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.

>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?

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.

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.

Criticism is healthy. False equivalence isn't.

Those big oil comments are in your head. The comments here, not cheering, are nowhere near parroting any Big Oil talking point. God forbid that we have an actual conversation.

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.

Oh, what a weak argument: "you've just fallen for the propaganda".

You might notice comments simply arguing for less energy usage are buried at the bottom too. Have you considered whether you may have fallen for the "green" propaganda? It's so predictable after all.

Two wrongs don't make a right. 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 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.

> 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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

That's GWh and vanadium flow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

Same sentiment! The one photo from Mongolia is going as my desktop background

Came here to appreciate the same. Not only it truly captures the scale, but does it in a great way.

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?

This planet-scale map of the global electricity network is incredible.

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.

For more amusement, look to Limerick, in Ireland, whose council tried to mandate all new homes have chimney stacks.

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.

And that's despite the breathtaking scale of BS from a single source!

China has has Megawatt-scale floating PV at sea too.

I would suspect they are floating on pontoons.

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.

Not as depressing as if it was coal power stations and coalmines blighting the landscape.

You mean in context of a complete regression in the West, right?

No, they are beautiful.

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.

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 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

The rest of the world is, in fact, doing it as well.

Basically everyone is except the USA

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

Only if you have a fetish for wasting money.

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

There's two big parts of the earth that are uninhabitable because of nuclear.

Anyway, they are going with nuclear too.

Why can't you do both? Why does it always have to be either or?

How renewable is uranium?

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.

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/

> is it free of side effects for the nature?

What is free of side effects for "nature" ?

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

>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.

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.

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.

> Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.

China needs power NOW though.

You can get a lot of stationary batteries for a couple of trillion dollars.