Apparently this was the peak pace of installation around May 2025, when there was a change in pricing structures associated with solar power so developers were rushing to finish projects so they could get in on the old structure.
Average pace across 2024 was closer to 25-30 panels / second (which is still incredibly high!)
One neat thing is that solar/wind farms can be multi-use. You can position panels to provide shade and wind-break to provide micro-climates for plants and animals.
The fact that parking lots in the south of US aren't just covered in those makes no sense at all. Vast expanses of mostly empty pavement, bathed in sun all day? Shaded parking? No?
The Cincinnati Zoo covered all their parking lots with solar panels last year. Your car stays cool in the summer, and there's motion activated lighting under the panels after dark. It's awesome.
One can only admire China's progress in this area. These days, if I got to choose between American and Chinese product, I always choose the latter for ethical reasons. I don't want to support anything American as long as its regime remains a puppet to fossil fuel companies.
They've got some impressive power cables too https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ul...
Meanwhile the US is using its remaining carbon budget to bomb and burn in one last effort to expand its dying empire. Eventually this system will fall, and the west will realize they wasted all their energy (literally) on non-civilian hardware that needs massive amounts of cheap oil.
This is more or less what we thought the 21st century infrastructure would look like in the 20th century. The only minor detail is it was supposed to happen in this country first.
When you're not trying to act like the "richest" country in the world, the sensibility of asource of energy is a complete no-brainer.
Even though associated costs exist, a free source is the lowest of its kind you can find.
On the one hand, the geometry is beautiful and almost serene; on the other, it's a reminder that decarbonization at this scale is still an industrial transformation of landscapes
Solar fucks up the landscape far more than wind
The photos demonstrating the scale of China's solar arrays are impressive. The wind farms are beautiful, but don't show a scale unfamiliar to me. Driving through the Columbia Gorge on the Oregon and Washington border, or through the Coachella Valley in Southern California, you will see wind farms of larger scale than depicted here.
Wow, pictures look great, well done Mr Weimin Chu
All this praise around China's buildout is just encouraging others ignore a problem to sell the solution. When the major nations started coming together to reduce emissions it was agreed that they would all aim to reduce emissions. However China did the opposite and purposefully scaled coal at record rates for nearly a decade and implemented no environmental regulations so as to outcomplete the nations who were transitioning and to be the ones to sell the solution. So now that its 2025 and they are finally starting to deploy some solar and wind im just not impressed. Its a dirty move and going forward I doubt we will see global trust in tackling these kind of problems again.
>it was agreed that they would all aim to reduce emissions
No, it was agreed during Kyoto that developed nations would reduce emissions, and developing nations (aka PRC, India) would not. Developing nations could keeping scaling fossil to industrialize until Paris where all countries had to submit climate plan (again not explicitly to reduce), and PRC's was to peak emissions by 2030s, which they're on trend to do early. PRC did what was legally permitted / agreed upon, and if developed nations want to cope / be butthurt and label following the agreement as dirty and not cooperate in the future global projects because they're not financial beneficiaries then that's on them. Also "some" solar and wind is ~ROW combined, which surely is very unimpressive.
> sell the solution
Selling solution to problems is solving problem, selling solutions to problems cheaply is solving said problem faster. As if developed economies did not decarbonize by selling clean tech solutions... which btw PRC bought. PRC simply doing globe a favor by selling real climate solutions at cost and scale that makes global difference, instead of scaling retarded paper solutions like carbon credits from countries that primarily scales spreadsheets.
China is not a developing nation. At that time they were more than wealthy enough to implement the same regulation as other nations and their industry was already developed.
They are not on trend to peak emissions pre 2030. Here is what happens Reliable china emission data takes a long time to verify and collect. So during the times where good data is not available china makes a ton of claims that will not line up with the next emissions study that comes out.
Ok then why does every country scale up their manufactering to make clean tech solutions. Im sure US, EU, India and Africa could use a few more steel mills and some coal plants to power it, we can handwave the emissions if they end up producing clean tech.
China WAS a developing nation in Kyoto 1997, GDP per capital $800, high income $7000.
China WAS a developing nation in Paris 2015, GDP per capita $11000, high income $13000 USD.
China JUST around developed nation in 2025, GDP per capita $14000, high income $14000.
They're on trend to peak emissions last year, see study below for PRC emissions trending down for last 18 months. What happens is we have these things called satellites that can detect emissions live, so you get the PREVIOUS study that confirms they have likely already peaked emissions.
Every country SHOULD scale manufacturing, no other country can scale as much as PRC into making stuff commodity tier. If PRC peak domestic emissions and global clean tech exports displaces 5x more emissions than US oil and produce net global reduction in emissions then that's aggregate emission reduction. If other countries can/wants to do that they ought to. It's not about handwaving emissions, it's about realizing 50% of world are developing, they're going to consume and generate massive amounts of shit, aka poverty alleviation, which is moral good, which will require magnitude increase in power and the most sustainable pathway to that is use as much clean tech as possible, clean tech that net displaces more emissions, which is only possible by making clean tech cheap, which PRC is uniquely able to do.
Lots of this is right, but
> and PRC's was to peak emissions by 2030s
This appears to be wrong. Peak is supposed to be before 2030. They will not hit it.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/targets/
>The 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP) aims to cut energy intensity by 13.5% and emissions intensity by 18% by 2025 from 2020 levels (Xinhua News Agency, 2021) . As of November 2025, China is unlikely to achieve the targets, as emissions intensity is projected to decline by only 16–17.
1% off according to dashboard analysis for 2025 5 year plan target. There's study from Q4 that PRC emissions has been stalled/trending, i.e. peaked for past 18months. Functionally they've peaked emissions before 2030 NDC commitment.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-emissions-decline
And all the US can do under the current president is steal oil from other nations.
What sort of risk of environmental poisoning comes from having that many solar panels in an area? Is there any risk that it can contaminate the area or are the environmentally safe?
I speak this having lived south of Moffett airfield where the entire area was poisoned from the degreasers used on the military planes in Moffett Field. It's one of the largest Superfund sites in the US and there are thousands of families living there. It might seem innocuous but I'm wondering whether solar panels in the environment leak any chemicals.
China is far more incentivized to champion renewable considering that they do not have the same access as the US. US is also on a path to quite literally invading other countries to extract crude and other resources. I don’t think China is in a position to do this, yet. If China invades Brunei or arrests Bolkiah, they will face irreversible repercussions.
All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers. Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.
I think China is incentivised due to health effects of coal. "China's reliance on coal reduces life expectancy by 5.5 years" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/08/northern... etc.
I think it's a bit better now. I don't think invasions change that much.
>All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers
Found the Oil & Gas lobbyist / apologist.
China might not have oil, but at least they are trying to figure something else out. Credit to them. Say what you want about The Party (I certainly have) but gotta give credit where and when its due. They have an interest in pushing alternative fuels, and by god they are doing it.
> Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.
China needs power NOW though.
What is the question to which fusion and geothermal is the answer? From a climate perspective those will come too late to aid our planet much until decades of further change, if fusion even comes at all.
Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.
Fusion is the answer to "how can we extract R&D money for decades without ever actually delivering anything." There is little prospect it's going to be competitive, particularly DT fusion. The engineering/economic obstacles are profound even if all the plasma physics problems are solved. Most of the efforts being touted are obvious nonstarters.
That is what they say about self driving cars, and there are services which are commercially available right now.
So, no technology is impossible? Every dream can come true? That's what I'm getting from the logic of the argument you're making there.
Sometimes technologies really do have showstoppers. There are fundamental reasons to think fusion is not going to be competitive. I know of no fundamental reason self driving cars would be impossible. The analogy doesn't work.
You can get a lot of stationary batteries for a couple of trillion dollars.
I know nothing about the topic. Although it seems a better alternative than coal or petrol, is it free of side effects for the nature? I wonder if the heat that would be spread around the atmosphere and back to space can actually gradually serve as a trap for heat?
Does this question make any sense at all?
No it doesn't make sense. Every photon that hits the Earth is eventually either absorbed as heat, reflected back into space or both (eg. partially absorbed and partially re-emitted as lower energy photons.) There is no net global increase in heat from a wind turbine or solar panel. (There might be slight local shifts.)
The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.
[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
This is actually quite a sizeable chunk. If in the future needs grow 10 times the area needed might become big problem.
It would actually be much better than nuclear. Remember, for every kWh of electrical energy delivered from a nuclear plant, 2 kWh of waste heat goes up those cooling towers. This is not the case with solar, particularly if it were built on ground that was already fairly dark.
Direct thermal pollution like this is not yet globally significant, but if demand increased to the point that land constraints actually applied then it would become important.
Might.
Sure, everything has downsides. Even breathing. But none of the alternatives have downsides that are as big as taking carbon from the soil and pumping it in an already stressed ecosystem.
> is it free of side effects for the nature?
What is free of side effects for "nature" ?
Re Wind and Solar Buildout.
The NEXT more challenging part is to build the necessary storage and "power network transmission lines" so that the supply can be made ( Large Scale ) reliable - 24/7 , independent of the weather.
Americans keep drilling baby drilling for oil that is becoming less and less necessary
Damn, they've been playing the hell out of factorio,
How can we get HQ versions for a desktop background?
Incredible photos.
Meanwhile POTUS has his head stuck in the sand [0]:
> “All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”
One of the most factually BS statements ever.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattrandolph/2026/01/12/china-d...
And that's despite the breathtaking scale of BS from a single source!
Enough biomass to power half the country sustainably.
They are going for energy security. Not relying on middle eastern oil.
A lesson Europe could learn.
>A lesson Europe could learn.
We've learned that lesson. Not to toot our own horn too much but we to a large extent kickstarted the thing in Germany with very little reward for it. 50% of Europe's energy produced is now reneables[1]. China's progress is incredibly impressive, but they are also the largest consumer of middle eastern oil in the world. Not really to their own fault, countries are going to be dependent on oil for a long time to come. (it's used in many more things than energy production)
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
I like Musk's lens: the sun is 99.8% of the galaxy's total mass and over 99.99% of its energy production. Pretty straight-forward where you want to be getting your energy from.
Which is why Musk supported political candidates that want to build out tons of solar and wind power right?
No? He doesn't do that at all? Gee maybe he never really cared then.
Yes, well, if we want to see the big picture, fossil fuels are also stored solar. Musk's statement sounds good but it's pointless.
Beautiful!
Dad, are we fucked?
No, that would be https://asiatimes.com/2025/12/chinas-jiutian-drone-carrier-t...
> With a maximum take-off weight of about 16 tons, a 25-meter wingspan and an operational ceiling of 15,000 meters, Jiutian can remain airborne for roughly 12 hours and reach targets up to 7,000 kilometers away
Okay, you're right... their military capabilities are still laughable. Thanks for the reassurance, that'll help me sleep at night a bit better.
It is incredible to see just how many big-oil talking points there are in this thread. From renewable energies resource costs, to their land use impact. I didn't realise just how effective their propaganda was in the tech space till reading this thread. That is not to say that these projects should be free of criticism, but anyone who believes these negatives are remotely close to the damage that fossil fuels are doing needs to re-evaluate their world view.
I was just about to make precisely the same comment. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt about renewables here is ridiculous, and I expected better. I suppose everyone watched too much Landman.
China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy industry like mining and processing, chemicals, ship-building.
Let's not even get into semiconductors. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.
Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.
Whoa boy. I caught Landman for the first time today because my partner was watching it.
Oil, cigarettes and alcohol were all clearly being pushed and promoted. Pretty sure it was episode four where a women rather matter-of-factly stated that one alcoholic beverage when pregnant was perfectly fine - inso much that it was good because it helped her body generate breast milk. Such a weird statement to shoe-horn into this soap opera.
Coupled with BBT chain smoking the coffin nails, the rampant shit-canning of renewables and incessant self promotion of how large and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is the money behind the show was as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Plus the sexual objectification of women in this show is ludicrous.
It's 2026. It seems everything old is new again.
Oh, and the
I haven't seen Landman, but I have heard of it. My understanding is that all the characters are pretty miserable, but that it nonetheless weirdly glorifies their lifestyles.
I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.
never heard of this show, I wonder who produces it
oh Paramount
the ones that just decimated CBS News, put talentless propagandist Bari Weiss in charge, and censored a critical report on human rights abuses ordered by POTUS
all running on Oracle (tm)
With China's huge resources both natural and human it's only expected that China will again reclaim its position as the leading country in science, technology, production and generally everything.
If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars.
There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China.
There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.
China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.
And in 2032 everyone just crosses their fingers this doesn't happen again? Unless 2029 includes a structural overhaul of the entire government I really don't see how the US regains it's status as the capital of the world. We are doing everything in our power to permenantly isolate ourselves from the rest of the world at the moment. Attacking a nato state, even threatening to attack a nato state really, is not something everyone will overlook in a years time. The wheels are turning now to divest from the us.
My optimistic take is that we will learn from the mistakes we are making now to make sure it does not get repeated ever again. Trump will be gone and will be too old to have any influence. But Elon Musk and people like Marc Andreessen will continue to be a problem we need to find a solution for.
And what do you expect the rest of the world to do? Pretend it never happened? They were willing to give another chance after Trump I, I highly doubt that it will be the same this time around.
> But Elon Musk and people like Marc Andreessen will continue to be a problem we need to find a solution for.
I suggest you, personally, assist with finding that solution.
Without it, even if we trust you personally, how can we trust you as a nation?
> but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best
Your current government seems determined to make sure this won't happen.
This is the GOP devouring itself. Ditto the christian right that's been behind it. Religiosity is decaying away in the US.
US is a crumbling democracy with crumbling infrastructure and society. I just hope while it goes down it doesn't take the rest of the planet with it.
Yes that's true... but only for the next 3 more years. We return in 2029.
The American people did this twice in fairly quick succession.
Unless there's a serious reckoning afterwards, the rest of the world is gonna operate on the assumption that it can and probably will happen again soon.
I wouldn't count these chickens before they hatch.
I keep wondering where the line in the sand is for the wider GOP base. We keep crossing what I think "this is the line … right?" and nope, that wasn't it, either.
I really hope so but honestly, what lessons have Democrats learned so far that will allow them to take the votes of those who are not right-wing radicals? Because there was a lot of unnecessary stuff that was going on that pissed off those who don't lean too far either side. Trump exploits this by, say, "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" and scores high not just on the right. This theme will be very difficult to deal with by the Democrats.
And on the foreign front, well, the trust has been broken and I don't think it can be repaired easily. The remaining NATO allies are very stable, they understand mutual respect and collaboration is the foundation of their survival, whereas attacking each other breaks trust completely. Even if a new fantastic president is chosen that understands his huge responsibility both for Americans and the world, other countries learned their lesson hard and understand there is no guarantee in a few years the USA become their enemy again.
Yes, Democrats have to move towards the center. But that's not enough. You can't have one good party and one evil party. Both parties have to be basically good, even if they disagree on policy. You can't have the country decline each time Republicans gain power.
> We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.
Don't count on it.
Some people may be willing to uproot their lives and move continent in the hope that 4 years later you won't re-elect another one like Trump, but it won't be as many as before. Heck, there was a brief window where I had the opportunity to migrate to the USA, but just the US electing Trump the first time ruled it out for me.
Not that I'd call myself "the best", but I was good enough if I'd wanted to. But I do also know some really good Cambridge graduates who were expressly asked by their American employer to relocate to the US, declined.
I think people generally vastly underestimate the negative effect of "nativism"/anti-immigration rethoric on desirable foreign workers. Even if those desirable foreigners are completely unaffected by actual policy.
I personally know at least two highly qualified STEM workers that went back to Europe after Brexit/Trump2 and from what I can tell this was at least 70% pure "spite" (instead of being affected by actual anti-foreign regulation or somesuch).
Indeed.
I used to live in Cambridge. Only one person I knew there was pro-Brexit, call him C. In the run-up to the referendum, I'd already told C I was looking to move out of the UK due to the entirely native political choices of the UK. The domestic political nonsense was necessarily only going to get less constrained by a policy decision (Brexit) specifically about getting less constrained.
One of my last memories of C was that a group of us were in a local pub discussing it, one said they were worried Brexit would make Cambridge smaller. C shouted "Good!".
Given my plans, obviously when C shouted "Good!" at the idea of Cambridge shrinking, I was shocked, took it somewhat personally. Then the referendum came, and I was both angry with him and far too busy, so I stopped talking to C entirely.
Other people report that C was very confused by this, did not understand at all.
> There's just no way to deny this.
Of course there is "way".
All the above above in itself sounds like propaganda. You forget other political (authoritarian system making massive mistakes), demographic (1.0, probably less in reality, birth per woman), psychological (disillusioned young population), and geographic (food and other imports) aspects, among other things.
> authoritarian system making massive mistakes
Compared to the US democracy?
Yes - so far.
Especially since the US is not going to have any allies anymore soon.
The EU is moving towards 50% sustainable with lots of countries that at 60-75%, while the USA is at 25%.
Europe is also at least a decade ahead.
And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.
> And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.
Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten salt, thorium, and more.
It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.
> Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, night is a thing, it might not be windy
Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.
Nuclear is transcedental. If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.
> Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.
Maybe tell the Chinese they have it wrong and are risking extinction.
> unlimited fusion power
This is pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by fantasy. Fusion's sole accomplishment is likely to be making fission look cheap in comparison.
Just because something became a science fiction trope doesn't mean it's actually going to be a part of the future.
One of the problems with nuclear is, um, it's ability to cause an "extinction event". Sort of.
In that:
* Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative.
* What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.)
* Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such.
This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere.
The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still.
(There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.)
(Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)
>> As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty.
Chernobyl is pretty much habitable now in most places. People live there, work at the power plant.
Fusion will be its own extinction event as things go. At our development level, if we develop fusion, we'll have to live underground after boiling the oceans to generate crypto tokens and undress videos.
The asteroid is just science unlikely fiction.
There's words like "cloudy", and then there's proper simulation studies which demonstrate that these concerns are unfounded.
Okay... and? I'm not saying 'let's only do nuclear, and not bother about wind/solar/tidal'. I'm saying there is plenty of money to go around, and it doesn't hurt to spend some of that to diversify our power generation and have some reliable, non-polluting, highly power-dense, high-tech base load (nuclear) that can be quickly throttled to meet demand, and is generally resistant to most environmental conditions.
The Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, French, British, and even Singaporean[1] (of all places, one might expect a tiny equatorial city-state to be the last place to think about nuclear, but it is all the same, because nuclear is ridiculously power-dense) governments seem to agree with me.
[1]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/singapore-seriou...
If you read the simulation studies you would know that ~0% nuclear is the most cost effective solution in many locations.
> Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy.
That's two baskets right there.
> it becomes night, it might not be windy.
That's where long distance interconnects come into play.
Nuclear isn't getting built at any significant scale in the US after Vogtle. We might get a couple of plants opened up (like 3MI) but large scale new buildouts aren't happening until SMRs are available at scale. Anything else is an Internet fantasy.
> Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy
...which is why China has 40 000 km of UHV transmission lines forming a vast network to move the energy from where it is abundant to where it is needed. They have 8 new UHV projects that started in 2024 or 2025 that will add another 10 000 km.
If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers?
I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons.
Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.
NVIDIA wants to run on 100% renewable electricity and already does so: https://nvidia.com/en-us/sustainability/
OpenAI bets on SMRs (now an ectoplasm, check NuScale...) and solar arrays: https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/openai-doe-rfi-5-7-202... , and drives breakthroughs on renewable energy: https://openai.com/index/strengthening- americas-ai-leadership-with-the-us-national-laboratories/
Microsoft: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/micros...
Alphabet (Google) buys 'Intersect' which "delivers ((...)) infrastructure for data centers and other energy-intensive industries by co-locating industrial demand with dedicated gas and renewable power generation". 4.75 billion USD. https://abc.xyz/investor/news/news-details/2025/Alphabet-Ann...
See if they've actually committed money in a serious way, not in a "if you can actually achieve this absurdly low price point we'll buy it" way.
> If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers?
They're looking for credulous investors in the nuclear startups they founded?
You mean VC companies creating their own customers to justify their investments again?
Landman is fascinating because it goes out of its way to bring up valid claims about renewables or criticisms of oil/gas but then spits an insane amount of propaganda and lies at you in quick succession to falsely "debunk" these criticisms or sweep them under the rug. This is definitely not being done for the character's benefit in the show, so its quite impressive how effectively and frequently its tossed in there.
America is stuck in its past, specifically the 1950s-1960s.
And it's aiming to go further back.
That would be nice. It looks more like the early 1900s with naked imperialism and crony capitalism right now. Possibly staring down the barrel of a 1930s economic collapse.
> I suppose everyone watched too much Landman.
No, too much Fox "News".
I expect China to overbuild and the west to underbuild.
Overbuilding energy doesn't seem like a problem, if Jevon's paradox applies to ANYTHING, it applies to energy.
You say that and OpenAI is signing compute deals in excess of 20X current revenues.
Good point. Reality is more nuanced than simple overbuilding and underbuilding. Still, we aren't really still building enough housing and mass transit infrastructure.
That may hamper us more than anything else. If AI proves to be as beneficial as its proponents hyped, the economic gains will just mostly get soaked up by landowners. Even UBI won't save us, because it will just get absorbed by landowners. Ditto for renewable energy.
I know which error I’d prefer to be making.
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>It is incredible to see just how many big-oil talking points there are in this thread. From renewable energies resource costs, to their land use impact. I didn't realise just how effective their propaganda was in the tech space till reading this thread.
What makes this more valid than something like "it's incredible how many YIMBY talking points there are" in a thread about housing, aside from you agreeing with the YIMBYs? Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
Oil and gas have used, between drilling and refining, over 7 million acres of land in just the US. Yes, it provides more electricity, but at the cost of destroying the entire planet's biosphere, global warming, etc.
Current US estimates for solar land usage are 500,000 acres.
The land use arguments are bunk. Anyone who complains is repeating oil and gas propaganda.
Around me, conservatives started a grassroots "save the whales" campaign to block wind.
Conservatives, protesting on the street to save the whales. Talk about a sight to see.
I call them True Bird Lovers. You only see them in numbers when windmills come up. They've never seen any pictures of oil-covered birds from the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon disasters.
There's zero chance it was actually grassroots though.
Faux environmentalism is the new climate denialism. https://www.desmog.com/2025/08/27/ai-slop-websites-are-publi...
> Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
It is. I've read dozens of comments like this on HN, and repeatedly see the "it's incredible that...", "talking points"/"propaganda", and "wow look at how much bad stuff there is in this thread"/"I'm so disappointed in HN" memes, and every single time it's because the author is trying to dismiss the opposition's arguments without responding to them individually and actually addressing their points.
This kind of thing clearly fits into the "sneering" category of things that aren't allowed on HN and so is valid for flagging. I do it and I highly encourage anyone else to do it who wants to preserve the culture of HN.
> Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
For me, yes it is. It wouldn't if policy discussions were purely technical and well informed. In the arena of public discourse they aren't. The majority of the population (including HN) is tribal, ideologically biased, emotionally driven and badly informed. Public discourse, particularly in America, is contaminated by propaganda of established economic powers (i.e.: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Tech companies). They can easily advance their talking points because they have much more economic resources for propaganda and lobbying.
I agree that, eventually, most people will discover that oil & coal are doomed and destroying the world. Reality has a way to force itself into ideologies.
But that will take a long time. I need truth and certainty now.
You don’t consider
that oil & coal are doomed and destroying the world
to be green-agenda talking points?
The fact that burning oil, coal and gas contribute to pollution and are one of the causes of climate change is a scientific reality
Scientists at Chevron came to this conclusion in the 70s
Destroying the world doesn’t come across as even a little hyperbolic?
Contributing to climate change sounds reasonable.
DESTROYING THE WORLD!!! dun dun duunnnnn.
Hyperbole. Get a grip Greta.
You forgot your meds again?
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Why is that a failure of the green agenda as opposed to a failure of Germany?
Edit: I don't have the facts about reliability of green energy (though you didn't provide any evidence against it either), but it's clear the "not knowing where your energy comes from", "having messy grid" and "not investing in nuclear" are unrelated to renewable energy.
Germany's grid is an absolute mess because their nat gas pipelines have been cut off. Renewables are preventing a worse disaster, saving their limited LNG storage capacity to cover for dankelflautes.
It's incredibly how common it is these days to see valid criticism dismissed as "X talking points" or "Y dog whistle". I guess that's easier than providing an argument.
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And the Right are known to have deep, intellectual, nuanced discussions?
Who said anything about "the left"?
9 day old account talking about “the left”. Go back to Reddit.
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Fossil fuel could be heading for a big cliff where most countries that currently import a lot of oil/gas will be year on year reducing their imports. China is ahead of the curve here and is already importing less oil year on year. That's likely going to spread. If you extrapolate growth curves trending up for EVs a few years you can draw similar curves for oil demand trending down.
We can speculate about how quick/slow all this will progress. But it's worth pointing out that e.g. IEA, EIA and similar institutes have been repeatedly wrong and overly pessimistic with their predictions for things like adoption and cost of renewables. People are still basing policy and important decisions on their reports. So this matters. The "What if they are wrong, again?" question might have some uncomfortable answers if you are betting on them not being wrong.
A lot of developing markets are skipping oil/gas/coal completely and are going straight to renewables. They are not first building a grid using coal/gas plants but working around what little they have in terms of unreliable grid by going straight for solar/batteries and microgrids. That's a pattern you see all over parts of Africa with historically very little/flaky power infrastructure and countries like Pakistan. These are growth economies showing much quicker economical growth than the world average. That's going to spread.
Lots of countries are going to be decimating their oil/gas imports over the next 20 years. That includes transport and power generation. They'll be installing wind/solar/batteries and buying lots of EVs. Fossil fuel usage won't go all the way to zero. But it won't stay at current levels or anywhere close to that. Some countries will be faster some will be slower. Being slower isn't necessarily good for economies.
Good advice here is to take an economic point of view and be aware of things like growth trends, cost curves, learning effects, technological changes, etc. You don't have to be an early adopter or believer. But there's a lot of data out there that supports an optimistic view. And a lot of pessimistic wishful thinkers that are not really looking at data or just cherry picking reports that support their believes. The fossil fuel industry sponsors a lot of reports research. And they are about as trust worthy as the Tobacco industry is when it comes to the pros/cons of smoking. That's why the IEA and EIA keeps getting it wrong. It helps to understand who pays for their reports (hint: fossil fuel companies and countries that depend on those).
A healthy personal perspective is maybe considering what happens if your pension fund bets on fossil fuel and that cliff I mentioned turns out to be very real in about 10-20 years. Because if you bet wrong, that affects the value of that. Before you knee jerk to an answer, take a close look at what institutional investors have actually been doing for a while. Hint: coal plants were written off as good investments ages ago and gas plants aren't looking much better at this point. I think you'll see them move on oil funds next.
Your point about developing markets resonates for me in a different area. Instead of layering mobile phones on top of landlines, many developing markets went straight to mobile phones. Another thing to consider is that solar/wind is an incremental expansion of power capacity, versus the "big bang" expansion of nuclear capacity.
To your point about the fossil fuel cliff, I think it was either a Bloomberg or Forbes article that discussed how China's deep involvement in the EV/battery/solar/wind Expansion in dozens of countries around the world gives it a chance to put a serious dent in oil consumption as well as locking American interests out of developing markets.
It's kind of bizarre to see the far right and far left circle to the same misguided big oil conclusions, although for different reasons. The right doesn't want their traditional oil/coal industries threatened. The left is kind of... just against the continued growth of technology/industry/humanity.
Can you point at criticism from the left? I haven’t noticed it.
Mostly just saying the sentiment I've seen on reddit comments or X posts, stuff like this:
https://x.com/duncancampbell/status/1647109450438955008
I'm not saying the idea is institutionalized by the democrats, but I think musk/tesla hatred is kinda driving it
That would be a weird way to get at Musk, as there’s plenty out there that avoids his toxic touch.
But he specifically points out that those a Right Wing talking points!
Criticism is healthy. False equivalence isn't.
Really? I don't think I have a dog in this hunt but my judgement of comments is that it's maybe 70/30 (with the 30 being critical in one way or the other) and anyone critical is getting down voted to oblivion.
That said "you're just repeating what you're told" is a comforting argument but doesn't go all that far.
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And a talking point in the other direction is to refer to people as "boomers".
In case you haven't noticed, it's the non-thinkers of all generations who willingly bury their head in the sand.
Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular unless their powers of observation are somewhat limited.
Which is understandable, you don't reach maturity overnight.
Edit: not my downvote btw
I'm not disagreeing with you so much but
> Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular
Interesting because most of the critiques, especially to electric cars come from boomers. Also to Solar and Wind, the kind of silly criticism like "Why are we filling our barely-arable lands with Solar?!"
Now we'll watch how the European car manufacturers get swallowed by Chinese electrical manufacturers.
I think what you're seeing is the criticism from those in the older generartions who are well-published and media savvy with decades more experience than average in that regard. Some of the old-timers can be expected to be better connected when it comes to available incentives too.
Not unlike anybody else who gets more attention from pointing out any possible controversy rather than more mundane non-critical analysis.
But not so much in the prevailing common sense of the actual baby boomers who for the most part are older and more ambivalent about these energy technology milestones and take them in stride pretty easily along with all the other progress over the decades they have seen.
I am with far more people over 70 all the time who wish they could afford a Tesla or some extensive solar panels than those who have negative feelings about it.
But you've also got negative "influencers" in older generations trying to appeal specifically to those who lived through similar (outdated or nearly forgotten) experiences, especially when the target demographic is known to be one that votes more often than average.
Looks to me like it's even more selected younger voices among those who stand to gain so much more over an upcoming lifetime without any upset from alternative energy that are doing more actual complaining. Like the incentive coming from somewhere is overwhelming, I can't deny.
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"China bots everywhere" or generally making renewable energy seem like a nefarious foreign plot is itself a big oil talking point. When your argument can't stand on the facts, deploy the Big Bad Bogeyman.
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Do you have ANY datapoints or arguments to underpin that renewables "destroy all wilderness". Or even more that they are worse than fossil fuels? This claim - especially in your harsh tone - could need at least some reason.
> We look back and curse our ancestors for their unbridled use of fossil fuels. Who is to say future generations won't look back and curse us for destroying all wilderness?
I curse my ancestors for destroying all wilderness to get at fossil fuels.
Ok, I'll bite. What if solar panels turn into breeding grounds with perfect environmental temperatures to create viruses that kill us all? Who is to say the sun won't blow up tomorrow? Why not enumerate all the things that might happen to distract? There is a nice quote going around re a weather scientists who gets asked annually what's it going to be like this year? He's tired, and notes "this year, and every year for the rest of your life is going to be the hottest ever." That's in large part to oil, full stop.
Yes fracking wells are famously harmless to the environment.
Right.
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What makes you say that? This sounds like denialism to me
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Uranium requires mining and is recyclable at most once (solar panels components are way better).
Recyclable wind turbines blades are appearing (RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...) and even existing ones (today, decommissioned blades are burned in cement plants, thus providing energy) may become so (check the 'CETEC initiative')
Uranium actually does not require mining. Most uranium is extracted using underground wells where water is pumped underground and the Uranium is extracted from the water. Also extracting Uranium from sea water (which would be basically unlimited) is close to being commercially viable and has received a lot of lab-scale research.
Also, Uranium is only recyclable once with light water reactors. With breeder reactors (which have been built in the past) it can be recycled a hundred times.
> Most uranium is extracted using underground wells where water is pumped underground and the Uranium is extracted from the water.
... I mean that's mining?
Arguably yes! But it avoids a lot of the safety and environmental hazards of traditional methods.
Your uranium grows on trees, mh?
If the US ever blocks Chinese ports the lights will be kept on. Although I'm sure that situation will end with a mushroom cloud.
It would be interesting to see how Carrier Strike groups fare against hypersonic weapons, as well as witnessing what the modern fighting doctrine is when there is no absolute air superiority.
Or massive industrial hacking that destroys enough transportation, farming, and supply chain integration that there is mass starvation when food delivery and production stalls - and it all comes crumbling down.
Looks quite ugly, actually.
However had, there is one thing working for China: decision-making steps.
I don't have any illusion about the sinomarxist party and I don't suggest that their model - which is a dictatorship, just like the USA has transitioned into now too under an orange-painted TechBro minion - replaces democractic processes. But you do have to ask yourself what the EU is doing here, other than failing in epic ways. You can not assume that current wealth will be retained in the future; and while "green energy" is great, what we in reality see right now is simply price increases. That ultimately means wealth is deducted from a majority, and only a very few profit from this. That is a design-by-failure process now.
I have installed photovoltaic panels + battery etc on my house. My energy costs have effectively decreased by ~30%.
All I see is missed opportunities to build a bunch less nuclear power plants and call it a day, without messing up with the landscape. Am I the only one? I believe if we Europeans and Americans start building nuclear power plants again we could finally compete. Renewable energy is not constant and has a storage problem
I also lament the landscapes covered by solar panels. Even deserts are not dead barren ecosystems. Some of these installs are only slightly better than paving the whole area.
But I get it, and tradeoffs are necessary.
Another reason China may prefer this to more concentrated nuclear power is that is is much more distributed and resilient to targeted attacks.
>Some of these installs are only slightly better than paving the whole area.
Utter horseshit.
Putting up what amounts to a bunch of shade on steel pillars just doesn't harm the environment. There are more than a few contexts where it improves the environment.
There's no identified or predicted harm from large scale photovoltaic installations.
If nuclear plants were as inexpensive as renewables, that would make a ton of sense.
France decarbonized way before the rest of Europe with nuclear and it wasn't expensive. 50 reactors for $200 billion. Gernamy has spent twice that on intermittents and still relies on coal
Such a tired point. It’s not the 1970s anymore, and the west can build any large projects cheap. Go look at the projected costs for France’s new fleet, and that’s before the inevitable cost overruns
Could you post a link to those projected costs?
"EDF estimates EPR2 programme cost at EUR72.8 billion"
France's EDF has said its preliminary cost estimate for the project to build six EPR2 reactors at Penly, Gravelines and Bugey totals EUR72.8 billion (USD85.3 billion).
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-estimates-ep...
Each reactor outputs 1650 megawatts of electricity running at full power. Assuming they run at 92% capacity factor, that's $9.38 per real annualized watt.
Great. So 538TWh per year is 61 GW so roughly 61 GW * $9.38 = $576 billion staggered over the 80 year life of nuclear plants is $7.2 billion per year of capital expenditure.
For comparison, wind is about $5/W. Assuming a 35% capacity factor and a 30 year expected lifetime for the latest turbines that comes to $10.0 billion per year of capital expenditure with no storage or fossil backup systems or extra capacity given weather variability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
PV solar is between $.97 and $1.16 per watt, so that's going to be the front line. With storage you can get from $1.60 to $2. This is already the bulk of the power generation in Europe and is only going to increase. The idea that you're going to run nuclear plants at 95% capacity factor economically is also very suspect in a continent saturated with cheap PV solar.
US NREL Puts it at $2/W with no storage and ~20% capacity factor. Lifetime of latest panels is unknown but optimistically is 25 years. Assuming perfect and free storage that comes to $24.4 billion per year of capital expenditure for a country the size of France to be 100% solar. So no, it would not be more economical to use solar over nuclear. Wind would be better but when you add the full system costs of storage and backup intermittent heavy systems are vastly more expensive and emit more carbon than nuclear ones. https://discussion.fool.com/t/levelized-full-system-costs-of...
Intermittents are only gaining market share because their unreliable and intermittent power which is less valuable is being purchased by governments at prices that far exceed what it is worth. In other words, massive hidden subsidies. Without those, there would be next to no intermittents on the grid anywhere.
See “Market matching costs” here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
At least half of people I talk to are strongly opposed to nuclear energy. How many are opposed to the current sources of energy as well? I wonder.
Agree they oppose nuclear, perhaps because of the fear of the unknown radiation or whatever. Reality is all nuclear incidents combined are nothing compared to the health problems oil and gas created(not to mention political implications). To me filling a giant space with solar panels or installing giant bird killing turbines is such a moronic move when you can have unnoticeable small nuclear power plants
> bird killing turbines
If you think wind turbines are a significant cause of bird deaths it shows that you have no clue what you're talking about. Please don't bother commenting on this topic again.
Not as many as cats I certainly know that, it obiovusly was an hyperbole used to underline that all we need is just a nuclear power plant to replace all that wind turbines
Our study, covering 45 species across 91 countries, reveals that human-induced factors—predominantly electrocution, illegal killing, and poisoning—constitute the major threats to bird mortality, highlighting a critical issue in global biodiversity conservation.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632072...
and from last year, US specific, endangered species:
A comparative assessment with data from the 2010 Red List reveals an increase in the proportion of threatened species recorded as being impacted by certain threats. Notably, the incidence of hunting and trapping as a documented threat has increased from 34% to 41% of threatened species. Similarly, the proportion of species assessments with fire/fire suppression, climate change, pollution, invasive alien species and energy production have each increased by 3-5 percentage points.
https://datazone.birdlife.org/articles/state-of-the-worlds-b...
Wind turbines are a significantly lower threat than windows, look it up!
Compete with what? Is this more American shadowboxing?
Depressing to look at.
Not as depressing as if it was coal power stations and coalmines blighting the landscape.
China is building more coal plants right now than the entire world combined so don’t worry they have those too.
And yet their coal usage has plateaued for the last few years, and actually likely started to decline in 25.
You mean in context of a complete regression in the West, right?
I mean, somewhat less depressing to look at that hospital wards full of people with COPD, which is the realistic alternative, IMO.
No, they are beautiful.
Why aren't we doing it in the rest of the world as well?
The rest of the world is, in fact, doing it as well.
China's willing to provide lots of capital for this, which has sped it up, but this is generally happening at a slower pace in most developed countries (and many non-developed ones, for that matter). It's even happening in the US, despite ol' minihands actively trying to stop it.
Basically everyone is except the USA
Where's the pictures of the coal plants that keep energy going when the wind/sun go down?
We are so done, and are going to be forced to instead fight the rest of the world for the remaining oil left if we don’t wake up. It may even be too late.
Worry not, you can't change the US but you can leave for a developed country.
It's very easy to do things like this when pesky things like property rights or environmental laws or labor protections don't get in the way.
In the U.S. and EU, if the government takes your land, they have to reimburse you for it, and you can fight them every step of the way. In China, the government can take your land and if you complain, you can spend the rest of your life in a labor camp.
That's simply not true. People are compensated generously for land that is seized. I have friends that have had it happen, and you get a lot more money than if you were to sell the property - so it's a bit like winning the lottery. The amount of room for appeal is dictated by the nature of the seizure and the government "level". (ie if it's a national interest project you have little recourse, but if it's the city government then it's likely different)
Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear? Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it? And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear
If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.
They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.
I don't think the characterisation of this as waste of space is correct. There's a growing body of research suggesting that solar panels are compatible with grazing animals and farming, and the wind farms don't really stop usage of the space unless you are planning to go ballooning.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?
Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.
Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.
If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.
> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?
No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.
If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.
> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.
Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Power-Play-The-Economics-...:
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”
I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.
And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.
Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range.
The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.
Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.
There is good reason to think fusion (particularly DT fusion) would be even more expensive than fission.
Take too long time and cost. I honestly perplexed by the fethism towards Nuclear Power Plants. Have you seen the delay and bloating cost of Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Vogtle?
Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.
They'll just blame those delays and cost overruns on greens or liberals.
Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.
PRC Solar is cheaper (LCOE) than nuclear, more distributed, faster to build. Western PRC with good solar is mostly empty/depopulated (2/3 of PRC with 80% of solar/wind potential has like 5% of population, it's empty). Easy to install, lots of transferrable skills from general construction (vs nuclear workforce). Real estate crack down = lots of lower skilled blue collar installing solar as jobs program. Serendipitous synergy. PRC installed renewable capacity exceeds energy required to manufacture same equipment on GW basis, functionally makes production of entire sector carbon neutral/sink, as in will displace more fossil than used in production and sink after. Obviously manufacture works off grid mix, including coal, but broad point is every panel going to save more emissions vs embodied carbon payback through life cycle. There's also plans for recycling / recover materials for circular economy.
This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
That wikipedia article needs to be updated for the last few years.
2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.
1GW of nuclear is worth about 3 to 6GW of solar if you account for the weather and nighttime. If you also account for nuclear not needing fossil backup its worth even more
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?
But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.
For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
If it was 2.5-3x cheaper, sure. But alas.
Nuclear still have to deal with nuclear waste.
> gigantic waste of space
Good thing China isn’t running out of space
The latest generation of Nuclear power plants are full cycle, produce close to nothing amount of waste
And you can buy them and use them right now, as i can go and shop some solar panels, inverters, batteries, some cables put them about anywhere and just have free electricity after the initial expense?
Plants being built these days are thermal burner reactors. They are no more "full cycle" than any other nuclear power reactors that have been built. And (like earlier reactors) reprocessing their spent fuel has no economic case.
Sources?
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The person he was responding to is wrong, as you might have discovered had you actually tried to provide information.
Well if by close to nothing he means waste lasting 300 years instead of 10,000 years and by latest generation he means gen IV reactors like bn-800, superpheonix, oklo, moltex etc sure he is basically correct. Here’s a source where you can read more about breeder reactors: (which is what he is referring to)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
These aren't nuclear power plants. They're designs of nuclear power plants. None have been constructed (well, aside from old plants like Superphenix, which was a failure, so much so that the French have mothballed their fast reactor program.)
Moreover, they would be considerably more expensive than existing plants (especially if fuel is to be reprocessed), so they're nonstarters.
Ah yes. “Old” plants. This plant is “old” so we could never build more like it. What an argument. And no, they would not be “considerably more expensive” because we wouldnt build a fleet of them until uranium was expensive enough that they would be cheaper. Thats why most countries have put off breeder reactor development not because they were “failures” whatever that is supposed to mean.
"Old" as in "we built it and discovered it's not wanted". The French basically gave up on the idea of fast reactors (as did the Japanese, although their fast reactor program appears to have been an excuse to obtain a stockpile of separated plutonium in case they need to make bombs). There's no market for them. The Russians have continued to try, but they're selling LWRs.
The big problem with fission is that it's too expensive. Fast reactors make that main problem worse. There is no economic margin to do fancy (and expensive) things to try to address the lesser issue of nuclear waste.
>There's no market for them
In an economic sense, when compared to burner reactors, this is correct. As the rise of wind and solar has shown however, political will and popularity matter more than pure economics. Burner reactors are more of a 22nd century technology, assuming the grid storage problem doesn’t get solved by then and we just go full renewable on economics. But nothing is set in stone
What nonsense. What solar and wind have shown is the overwhelming importance of economics. They are dominating now because they have become cheap, not because of some sort of "triumph of the will". And they have become cheap because they are inherently the kind of technologies that has good experience curves. Unlike nuclear.
Nonsense? Why was US nuclear built at all in the 60’s and 70’s? Or in France? Because it was cheaper? No. It was built because people thought it was a good idea. The same is true for intermittents today. They are popular with a section of the population so they get the funding. And no, nuclear has fantastic experience curves. Look at any country building lots of reactors and the n-th of a kind is cheap. Building out nuclear and maintaining industry experience works to keep costs low.
The problem is that it is extremely expensive and takes a very long time to build.
The supply chain for nuclear power, including fuel from mining to waste storage, is not tiny either.
Only if you have a fetish for wasting money.
There's two big parts of the earth that are uninhabitable because of nuclear.
Anyway, they are going with nuclear too.
They are uninhabited by humans currently. They are not uninhabitable as shown by animals and plants living there. And they can also not be called "big parts of the earth" by any stretch of those words.
Especially Fukushima is more of a political issue than a safety one.
> animals and plants
Scientists are on the fence: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environmen...
> Fukushima is more of a political issue
A very, very expensive political caprice, if any: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...
Why can't you do both? Why does it always have to be either or?
Why can't (loser technology) coexist with (winner technology)?
Because that's not how technological competition works.
I mean if there's one thing China isn't short of, it is _space_. Monaco, say, might struggle to do this, but China is fine.
How renewable is uranium?
Proven Uranium reserves with breeder reactors will last 10,000 years. With a modest increase in the price of Uranium, extraction from sea water becomes viable and unlocks tens of millions of years of supply. Some geologiats have argued that rock weathering will replenish sea water Uranium concentrations faster than we would extract it making the supply last longer than the expected age of the Earth.
China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
The world is buying Chinese solar without subsidies. It’s the cheapest power option.
Chinas nuclear share is declining every year.
I find the idea of blanketing mountainous wilderness in relatively short-lived e-waste just awful. Surely there are much better terrains for solar panels?
Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".
Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.
Given the vast amount of flat, well-lit terrain within the borders of China, it should be clear that the pictured projects (and the other "blanket a mountain in solar panels" projects that are easily discoverable) are not about the economics of power generation.
At least it's better than sending peasants into the mountains and building solar panels on the flat field that has been growing crops for thousands of years.
Bring back those big beautiful chimeys, burning their beautiful coal and blanketing us in the warm glorious embrace of soot and fly ash.
In this particular case I believe the mountain is largely karst (limestone) and the panels substantially reduced erosion -- particularly of soil -- leading to an increase in fauna that thrive in the shade.
As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.
Still much better and lower impact than whatever the fuck we'd been doing for the past 200 years
Yes let us wait for an optimal aesthetic solution for another 50 years while we choke on our own fumes. Plenty of time to rearrange the deck chairs.
China already has one (if we're insisting on solar power generation) - 700,000 sq. mi of desert.
It's also not just aesthetic - flat terrain is just so much more practical.
> flat terrain is just so much more practical.
Outside of peak summer it's much more optimal to have a south facing slope actually.
Additionally, solar panels can become too hot and that reduces their efficiency. Also, deserts are famously known for dust. Since it rarely rains, you get a dust buildup, further compromising solar efficiency in deserts.
I'm not saying that deserts are a bad place for solar. What I'm trying to say is - it's often worse than people think and it requires special infrastructure.
I love how they’re just building and building, adding more and more capacity and people here are arguing whether it’s in the right location. It’s laughable.
Beautiful pictures. To be clear: China runs on coal and will for the foreseeable future.
https://www.iea.org/countries/china
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
By showing only your provided data it seems. But when looking at the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources it looks totally different!
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=line&facet=n...
That metric doesn't answer the same question. It isn't saying 18% of their needs are being met by renewables.
If you look at the growth rate of renewables it should be pretty clear that coal will not play a major role in the foreseeable future. Why is it not saying 18% of the needs are being met by renewables? That's exactly what it does
This is not energy output (production, usage), it is that plus an adjustment for the in->out energy efficiency. It would only == production if all energy sources in the mix has the same factor.
Because fossil fuels have higher in/out losses this is number is larger than usage. This metric is generally used to track decarbonization.
Using the IEA number you can see the hydro+solar+wind production is about 9.5% of the total, not 18%.
ChatGPT or you favorite LLM can explain in greater detail, just send it the plot image and ask.
The adjusted graph is a better reflection of "meeting their needs" than raw primary energy, since more than half of fossil primary energy is lost as waste heat.
> Heidu Mountain Scenic Area
Not so scenic any more... I get it, electricity good, but man are we destroying places just to get this stuff. In the UK I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it. Fossil fuels gave us too much. If only we could figure out how to want less.
My local beaches on the Yorkshire coast have some of the biggest wind farms in the world.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.
I think there is reason to think that we will reduce energy consumption.
US energy consumption per capita peaked in 1975 and has trended down even as population has increased. There's going to be a peak in global population, likely before 2100 (and it keeps getting revised sooner, not later).
So it stands to reason that as we become more energy efficient (already happening) and we start to have fewer people on earth (likely to happen in your/ your children's lifetime) that overall consumption will in fact go down.
> We’re never going to reduce energy consumption.
I mean, I think on an infinite timescale we probably will. A middle-class lifestyle today requires less energy than 20 years ago, simply because things have gotten more efficient (if you buy a fridge or a washing machine or a central heating system or a lightbulb today, it's using significantly less energy to do the same thing). But not _soon_. And part of the shift is very much from non-electric to electric power usage (gas heating -> heat pumps, petrol cars -> electric cars, diesel trains -> electric trains, etc etc). Energy use per capita will peak (may already have peaked) _long_ before electricity use per capita.
Every generation thinks they're building a safer future for their kids, including the boomers. If you want to talk about safety then you need to take sustainability seriously.
In the US, "Boomers" made the environmental movement mainstream, created the EPA, started cleanup of superfund sites, and passed the clean water and clean air acts. There are waterways where I live that are swimmable for the first time in generations because of the Boomers. It's not an either/or proposition.
Boomers didn't create the EPA, that was the Greatest and Silent generations. Boomers were no more than 25 in 1970 and hardly in power. Some of them may have been in the activists pushing for change but they didn't actually pass the legislation.
Fossil fuels have destroyed far more places than renewable energy's land coverage ever will.
Less scenic, sure. But still beautiful.
I would rather they not have to be built in the first place. Yet, this is unfortunately the price we must pay today for not reducing our carbon emissions yesterday.
Had we taken a serious effort to do something in, say the mid nineties when the scientific community reached a large consensus regarding the major contributors of climate change it had been less urgent to do something now thirty years later and we would have had a much longer time for the academies and industry to research and improve performance of non-fossil energy production and do the same for energy using applications.
It's not the renewables which are to blame, because if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way we do then these places will either soon be destroyed, or nobody can appreciate them due to civilisational collapse.
I'm sure there will still be places where people with your particular phobia will be able to go to the beach and not see a scary wind turbine.
> I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it
I didn't know they were so big that you can't fit in the sea anymore. /s