China's total wind and solar capacity outstrips coal

https://renewablesnow.com/news/chinas-total-wind-and-solar-capacity-outstrips-coal-rystad-says-865106/

172 152 2 years ago

aquamar2• 2 years ago

China accounts for close to 60% of global coal-fired electricity generation and coal-fired power emissions

In 2023, China's total emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power generation hit 5.56 billion metric tons, an all-time high that was nearly 6% greater than 2022's record. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-may-upend-...

pixl97• 2 years ago

Ya and they have 1.2 billion people they are bringing out of poverty while becoming the manufacturing hub of the world. They do realize they need massive amounts of power to keep up the growth. They also realize pollution is a huge problem and that they can't continue to burn coal supplies at their current rate forever.

fred_is_fred• 2 years ago

1.2 billion and falling. For not the change in standard of living pushes consumption net positive, but I wonder about in 20 years or 30?

whatever13• 2 years ago

Someone is lying.

Either the coal capacity is flat (as the main article of the thread suggests), or the coal-fired emissions are still rising (aka they are still bringing coal-fired capacity online).

It wouldn't be the first communist regime that is lying though.

maxglute4• 2 years ago

Or someone can't read. No where in article does it state Coal capacity is flat, just coal growth has flattened significantly per 14th five-year plan (2021-2025). PRC peak coal is expected this or next year, and phase down / decline starting 15th five-year plan (2026-2030).

teractiveodular2• 2 years ago

Worth highlighting: The research firm projects that by 2026, solar power alone will outstrip coal as China's main energy source, reaching 1.38 TW in cumulative capacity, 150 GW above coal.

Last year, China added a record 293 GW of wind and solar, driven by gigawatt-scale renewable hub projects. Coal power additions were about 40 GW in 2023, while the first half of 2024 saw only 8 GW of new coal capacity, according to Rystad Energy’s estimates.

After a record 216 GW of solar installations last year, China is expected to exceed 230 GW this year. Wind capacity additions are projected to be 75 GW in 2024.

To put those numbers into perspective, the largest nuclear power plant complex in the US (Vogtile) has a capacity of 4.6 GW, while the world's largest power plant at the Three Gorges does 22.5 GW (max).

asdefghyk2• 2 years ago

How long is the 294 GW produced , For solar is the rated output only produced when sun shining?- which means the quoted OP is only for a few hours a day? The nuclear power plan OP would be constant.

Chilko• 2 years ago

Capacity factor of solar is generally ~20%

toomuchtodo4• 2 years ago

Currently, the world is on track to be deploying ~660GW of solar per year by end of year, and at current manufacturing capacity ramp rates, will very likely reach ~1TW/year in ~18 months. This doesn’t stop, it only continues to climb. The Sun delivers enough energy to Earth in under an hour to power humanity for a year. There will certainly be challenges along the way as the world heads towards net zero, but none of this is unsolvable with current renewable and storage technology.

Renewable and storage costs continue to decline, new nuclear is dead, existing nuclear will run as long as safe to do so until decommissioning. Fission lost to fusion at a distance. Very simply, we just keep building and deploying solar as quickly as possible. Wind and batteries too.

https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-global-renewabl...

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/14/overbuilding-solar-at...

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA

senectus13• 2 years ago

there in lies the problem with nuclear.

Solar is cheaper and easier, so when the sun is shining you get essentially free energy while the nuclear cant be ramped down so you are now producing excess energy during the day.

solar eats nuclear's lunch during the day... with the long term waste issue and military target danger of nuclear thrown in.

ralferoo• 2 years ago

only produced when sun shining?- which means the quoted OP is only for a few hours a day?

China has a very large desert region in the northwest that receive a LOT of sun year round, so I'd expect the panels to be producing a decent amount of power throughout most of the day.

The biggest problem is actually distance - even a few years back, I was reading that there was a massive amount of solar power, but a very significant percentage was lost in transmission to the most densely populated areas of China which are predominantly in the southeast and east of the country.

These areas are also where a lot of rare earth metals are mined, so feasibly it would be relatively cheap to produce giga-batteries there too smooth demand, but I also suspect that they could see significant advantage to doing things that are traditionally energy-costly like electrolysis of water to create hydrogen that could be transferred across the country by pipe with pretty minimal losses and then burned to drive turbines at the other end. Such systems might end up with overall fewer losses than just having thousands of miles of power grid.

Another thing I read recently that was interesting is that it's getting approximately close to free for China to produce solar panels now, significantly cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Largely this is also due to the excess power produced in the northwest that can be cheaply used in the processing needed to produce more solar panels.

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

I'm not one to champion China, but thank god that they seem to be pretty co2 conscious. It's easy to envision China having leadership that didn't give a fuck about climate change (or didn't want to hear it was real) and just went full on coal energy independence.

roenxi5• 2 years ago

One of the best aspects of Chinese energy policy is there isn't much evidence they care about CO2 at all. They aren't world's largest coal consumer (by a 5x margin I believe [0]) because they care about CO2.

They care about cheap energy and energy security. They've been relatively transparent that they are pursuing all available options as far as those options will go. It has been a wildly successful strategy for them in securing prosperity and I wish the west had that sort of ambition.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...

BurningFrog3• 2 years ago

China is also building two new coal powered plants per week. Far more than the rest of the planet combined: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

China cares above anything else about power, both political and electrical.

dn3500• 2 years ago

Seems like a less than useful comparison, given the very different utilization factors. For solar you'd need five times the capacity to get the same average power.

bryanlarsen4• 2 years ago

Not as much as you'd think. China's coal capacity factor is around 50% and dropping rapidly. Much of their coal is used in peaker plants.

MichaelNolan• 2 years ago

Yeah, for some reason people seem to assume that coal and natural gas all run at 95%+ capacity factors. I don’t have any data for China, but in the US coal’s CF was 42% and gas combined cycle was 58% in 2023. The EIA publishes monthly and yearly capacity factors by generating type.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

taneq• 2 years ago

Depending on the uptime requirements you probably want more like 10x base load. Solar generation will cap out under good conditions but for year round, you’ve got to handle stints of bad weather and much shorter winter days.

alwa• 2 years ago

Those quantities are astonishing, no doubt. Does “capacity” here mean “nameplate capacity,” in the sense of the maximum that the installation can produce under peak input conditions? So for solar, the actual energy flowing into the grid would be on the order of 10-20% of that?

pcchristie• 2 years ago

Yes, spot on, but it'd be closer to 25% for a grid-scale solar PV installation.

asdefghyk2• 2 years ago

The problem is wind and solar are un reliable. Need massive storage needed for them to be 24x7. Then there is the 2nd problem problem that transmission line capacity is needed to get it from its stored location ( maybe hydro or batteries ) to where it's needed.

hooverd2• 2 years ago

They're also building out crazy amounts of nuclear.

pfdietz5• 2 years ago

Their nuclear build out is behind plans, while their renewable build out is ahead of plans.

pfdietz5• 2 years ago

There is no reason why many of the batteries can't be colocated with PV. They take up much less area. Properly configured, batteries can take DC from the PV modules and share the same inverter and grid connection. This is especially useful because typically a field will oversize the PV modules relative to the inverter.

mgfist• 2 years ago

Just another problem to be solved (and which is already in progress)

lolinder2• 2 years ago

I love Technology Connections' take on this line of argument [0]:

When there's a new innovation which changes how we do things for the better, its benefits are obvious. ... However when the "But Sometimes" rears its ugly head, people tend to freak out. Suddenly all those benefits go away, because in this one particular facet of stoplight functionality, the wasteful and maintenance-heavy incandescent lamp is accidentally superior. Suddenly, when a new solution presents a new problem, all we think about is the problem.

Yes, there are problems that exist with solar that don't exist with other electrical generation systems. That is not, by itself, evidence that solar will not be sufficient by itself as we solve those problems, and it's not a good reason to slow adoption of a piece of technology that is better in almost every way.

Everything suggests we're going to fix the "but sometimes"—as others have noted there are many different paths being successfully explored at this point—and everything suggests that solar will still be both cheaper and better for the environment even when you factor in the fix.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8

culi7• 2 years ago

I don't think this is a fair criticism. It's not a "but sometimes" so much as "but X hours a day" and "but during X season". There are genuine problems unique to solar (e.g. the Duck Curve) and genuine problems unique to wind

icehawk• 2 years ago

Please, name a generation technology that does not need transmission capacity to get it from where it is generated to where it is needed.

Even coal plants stopped being built in the middle of cities half a century ago.

eastof• 2 years ago

The reason it's a bigger issue for solar is that you don't get to choose where the best place to put it is, and it might be really inconvenient. Coal plant you can intentionally put it outside the city, but not too far and where a flat road can connect them. Solar is usually best placed in a desert, and usually people don't live anywhere near deserts, and usually they're separated from where people live by mountain ranges (i.e. the Mojave to LA).

yen223• 2 years ago

It amuses me to imagine engineers reading this comment and going "Oh crap - we totally forgot that the sun doesn't shine at night! Kill the projects immediately!"

stonethrowaway• 2 years ago

It wouldn’t be engineers saying this.

bushbaba• 2 years ago

Water heaters are 18% of a homes U.S. energy usage. No reason I can’t shift when my hot water is heated throughout the day.

Lots of similar industrial use cases

bamboozled• 2 years ago

It's getting old now

xiaodai• 2 years ago

But cup blah blah blah

loongloong2• 2 years ago

Humans have managed to build out a global network of fiber to enable a global Internet.

I wonder if we can do the same for electricity distribution, mitigating the uneven electricity generation of solar (day vs night, summer vs winter, etc.)

Gare• 2 years ago

At some point storage or overbuilding capacity becomes more cost effective than long transmission lines.

dbetteridge• 2 years ago

While it's physically possible it's likely not economical to setup a full global network.

What is more likely is projects like

https://www.energymagazine.com.au/milestone-for-nt-solar-far...

Where neighbouring countries share generation and consumption (lots of western European countries already do this)

loongloong2• 2 years ago

In Bits and Pieces. Isn't that how the Internet grew?

Those that have more pressing needs or have more aligned opportunities will invest first, then the cost goes down as the scale and technology improves, and the global network is built.

Geopolitics might be a big stumbling block though.

blackoil2• 2 years ago

For net emission, that investment may be better utilized in upgrading transportation and infrastructure and run peaker gas plants.

BurningFrog3• 2 years ago

A good start would be for the US to legalize building new power lines.

https://www.route-fifty.com/infrastructure/2022/10/bidens-pe...

skybrian• 2 years ago

There might be other ways. I’m guessing this will just be a niche when extra power line capacity is unavailable, but here’s a startup that wants to build giant batteries as railway cars and ship energy by rail:

https://www.suntrain.co/

ApolloFortyNine2• 2 years ago

It's still a good thing, but isn't this misleading, since solar capacity would only be able to run 1/3 of the day-ish? Not sure about wind but again guessing it's not 100%.

acdha• 2 years ago

A third of the day is the winter solstice in fairly northerly latitudes. It’s better the rest of the year and the further south you go.

The other thing to remember is that production and storage capacity are cheap to expand, so the better question is how often it’s the case that it’s dark at times of peak demand long enough to exhaust the grid storage capacity. Currently, that’ll be the case but I’d bet that a decade from now it’ll be much less common.

duckmysick• 2 years ago

Depending on the location, it's between 10-25%. The EIA data says it's around 25%. Wind is 35%, nuclear 92%, gas combined 58%, coal 40-50%, hydro 35-40%. As you can see, the capacity factor is not 100% for pretty much everything.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Again, it all depends on the location. The US has a pretty high capacity factor for nuclear at over 90%, but the UK has it at 60-80%. Wind farms can go over 50%.

ApolloFortyNine2• 2 years ago

Capacity factor: The ratio of the electrical energy produced by a generating unit for the period of time considered to the electrical energy that could have been produced at continuous full power operation during the same period.

For solar/wind, this can literally never be 100%, or even close to it.

For Coal/Nuclear/Gas it just comes down to maintenance duration.

whatever13• 2 years ago

Max capacity is not equal to actual production volumes.

Also some of that capital would be better invested at cleaning up the outputs of the coal plants. Supposedly there are desulfurization units in 90% of their plants. The actual pollution numbers disagree with that.

ggm• 2 years ago

If this reflects a goal set in the 13th 5 year plan, I am pleased their intent is both stated publicly, and being achieved.

From the plan:

Key objectives of China are to: Increase share of non-fossil energy in total primary energy consumption to 15% by 2020 and to 20% by 2030. Increase installed renewable power capacity to 680 GW by 2020. Increase installed wind capacity to 210 GW.

https://policy.asiapacificenergy.org/node/2837

China's total wind and solar capacity outstrips coal

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