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Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people)

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  • This is legit true IDK why you're getting downvoted. Just because it doesn't show on US energy usage, every time you buy stupid shit you don't need like an automatic corn dog maker or a taco holder shaped like a sombrero that holds a shot glass in the middle, that has a real cost in terms of CO2 and that is done in China.

    i think I need an automatic corn dog maker and a taco holder shaped like a sombrero that holds a shot glass in the middle

  • Last year, China generated 834 terawatt-hours of solar power.

    Which is more than the G7 countries generated, and more than the US and EU combined. In fact the only country group that generates more solar power than China is the OECD, all 38 countries of it.

    Data:
    @ember-energy.org

    Source: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lsbbsg6ohk2j

    Good for China on that!

    To add some perspective, China is about 2 and a quarter times as large as the EU nations, and according to currentresults.com seems to get a bit more sunshine than the EU does. So the difference isn't quite as stark as this post makes it seem.

    But still, it's good that China is taking solar power seriously. I didn't realize they were doing that well.

  • i think I need an automatic corn dog maker and a taco holder shaped like a sombrero that holds a shot glass in the middle

    I immediately went looking on temu 🙂

    I don't the poster meant to happen!

  • Why wouldn't solar and other renewables combined with batteries be better?

    It's very early days, yet California recently had 98 days on renewables. That started in winter.

    What is it about renewables with batteries that you believe will fail, despite the mass adoption that is under way?

    Why will the projected, continued decline in battery prices and advances in battery tech not occur?

    Why would adjacent solutions, like the massive storage ability of vehicle-to-grid, be worse compared to nuclear?

    Why are so many "in the know" getting it so wrong?

    What batteries are you referring to? Do you realize the amount of energy those batteries would have to store? Perhaps somewhen in the not so near future, but today? Go ahead and show me a western city able to store a couple of days worth of energy. More realistically a week.

  • China also continues to increase coal generation by more than renewables.

    I don't believe this:

    In 2024, China approved 66.7GW of new coal-fired capacity, started construction on 94.5GW of coal power projects

    Even if you add these 2 together and pretend they were finished the same year it's not even close to:

    China’s renewable energy sector made remarkable progress in 2024, adding 356 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity

    They have missed every single renewable target and goal they’re set.

    I don't believe this is true either unless you are referring to some other targets?

    In 2020, China set a goal to install at least 1,200 gigawatts (GW) of solar and wind power by 2030. By the end of 2024, China had already surpassed this target, reaching this milestone 6 years ahead of schedule. This was made possible by aggressive investments, government policies, and a surge in solar and wind installations.

    China’s solar capacity grew by an incredible 45.2% in 2024, adding 277 GW. Wind capacity also saw a strong increase of 18%, with an additional 80 GW installed. Overall, total power generation capacity rose by 14.6% in 2024, driven mainly by renewables.

    China is only %27 renewables while the EU is 47%.

    Don't worry, just like everything else I'm sure that will flip in the future

    Europe has plenty of money apparently to suddenly:

    NATO leaders on Wednesday confirmed their commitment to more than double defence spending by 2035 banding words like "crucial", "momentous" and "quantum leap"

    Just why does it take an emergency to make some proper progress:

    Global energy storage owner-operator BW ESS and Spanish energy storage developer Ibersun say a new joint venture is intended to build eight four-hour battery projects across the country, with a combined capacity of 2.2 GW, 8.8 GWh.

    Where will the batteries be made I wonder?

    On top of this energy prices in the EU are ridiculous and for some reason they still can't get off the gas, which leads to an unreal point of France giving more money to Russia for gas than in aid to Ukraine, so they have high energy prices and they're funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine and their companies and manufacturing are leaving them... to go to China...

    But I appreciate your scepticism (I gave your post an upvote because China does sometimes get a little bit too much credit), they are the worlds top producer of CO2 by FAR but I do want to address

    Greenwashing

    This is something I've wanted for a while:

    It requires EU importers to pay a levy corresponding to the embedded carbon emissions in 303 emission-intensive products

    I've long disliked that places like the EU and the rest of the west can export their dirty manufacturing over to China where companies take advantage of lax or no environmental regulations, it's a false economy and makes the west look a whole lot greener and cleaner than it would if we were manufacturing what we used back at home

    China has Apple by the balls’: How the rising superpower captured the tech giant

    edit: boy I sure do love to procrastinate and talk about energy and co2 instead of studying 😐

    China approved 66.7GW of new coal-fired capacity, started construction on 94.5GW of coal power projects

    New power plants don't mean using those power plants. Resilience/backup power. Use of coal for electricity has declined despite new coal plants.

  • Last year, China generated 834 terawatt-hours of solar power.

    Which is more than the G7 countries generated, and more than the US and EU combined. In fact the only country group that generates more solar power than China is the OECD, all 38 countries of it.

    Data:
    @ember-energy.org

    Source: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lsbbsg6ohk2j

    They also expanded coal power, roads, and removed their population limiting policies, though. They produce about 3 times as much CO2 per person as India, Indonesia, and many South American nations, likely many nations in Africa as well but theres a lot of missing data.

  • They‘ll keep building more coal power plants in the global south and export coal. There‘s a lot of money to be made.

    They're also actually still building more coal power in mainland China.

  • The question is simple. If you have installed solar power of 40% your country peak use, how much nuclear power you need - assuming simplified you have only these two power sources.

    In a market or effincient economy, where peak occurs mid hot summer day, 100% solar dominated renewables makes sense. In Spring and fall, EVs can absorb daily oversupply and profit from trading back at night. Winter is when solar can fail to meet heating and electricity needs, and so either backup energy sources or having much more than 100% peak demand in order to make green H2 that can be exported to where it gets cold is needed.

    0 new nuclear is best amount of nuclear for any economy.

  • What batteries are you referring to? Do you realize the amount of energy those batteries would have to store? Perhaps somewhen in the not so near future, but today? Go ahead and show me a western city able to store a couple of days worth of energy. More realistically a week.

    OP sepcifically mentioned EVs. This sector is deflationary even in US, where better value/performance cars cost less every year. More dramatic deflation in less corrupt countries. Australia home solar costs under 1/3rd of US due to different politico-social corruption levels.

    EVs and home solar are a great match that permits going offgrid at substantially lower cost if an EV is parked at home during day. That same dynamic allows a society/community to power itself through solar+batteries, and EVs parked at work. It's not a question of look at our corrupt obstructionist oligarchical monopoly state of societies for examples of lack of economic success as proof that it will forever be impossible.

  • Yes, of course I've meant it in a positive way - a way to replace coal and gas. But solar is not just positive, they are problematic when you couple them with nuclear for the simple reasons that solar is not reliable and you can't throttle nuclear - they are like big ships, they require a lot of time to steer. Furthermore solar energy low price causes problems for nuclear higher prices. Which wouldn't be a problem if solar was reliable and continuous (long winter nights much?). But it's not, but you still need a reliable energy source. And so on.
    The pro solar panel crowd don't understand many of these implications and go with simple "idiotic" and downvotes.

    The idiot digs deeper, and shows his true colours. Asinine.

  • People talk about China's energy use like it's not* their* energy use. They used that power to produce the stupid shit that you bought, dumbass. You're responsible for that energy use, despite it being generated in China.

    So you're saying we should stop trading with China?

  • What batteries are you referring to? Do you realize the amount of energy those batteries would have to store? Perhaps somewhen in the not so near future, but today? Go ahead and show me a western city able to store a couple of days worth of energy. More realistically a week.

    Las Vegas has already achieved 97% storage supply for its needs - a city that barely sleeps at night.

    Again, where is your evidence that it is not going to improve across the board, and will all fail?

    "It's not all happening right now," is not even close to a convincing answer. If that was the reason to exclude any technology, there'd be none.

    And it's an especially ironic answer given that it takes up to 20 years to commission a nuclear power plant. And they are down for scheduled maintenance for up to a month a year, etc.

  • Last year, China generated 834 terawatt-hours of solar power.

    Which is more than the G7 countries generated, and more than the US and EU combined. In fact the only country group that generates more solar power than China is the OECD, all 38 countries of it.

    Data:
    @ember-energy.org

    Source: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lsbbsg6ohk2j

    Amazing how fast you can build stuff when there's safety standards, no environmental regulations, no labour rights and the government can expropriate property without a time consuming legal process!

    Though I think a prefer living in a country where I have rights even if it takes a bit longer to build stuff.

  • Amazing how fast you can build stuff when there's safety standards, no environmental regulations, no labour rights and the government can expropriate property without a time consuming legal process!

    Though I think a prefer living in a country where I have rights even if it takes a bit longer to build stuff.

    We tried getting rid of environmental regulations, safety standards, labour rights, etc. in America and I'm still waiting for when stuff gets built faster... At least the government can't expropriate property! oh wait... Well at least we still have our rights? oh wait...

  • We tried getting rid of environmental regulations, safety standards, labour rights, etc. in America and I'm still waiting for when stuff gets built faster... At least the government can't expropriate property! oh wait... Well at least we still have our rights? oh wait...

    I think you call it eminent domain in the US. But I think it can still be challenged in court, but wait a couple months.

    Yes, the US is becoming China. You put a guy into power that admires Xi Jinping for the same reason China made Xi President for life: wanted a strongman to run the economy and protect you from evil foreigners. And now you're getting corporate socialism, just like China has.

  • What batteries are you referring to? Do you realize the amount of energy those batteries would have to store? Perhaps somewhen in the not so near future, but today? Go ahead and show me a western city able to store a couple of days worth of energy. More realistically a week.

    It's not perfect so it must be bad! Hot take. Fuck off with your green energy negging. You're a paid assassin or an idiot. Doesn't really matter which. Good day

  • They also expanded coal power, roads, and removed their population limiting policies, though. They produce about 3 times as much CO2 per person as India, Indonesia, and many South American nations, likely many nations in Africa as well but theres a lot of missing data.

    Pollution per GDP is a better measure.
    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity
    Pollution per GNP would be even better but I can’t find it.

    Individuals don’t pollution much, it’s mostly industry. Really poor countries often don’t pollution much because they can’t afford to. Sometimes they pollute prodigiously because the only thing they can afford to do is destructive resource extraction. Rich countries can often outsource their pollution to poorer countries.

    China has been making mind boggling investments in renewables. They have been expanding all their energy sources but their renewables have the lions share of the growth.

    They’ve been building roads and all kinds of infrastructure. That’s what the BRI is all about, even if they’re being a bit quieter about saying the phrase. They like to build their long haul roads on elevated columns; not only because it’s less disruptive to wildlife but because it lets them use giant road laying robots to place prefab highway segments.

    They dropped the one-child policy a while back but they’re having some trouble getting people to have more babies. That said, there’s some research that suggests that rural populations around the world are severely undercounted, so they may have a bunch more subsistence farmers than they, or anyone else, realizes.

  • Last year, China generated 834 terawatt-hours of solar power.

    Which is more than the G7 countries generated, and more than the US and EU combined. In fact the only country group that generates more solar power than China is the OECD, all 38 countries of it.

    Data:
    @ember-energy.org

    Source: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lsbbsg6ohk2j

    This has been going on for years and will continue.

    China really really really needs a robust and diverse energy infrastructure.
    Industry needs huge amounts of energy. AI needs huge amounts of energy. The military needs huge amounts of energy.

    Coal is unreliable and dirty. Oil can be blocked at the Straight of Malacca and a few pipelines.

    China is also the world’s factory. They own the entire logistics chain for producing renewable generators; from raw materials to final assembly. They have all the infrastructure to not only build solar panels and wind turbines at scale, they’ve scaled up building the machines that build them.

  • Pollution per GDP is a better measure.
    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity
    Pollution per GNP would be even better but I can’t find it.

    Individuals don’t pollution much, it’s mostly industry. Really poor countries often don’t pollution much because they can’t afford to. Sometimes they pollute prodigiously because the only thing they can afford to do is destructive resource extraction. Rich countries can often outsource their pollution to poorer countries.

    China has been making mind boggling investments in renewables. They have been expanding all their energy sources but their renewables have the lions share of the growth.

    They’ve been building roads and all kinds of infrastructure. That’s what the BRI is all about, even if they’re being a bit quieter about saying the phrase. They like to build their long haul roads on elevated columns; not only because it’s less disruptive to wildlife but because it lets them use giant road laying robots to place prefab highway segments.

    They dropped the one-child policy a while back but they’re having some trouble getting people to have more babies. That said, there’s some research that suggests that rural populations around the world are severely undercounted, so they may have a bunch more subsistence farmers than they, or anyone else, realizes.

    Why is Polution per GDP a better measure? I don't care how much they export when they're killing the planet at a faster rate every year with no intentions to stop it. I will praise China and the rest of the world when they reimplement and follow through with plans to ethically lower the world population, such as investment in education especially for women and incentives or fines based on numbers of children.

  • This has been going on for years and will continue.

    China really really really needs a robust and diverse energy infrastructure.
    Industry needs huge amounts of energy. AI needs huge amounts of energy. The military needs huge amounts of energy.

    Coal is unreliable and dirty. Oil can be blocked at the Straight of Malacca and a few pipelines.

    China is also the world’s factory. They own the entire logistics chain for producing renewable generators; from raw materials to final assembly. They have all the infrastructure to not only build solar panels and wind turbines at scale, they’ve scaled up building the machines that build them.

    Coal is unreliable and dirty.

    China use absurd amounts of coal and they're not slowing down. They're the worlds largest producer and consumer of coal. They're increasing use of all power generation types - coal, solar, nuclear.

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    So they're doing good work at least.
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    Stop fucking using twitter. Stop posting about it, stop posting things that link to it. Delete your account like you should have already.
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    Just keep in mind they are considered a crime in the US and can be located. Use with caution.
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    Run the Jewels?
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    Even being too lazy to open the weather app, there are so many better and free ways of receiving a message on your phone. This is profoundly stupid.
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    Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company. I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law. I could be too naive, but I think it is possible. We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company. The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it. The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage. So how much money your privacy it's worth ? 6 For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful. The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don't want to break the law. I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them. Trust me on this one, direct experience payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work. I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws. For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime. It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that. Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience. In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting. Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
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    PSA OP "wikipediasuckscoop" seems to have a personal vendetta against wikipedia. All their posts are various articles bashing the site.