Rare climate win: China's carbon emissions have plateaued and may have already started to fall.
Rare climate win: China's carbon emissions have plateaued and may have already started to fall.
Xi’s quest for global supremacy is in perfect alignment with the country’s clean-tech dominance
The article is still biased as hell and couched in the usual "China had" scare language, but here's a few good quotes.
China’s carbon emissions have either peaked already or will do this winter, seven years ahead of schedule. They may plateau for a year or two but will then go into exponential decline for mechanical and unstoppable reasons.
The country’s target of net zero by 2060 is likely to be achieved a decade earlier than previously assumed, and perhaps earlier than in Europe.
Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, says China has reached a structural tipping point where the roll-out of renewables is outpacing the rise in electricity demand.
“A drop in power-sector emissions in 2024 is essentially locked in. We’re likely to see a fall in total CO2 emitted in the first half of next year,” he said.
At the risk of overtaxing the reader’s appetite for figures, it is worth spelling out the enormity of what China is doing. The China Electricity Council says the country will add 210 GW of solar this year, twice the entire solar capacity installed in the US to date.
It is not going to stop there. Carbon Brief says China’s output of solar panels was 310 GW in 2022; it will be 500 GW in 2023; and 1000 GW in 2025 – four times the total installation of new solar worldwide last year.
Regarding the scare point of new Chinese coal plants:
The regime is approving two new coal plants a week. It does not mean what many in the West think it means. China is adding one GW of coal power on average as back-up for every six GW of new renewable power. The two go hand in hand.
“The more renewable energy used, the more the need for coal peaking capacity. A large number of coal power units will be idle,” says Chinese coal expert Li Ting.
Obligatory Westoid nonsense about how Xi is evil and he just wants to take over the world with his sinister measures to protect the environment.
Xi seeks global supremacy. He was never going to let climate worries alone hold back China’s rise. But today the two are in perfect alignment. Clean-tech has become the spearhead of China’s global economic conquest, and this changes the thrust of Beijing’s climate diplomacy.
It is no longer possible for foot-draggers to hide behind China. As Chinese emissions roll over and go into free-fall, Xi will become an even bigger problem for them than Western preachers.
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The regime is approving two new coal plants a week. It does not mean what many in the West think it means. China is adding one GW of coal power on average as back-up for every six GW of new renewable power. The two go hand in hand.
For those who don't understand this part in particular. How power grids work is that there's an expected amount of power that needs to be generated at a given time period, but there are times where spikes in use happen. During those times "dirty" energy is used to help level out the spikes as they have the ability to generate energy at a shorter time period faster than green energy, as you do NOT want a power grid to break down (which causes a lot of societal problems, far worse than the emissions that would arise from it.(common result is death in vital buildings that need power))
While coal isn't ideal for the burning of dirty energy (natural gas burns relatively speaking, cleaner), coal is chosen because coal factories are significantly cheaper, and the scale that china wants to build energy requires the buildings now rather than later, so (hopefully) the coal plants are just temporary for them to rapidly expand their grid, and slowly transition the coal plants down the line to slightly more clean energy.
Thanks for the explanation comrade. The article also talks about how coal was chosen because natural gas must be imported and is thus vulnerable to supply shocks. China is apparently also taking measures to implement carbon capture and re-use technologies with newer plants (which will mostly run below capacity most of the time).
Yeah China's coal plants are way more advanced than America's at this point. 90% of China's 100 most efficient coal plants are ultra-supercritical, while it's only 1% for America.
The U.S doesn't upgrade them because of the dirty energy sources, coal is only a third. the other 2/3 is natural gas (and the fact that the existing coal plants are primarily used in the south, which is not so positive on climate change)
Yes, it probably does not make sense for the US to upgrade them at this point. This is good to know when American reactionaries point at Chinese dirt coal, however. The truth is China's is actually less dirty than America's.
Also worth noting that power plants only used as backups in times of grid instability can at some point in the future switch over to using biomass/biochar or some other carbon neutral combustible fuel. When something is a last line backup, a whole bunch of options open up for using combustion in a carbon neutral way that isn't realistically feasible when a powerplant is being used for baseload or normal peaker operations. Ideally in a few decades all the grids of the world will be solar/wind/nuclear combined with grid scale energy storage replacing normal coal/gas peaker plants, and emergency backups being biofuel/efuel burning generators.
Same applies to the massive diesel generators built underneath critical facilities like data centers and hospitals. Because it's a last resort emergency backup only meant to be used rarely, it becomes feasible to use either e-diesel or bio-deisel.
It would be good to switch to biofuels, but we should remember they aren't a good solution either. Biofuel isn't carbon neutral, it only appears that way due to spread sheet magic, and even then the numbers are fudged
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Spike usage is also about the only time I can see a viable use for electrofuels, as they are among the only "renewable" fuels that can be stored. E-fuels are still fucking stupid tho, the problem they solve shouldn't be an issue of such magnitude it requires such an investment. The problem is a symptom of larger issues.