In the US, coal consumption is down 60% since the peak year of 2008.[1] The trend looks linear. Hits zero sometime in the 2030s. Coal is over in the US. Even the coal industry thinks coal is over.[2] Conversion of coal plants to natural gas is proceeding rapidly.
I flew across Northern China 5 years ago, you could see open cast mines next to power plants to the horizon .... but they were rapidly filling in the space with wind generation 1000s of turbines using the coal plant's transmission lines - they knew that the pollution drifting east to Beijing wasn't sustainable
The impetus is more to ensure people don't get pollution in the big cities (which indirectly helps with climate change, but that was never the real goal).
Pollution in China was terrible. Pretty much everybody hated it, and it was not possible to hide or whitewash it.
The US was in the same position during 60-s and 70-s, and it fixed the worst of the pollution rapidly. The EPA was established during the freaking Nixon administration.
I think there were a lot of factors at play behind the will of the leader or form of government, including resources and technologies available to the respective nations.
Well, they'll at least report that they're doing it. I've heard that autocracies tend to have data quality issues that derive from messengers not wanting to be shot.
China’s commitment to nuclear power increased significantly with the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025), released in March 2021, which called for a buildout of some 150 new nuclear reactors over the ensuing 15 years to reach a production goal of 200 GW of nuclear energy by 2035 (enough to power more than a dozen cities the size of Beijing).
By 2050, China wants nuclear to provide at least 15 percent of its electricity generation (which China envisions as its third overall source of energy by that year, behind wind and solar).
Mostly similar but with a lot of breadth, eg: they have three generations of molten salt reactors on the go ATM (one pilot complete, one 10x large half complete, one even bigger on the drawing board being modified on basis of results from first two).
Employment in coal extraction is also an interesting graph. Although a lot of it has dropped due to mechanization over the generations (like, from ~1910 on downwards) it's still pretty clear that the old heights of job-creation people might remember with nostalgia are never[0] coming back.
Coal has peaked globally, there's no global expansion, 190+ countries are winding back coal save for both India and China which are still expanding at a declining rate and expected to peak and decline in the mid term.
WRT China, they can't over produce renewable energy and be the largest global supplier of green energy without coal .. at least not yet.
China’s growing coal capacity could be seen as a mix of welfare and bureaucratic waste. Each prefecture is incentivized to build its own redundancy, and in a flagging economy, government spending is up to keep the economy going. The resulting overcapacity could be used for ‘peaking’ to offset intermittency in renewable power, something that’s being experimented with currently. And in the shorter term, coal can have less warming effect than gas, but I’m not sure this would be true of China’s coal plants in particular
China’s growing coal consumption is part of Cina's growing energy demands, their middle class is growing and exceeds the entire popultion of the USA in size.
While that middle class has a per capita energy and consumption figure that is lower than the USA per capita figures it is the case that the US has set an aspiration life style expectation that sees demand grow.
China's coal use has become increasingly more efficient; much is made of additional new modern coal power houses, little mention is made of the larger numbers of older inefficient far dirtier coal plants have been closed down and are still being closed down.
Nuclear and renewables are part of overall energy production in China to a far greater proportion and absolute number than in the US.
The scale of China's energy production is substantial and not easily characterised.
It's 29.1% renewables in China (2,756 TWh) vs. 21.4% (894 TWh) in the United States.
Grouping nuclear and renewables together as low-emissions sources, the US gets 47.65% of its electricity from low-emissions sources and China gets 33.96% from low-emissions sources.
China is building nuclear and renewable sources faster than the US, so will narrow the gap over the rest of the decade, but it's also growing its total electricity consumption faster.
Fair correction, I was focused more on China's renewable sector than it's nuclear (which China plans to increase to 15% of their projected 2050 electricity production) and on absolute size.
I mostly check my figures before comments, this is what I deserve for going off the cuff :-) ( thanks )
I made a mistake too when I was adding and copy-pasting numbers. US is at 39.55% low-emissions electricity. So I got the ranking right but originally overstated the size of the gap.
China in 2024 is on track to install more solar and wind capacity than it's consumption growth add the fact that of lcoe of solar + battery storage is now cheaper than what retail electricity is selling for in China. So move off coal electricity for China might be a lot faster than people are predicting.
Most coal plants in China will probably be used a peaker plants in the future. They don't make the best peaker plants, but China doesn't have much natural gas.
The linked article by Hannah Ritchie states the case for this. There's also this article about an Australian experiment to shut off and turn back on a coal plant within 5 hours:
Coal has already taken over peak generation in China. They've only started to build battery plants, so coal will be covering peaks for anther decade at least.
This is wishful thinking. Large parts of Africa is yet to become a developing economy. Once that happens, coal consumption is going to increase. Unfortunately, it's the easiest and cheapest way to generate electric power.
Africa is also one of the sunniest places around. With both solar and battery capacity still rapidly falling in price, and infrastructure generally being problematic in many African nations, it seems likely enough that they'll skip past to off-grid / micro-grid power.
Why would Africa install coal? It's way more expensive than solar, and coal makes them dependent on imports. Once installed, solar is independent energy.
The same reason African nations build railways and ports they strictly don't need - China and various world banks are continuing what European countries used to do, cheap "upfront" capital loans for expensive infrastructure projects that benefit resource extractors and other that prey on small nations.
Your rational long term argument has little sway when key decision makers are bribed and offered a chance to retire to a mansion elsewhere on the planet.
The future maybe different, but right now coal use has peaked and is starting to fall. See (for example) actual data [1].
> Once that happens ..
you speculate, you engage in wishful thinking, you ignore actual resource consumption projections gathered globally over decades by major resource companies.
Such external costs should only be included if the uncertainties on estimates of external costs of CO2 emissions are somehow represented. And I’m referring to factoring in all structural and parametric uncertainties inherent in climate models. Cutting to the chase, you can never factor in, or even meaningfully bound, those structural uncertainties. Not a big deal for million dollar investments, a big deal for trillion dollar investments.
Modelers of all ilks generally avoid reporting the underlying uncertainties in their results. And when they do report them, they are woefully underestimated. Fine in the abstract, but not acceptable when trillions of dollars are at stake. Dollars that can be spent instead on direct low risk, high impact improvements in third world child health (clean air, clean water, infectious diseases, etc.). Maybe choose those that also mitigate climate impacts (as we currently understand them), but directly save the living children/people first.
Keep on improving the models with scientific research, but don’t fool ourselves about the accuracy and completeness of such models for policy analysis. I’m old enough to remember the Club of Rome/Limits to Growth controversies.
The geophysics behind, say, the Santos Barrossa gas project appears pretty tight; the C02 emmissions estimates are directly tied to the economic feasibility estimate process .. if one is wrong then so is the other, if so it must be a bad investment and a foolish project?
When the project’s offshore and gas processing emissions are factored in, the LNG produced from the Barossa field would have a total emissions intensity of 1.4 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of LNG produced.
This makes the Barossa development the most emissions intensive LNG projects in Australia and the world
At this point in time there's a clear understanding of the consequences of the current 11 billion tonne of CO2 equivilant emmissions released annually .. an increase in trapped solar heat energy that directly leads to increased storm intensity, climbing global mean tempretures, and edging closer to positive feedback thresholds which are significantly hard to reverse when crossed.
It's worth contextualizing that the decline of coal in the US has been fuelled (sorry) more than anything by the rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas extraction. The US is now the world's largest natural gas producer with 60% of that gas being produced by hydraulic fracturing. This isn't going to be easily accessible — or acceptable — everywhere around the world.
Solar and batteries are getting so cheap so fast it won’t matter for the rest of the world. China installed a 3GW solar facility in 14 months, just turned up, second largest in the world [1] [2]. 14 months. And they are not slowing down.
Is there any data on the lifecycle of large-scale solar batteries? Are they any better than the small-scale ones? If they aren't, it would seem impractical to rely on them, because of the costs to replace/recycle them every few years.
Just to be clear, I'm referring to the use of electrical batteries for the temporary storage of solar power, so that the power can be available when the sun is not.
Non-electrical storage techniques (gravity, hydro) would seem better suited for long-term reliability.
Lithium batteries typically have a 10-15 year service life, depending on who you buy from (I am most familiar with Tesla's Megapack and Autobidder product in this regard; Tesla will warranty for up to 20 years [1]). CATL has a battery they warranty for 1M miles in EV applications [2], extrapolate to daily stationary storage cycles. Sodium ion is moving very fast, and is likely superior for this use case (both in regards to cost and service life) [3].
Scale up manufacturing, scale up deployment, scale up recycling, and you've got a circular supply chain system. At end of life, new (very likely better) batteries are installed and the old ones (in decades) are shipped back for recycling. In the US, this is Redwood Materials [4], founded by JB Straubel (former Tesla CTO). They have agreements to both recycle batteries with major automakers as well as supply feedstock for new battery components [5]. I'm unsure if this circular supply chain system exists in China yet, but I presume it is straightforward with their nation state resources to encourage along.
Pumped hydro is great where you can build it and it is cost superior to batteries, but batteries can be shipped and installed anywhere a concrete pad is waiting for them, very rapidly.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/megapack ("Each Megapack unit ships fully assembled and ready to operate, allowing for quick installation timelines and reduced complexity. Systems require minimal maintenance and include up to a 20-year warranty.")
As I understand it, the Tesla warranty was factored into the purchase price as a way to stabilize the TCO, and has little to do with the physical lifecycle of the lithium cells.
Sodium looks very promising, but it's "not there yet."
> As I understand it, the Tesla warranty was factored into the purchase price as a way to stabilize the TCO, and has little to do with the physical lifecycle of the lithium cells.
Where does that understanding come from? Because Tesla's warranty is consistent with every other manufacturers warranty that I have seen, basically 4000-5000 cycles is standard for grid storage lithium ion.
The warranty doesn't guarantee that the batteries will not fail, it just compensates the owner when they do. Buyers may be hesitant to purchase an expensive system such as a Powerwall or a Cybertruck unless the system comes with a warranty. So Tesla can raise the sales price to cover the inevitable warranty claim, and the purchaser will be none the wiser.
It's clear how warranties work, what's not clear to me is why Tesla would be using them in a way different from any other use of them over the years, and why every single other manufacturer is also using them in some sort of different way.
The cost difference depends on number of cycles. If you fill and empty your storage daily, batteries are way cheaper. If you fill and empty annually, pumped storage is way cheaper.
I cannot speak authoritatively as to whether the LFP cell cost decline curve has enabled stationary storage to be cost superior in all cases compared to both short and long duration pumped hydro, hence the caveat. I have no doubt we'll get there, just not sure we're there yet.
Probably something for Lazard's next LCOE report, to act as a canonical reference for such discussions.
I didn’t read where the US is mining out all their coal deposits and dumping them in the ocean.
Current exploitation of coal in the US maybe be declining, but it is still an important part of a robust portfolio of energy technologies. The US is, in fact, the Saudi Arabia of coal and, to meet robustness requirements for meeting short and long term US energy demand, coal is a common sense component. Maybe eventually only in some mothballed-annual testing-fast restart sense, but it’s a very cheap insurance policy. Keeping the pilot light on for the US coal industry as well, from a National Security standpoint.
Keep improving renewables, but don’t throw away what works. There’s a beauty to a highly diverse portfolio. You sleep better at night.
On the last few years, China's coal consumption has been almost unchanging.
What yeah, makes them one of the countries mostly investing in coal out there. But there hasn't been an increase, and it ought to fall fast at some point to one of the cheaper alternatives.
The reason it's over is because wind and solar have become cheaper than anything else. Solar is currently around $23/MWhr.
Nuclear is around $70/MWhr, one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.
Solar is highly distributeable so it can be placed closer to where the power is used, reducing transmission losses. It doesn't need to be very carefully sited in terms of where it goes on the grid, and nobody needs to worry about the long term geological stability of the area. It doesn't need to be partnered with another plant for cold starts. It has no safety concerns. It doesn't need any labor to operate - mostly occasional repairs to damage and cleaning. It has no capacity to cause any sort of disaster. It does not generate toxic waste in operation.
Nobody has ever said "don't shoot tank rounds near that solar farm or you might cause thousands of square miles of land to be uninhabitable for centuries."
Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"
The administration kowtowing to industry lobbyists to fund nuclear energy when the market was already adding seven times as much renewables as it is decommissioning nuclear capacity...is just corporate welfare, pure and simple.
Solar and wind definitely make the most sense wherever feasible, but it's important to keep in mind you can't just build solar and wind farms anywhere. China has moderately good solar capacity in the north, but generation there will be seasonal due to how far north it is. The north of China is also not close to the majority of the population, so transmission will be an issue.
China's high to moderate quality solar capacity will be built out very quickly, and it won't provide enough to close the gap from fossil-based generation. From there, the cost of solar generation will rise as low quality capacity is developed.
China will need a way to import some of their energy generation, possibly through by importing goods like iron and steel that have a high energy production cost, from countries like Australia that can produce them using renewable energy (green iron / green steel) using Australia's almost limitless solar resources.
Since much of Australia's coal is also used in places like China to smelt their local and imported iron and steel, this could further drive down production of coal.
China is building a nation spanning UHV ("ultra high voltage") power transmission system.
> According to China Energy News, the combined length of the UHV transmission lines operating in China had reached 48,000km (30,000 miles) by the end of 2020, more than enough to wrap around the Earth by the equator.
Solar + battery storage is cheaper than nuclear, and also far more flexible.
Nuclear, as a baseload generator, is not capable of meeting demand peaks, so if we are going to require batteries for solar, we should require batteries for nuclear as well. Which does not help its case very much.
> Nuclear, as a baseload generator, is not capable of meeting demand peaks, so if we are going to require batteries for solar, we should require batteries for nuclear as well.
Being a baseload generator is what nuclear is used for. It doesn't require batteries because you're not trying to use it for demand peaks.
Suppose you have 10GW of demand at night (minimum daily demand), 16GW at midday during peak solar generation and 20GW for two hours right after sunset (maximum daily demand). Do you want 20GW of nuclear? No, you want 10, to handle the first 10GW of demand at all times. That's baseload. Then you want another 10GW of solar, most of which is used directly during midday and the rest of which is used with storage to handle the demand peak just after sunset.
Doing it this way means you only need storage for the amount the demand peak after sunset exceeds baseload, which might be 20GWh of storage, instead of needing enough storage to satisfy the entire demand all night, which could be 140GWh.
It also improves resistance to low renewable generation because if renewable output is at 50% of normal for a week or more but the grid is half nuclear then the overall grid would have a 25% deficit instead of a 50% deficit. And then you need less in long-term storage, or peaker plants, to pick up that load.
Using nuclear for base load is silly. Why would you use the 12c/kWh nuclear energy while the sun is shining when you could be using the 0.5c/kWh solar instead?
> Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"
Well, if hydrogen from electrolysis really takes off, it would be possible to piggyback an exchange tower on the system to also get heavy water production.
If I'm reading this right, they just added up the remaining amortized capital cost of the plants, doubled that to give the investors a return, and divided by the amount of CO2 emissions that would be avoided.
They don't mention cost of replacements, or the costs of climate damage.
The installed capacity of solar has been doubling every 3 years for the past 15 years. And if it keeps going on this pace for another 15 years, solar will exceed the energy production of all other energy sources (coal, oil and gas’s).
It is my opinion that this should be a global roadmap. Double solar installed capacity every three years. It’s doable. We should do it.
One of the ways China is killing coal is of course with coal, aaaand the worlds largest ultra high voltage transmission power lines~30000 km's, which is so extensive that moving power from supply to demand works over several time zones. Enabling maximisation of solar and wind production by sending noon solar in one place to power the end of day surge somewhere else and coal is
playing a role by bieng run at full efficiency, with no need for load dumping.
Currently more than half of the load on the ultra high voltage transmissiin network is bieng provided for by renewables, and a mad mix of anything and
everything to fill in the gaps.
kind of like finding anything to put in empty shipping cans going back to china
driving American production of Hay, watered from aquifiers,ending up in China
or possibly mountains of wierd suspect corn,bieng shipped and then burned as fuel
in a coal plant.Thermal plant here in Nova Scotia, burns wood to make electricity.
And then back to hay, which is pelletised and used as fuel.World wide the use of bio fuels is going to be in the millions of tons, so it is too soon to close the book on carbon.
Someone in China drew an interesting picture of a slow rotating skyscraper shaped like a vertical axle wind turbine. Tall but the proportions of a bucket. Say such a thing has half a million ton in mass and 500 m diameter. The fun part is that losses are less than zero if there is some wind.
Wrongly framed. The price of not shutting down coal is an planet that would uninhabitable. That would cost more than all of the value humans ever created, create, or ever would create had we chosen more wisely to stop killing ourselves for the temporary "crack high" of profits today. Now, the challenge is in decarbonizing energy and all other industries one-by-one to limit the damage and destruction that has already been set in motion by energy already imparted and will be retained using the sky as an open sewer.
I don't think I'm anti-nuclear power. The only thing that works against nuclear, in my opinion, is the time it takes to build. A lot of solar and wind and battery can be built in the decade (if not more) that it seems to take a nuclear power station to be built.
Having said that, given the increasing power demands of civilization, why not both in parallel?
Why does it take time to build though? Is it a technical reason, or economic and regulatory reasons? If the latter, we could probably go faster if as a society we prioritized it.
Nuclear is seriously unfriendly stuff. Just read up on all the lessons (and coverups) the US nuclear industry learned about making nuclear fuels. The metals involvsd are toxic AF and unforgiving of any stupidity. We have a ton of regulations around this because businesses of the past just dumped things like mildly radioactive tailings to blow around in the wind.
I have heard the argument that the standard nuclear plant have the inefficiencies of any large building project, like building a big bridge. You never get the optimizations of mass production that you get in a factory that produces tens of thousands of solar panels or lots of wind turbines. I guess that is what SMR is trying to solve. I don’t know how that is going.
> No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.
The dollar density is also huge.
Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive. And figuring in the cost of nuclear waste disposal kills the project.
All other means of grid power generation are able to externalize expenses. Our society, for better or worse, won't let anything "nuclear" get away with that.
Baseload power comes at the expense of renewable power, the latter of which is much cheaper, much faster, and less riskier to deploy than nuclear. Peaking gas plants are much quicker to build than nuclear and should tide us over until grid storage (of all kinds) catches up – which looks to be around 1-2 decades at current scaling and about the lead time for a nuclear power plant
You don't need dispatchable baseload and batteries do scale enough. If nuclear was cost competitive, I'd support it, but it's just not. Look at how much renewables China is building vs. nuclear, if you think this opinion is somehow political in nature, it's not.
Presumably countries with a higher proportion of electricity from hydropower, like Canada and Brazil, could get even more out of this than Japan does in terms of stabilizing renewables.
We have a long way to go to shut down coal power. Here's a graph of current global fossil fuel consumption in exajoules. China uses about 84 exajoules of coal power, and is approaching 4 exajoules of nuclear, so that's a big job to replace with nuclear. China plans to triple their nuclear from their current ~50 plants, but that's still a smallish fraction of total demand.
> "Global coal consumption also hit a new high, exceeding 164 EJ for the first time. This represented a 1.6% increase from 2022, a growth rate seven times higher than the average over the previous decade. China remained the largest consumer, responsible for 56% of global coal use. China’s coal consumption increased by 4.7% in 2023, more than four times the country’s 1.1% average coal consumption growth rate of the past decade. For the first time, India’s coal consumption in 2023 surpassed the combined consumption of Europe and North America. Meanwhile, coal consumption in both Europe and North America dropped below 10 EJ each, marking their lowest levels since 1965."
The planet thus continues to head full tilt towards Pliocene conditions last seen 2-5 mya. A rational civilization would at this point be investing in a massive infrastructure project on a global scale to adapt to these new conditions, while simultaneously stepping up wind/solar/storage deployment at scale.
Global high, sure, and yet at the same time a very probable peak with a future of steady fall:
For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand.
Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.
The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector.
Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth
Off topic but I saw in a YouTube video how they suspect one of the earths greatest extinction events was partly driven by volcanic material igniting massive coal beds, the combination of the vulcanism and the coal burning killed like 90% of life on earth.
> Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geo-chronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key, short intervals, rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions.
Modern CO2 increase has been going on for 200 years, and is theorized to be comparable to one of the bursts that occurred during the Permian-Triassic extinction. However the PTME witnessed a few such bursts over the course of tens of thousands of years. CO2 levels sextupled from a base that was not much lower than where CO2 levels are today.
It's a warning about the dangers of CO2, but given the corrective actions already taking place I don't think CO2 levels will reach anywhere near those seen during the PTME. Most importantly CO2 level increases are driven by human activity which is a lot easier to modulate than volcanoes.
The Permian-Triassic extinction. A massive intrusion of basaltic magma into the The Tunguska Basin that also created the Siberian Traps. The intrusion heated organic-rich sediments and evaporites (salt, anhydrite) and caused eruption of gases. Siberia is littered with enormous pipes as much as 1 km in diameter that erupted massive amounts of gas during the event. In addition to CO2 and methane, the gas was loaded with chlorinated hydrocarbons from the salt, which could have devastated the ozone layer.
I've seen an estimate that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may have reached as high as 30,000 ppm (3%).
It was bad luck for the Paleozoic world that this massive mantle plume came up in perhaps the worst possible place.
Some of these pipes became filled with magnetite and as a result are mined for this rich iron ore.
Steel uses so much carbon that it’s been a target for using hydrogen as a reducing agent. There are a couple ironworks that have already started converting.
That’ll still leave concrete as one of the next largest sources, even if the rebar gets a smaller footprint.
One of the biggest Steel mils here in Argentina had a dedicated forest with 30.000.000 eucaliptus to make the coal. So it's possible to use carbon-neutral coal. More details (Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceros_Zapla_S.A.
There are two types of coal, metallurgical and thermal.
Energy for steel production can come from coal, but doesn't need to, coal bound with iron to make steel is a different reaction to burning coal for energy.
"Green steel" (as odd as that sounds) is an active area of research ATM, promising but there's a looong way to go to reduce the emissions from a billion+ tonnes of steel per annum (and concrete production and other resource processing).
Coal is key to current steel manufacturing process. There are experimental green steel processes but very nascent. If you're building stuff, you need coal.
China, though, is still adding coal capacity.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/243934/coal-consumption-...
[2] https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity...
It's a bit misleading because China is mostly _replacing_ old coal power plants now.
China has probably passed the peak coal consumption this year, or it will in 2025.
Not that this is a problem.
Let's see if democracy is ever able to do the same.
Pollution in China was terrible. Pretty much everybody hated it, and it was not possible to hide or whitewash it.
The US was in the same position during 60-s and 70-s, and it fixed the worst of the pollution rapidly. The EPA was established during the freaking Nixon administration.
https://dialogue.earth/en/pollution/how-climate-change-compl...
Source: https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstruction...
See: (for example) https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001
[0] Barring a discovery that coal can be converted into the elixir of youth, etc.
WRT China, they can't over produce renewable energy and be the largest global supplier of green energy without coal .. at least not yet.
While that middle class has a per capita energy and consumption figure that is lower than the USA per capita figures it is the case that the US has set an aspiration life style expectation that sees demand grow.
China's coal use has become increasingly more efficient; much is made of additional new modern coal power houses, little mention is made of the larger numbers of older inefficient far dirtier coal plants have been closed down and are still being closed down.
Nuclear and renewables are part of overall energy production in China to a far greater proportion and absolute number than in the US.
The scale of China's energy production is substantial and not easily characterised.
China has a smaller nuclear fleet capacity than the US and meets a much smaller percentage of its electricity needs with nuclear power:
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
As of 2023 US got 18.55% of electricity from nuclear power (775 terawatt hours) while China got 4.86% (433 TWh).
As of 2023 China does get a larger share from renewables:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Pr...
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
It's 29.1% renewables in China (2,756 TWh) vs. 21.4% (894 TWh) in the United States.
Grouping nuclear and renewables together as low-emissions sources, the US gets 47.65% of its electricity from low-emissions sources and China gets 33.96% from low-emissions sources.
China is building nuclear and renewable sources faster than the US, so will narrow the gap over the rest of the decade, but it's also growing its total electricity consumption faster.
I mostly check my figures before comments, this is what I deserve for going off the cuff :-) ( thanks )
> In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They’re now running around 50%.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/141628065/chinas-c...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41831861
EDIT: but apparently it went back up in April. Installed coal capacity is 49.3% but since hydro dropped in April it went up again
https://www.seforall.org/press-releases/new-research-finds-u...
Your rational long term argument has little sway when key decision makers are bribed and offered a chance to retire to a mansion elsewhere on the planet.
The future maybe different, but right now coal use has peaked and is starting to fall. See (for example) actual data [1].
> Once that happens ..
you speculate, you engage in wishful thinking, you ignore actual resource consumption projections gathered globally over decades by major resource companies.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023
The problem is that not all parts of the world have access to cheap nat gas
Modelers of all ilks generally avoid reporting the underlying uncertainties in their results. And when they do report them, they are woefully underestimated. Fine in the abstract, but not acceptable when trillions of dollars are at stake. Dollars that can be spent instead on direct low risk, high impact improvements in third world child health (clean air, clean water, infectious diseases, etc.). Maybe choose those that also mitigate climate impacts (as we currently understand them), but directly save the living children/people first.
Keep on improving the models with scientific research, but don’t fool ourselves about the accuracy and completeness of such models for policy analysis. I’m old enough to remember the Club of Rome/Limits to Growth controversies.
At this point in time there's a clear understanding of the consequences of the current 11 billion tonne of CO2 equivilant emmissions released annually .. an increase in trapped solar heat energy that directly leads to increased storm intensity, climbing global mean tempretures, and edging closer to positive feedback thresholds which are significantly hard to reverse when crossed.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/11/12/worlds-second-largest...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42124253
Just to be clear, I'm referring to the use of electrical batteries for the temporary storage of solar power, so that the power can be available when the sun is not.
Non-electrical storage techniques (gravity, hydro) would seem better suited for long-term reliability.
Scale up manufacturing, scale up deployment, scale up recycling, and you've got a circular supply chain system. At end of life, new (very likely better) batteries are installed and the old ones (in decades) are shipped back for recycling. In the US, this is Redwood Materials [4], founded by JB Straubel (former Tesla CTO). They have agreements to both recycle batteries with major automakers as well as supply feedstock for new battery components [5]. I'm unsure if this circular supply chain system exists in China yet, but I presume it is straightforward with their nation state resources to encourage along.
Pumped hydro is great where you can build it and it is cost superior to batteries, but batteries can be shipped and installed anywhere a concrete pad is waiting for them, very rapidly.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/megapack ("Each Megapack unit ships fully assembled and ready to operate, allowing for quick installation timelines and reduced complexity. Systems require minimal maintenance and include up to a 20-year warranty.")
[2] https://electrek.co/2024/09/16/catl-launches-new-ev-battery-... ("CATL launches ultra-high-energy-density EV bus battery that lasts nearly 1 million miles")
[3] https://electrek.co/2024/05/17/china-first-large-scale-sodiu... ("China’s first large-scale sodium-ion battery charges to 90% in 12 minutes")
[4] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ ("Redwood Materials: We’re building a circular supply chain to power a sustainable world")
[5] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/#partners ("Redwood Material: Partners")
As I understand it, the Tesla warranty was factored into the purchase price as a way to stabilize the TCO, and has little to do with the physical lifecycle of the lithium cells.
Sodium looks very promising, but it's "not there yet."
Where does that understanding come from? Because Tesla's warranty is consistent with every other manufacturers warranty that I have seen, basically 4000-5000 cycles is standard for grid storage lithium ion.
Given the dramatic price decline of LFP cells in the past year, I'm not sure this is still the case.
Probably something for Lazard's next LCOE report, to act as a canonical reference for such discussions.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
Current exploitation of coal in the US maybe be declining, but it is still an important part of a robust portfolio of energy technologies. The US is, in fact, the Saudi Arabia of coal and, to meet robustness requirements for meeting short and long term US energy demand, coal is a common sense component. Maybe eventually only in some mothballed-annual testing-fast restart sense, but it’s a very cheap insurance policy. Keeping the pilot light on for the US coal industry as well, from a National Security standpoint.
Keep improving renewables, but don’t throw away what works. There’s a beauty to a highly diverse portfolio. You sleep better at night.
What yeah, makes them one of the countries mostly investing in coal out there. But there hasn't been an increase, and it ought to fall fast at some point to one of the cheaper alternatives.
Nuclear is around $70/MWhr, one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.
Solar is highly distributeable so it can be placed closer to where the power is used, reducing transmission losses. It doesn't need to be very carefully sited in terms of where it goes on the grid, and nobody needs to worry about the long term geological stability of the area. It doesn't need to be partnered with another plant for cold starts. It has no safety concerns. It doesn't need any labor to operate - mostly occasional repairs to damage and cleaning. It has no capacity to cause any sort of disaster. It does not generate toxic waste in operation.
Nobody has ever said "don't shoot tank rounds near that solar farm or you might cause thousands of square miles of land to be uninhabitable for centuries."
Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"
The administration kowtowing to industry lobbyists to fund nuclear energy when the market was already adding seven times as much renewables as it is decommissioning nuclear capacity...is just corporate welfare, pure and simple.
China's high to moderate quality solar capacity will be built out very quickly, and it won't provide enough to close the gap from fossil-based generation. From there, the cost of solar generation will rise as low quality capacity is developed.
China will need a way to import some of their energy generation, possibly through by importing goods like iron and steel that have a high energy production cost, from countries like Australia that can produce them using renewable energy (green iron / green steel) using Australia's almost limitless solar resources.
Since much of Australia's coal is also used in places like China to smelt their local and imported iron and steel, this could further drive down production of coal.
> According to China Energy News, the combined length of the UHV transmission lines operating in China had reached 48,000km (30,000 miles) by the end of 2020, more than enough to wrap around the Earth by the equator.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/chinas-energy-infrastructure
Nuclear, as a baseload generator, is not capable of meeting demand peaks, so if we are going to require batteries for solar, we should require batteries for nuclear as well. Which does not help its case very much.
Solar + battery storage is cheaper than Vogtle, but Vogtle was an exercise in mismanagement before COVID caused it to be even worse. Compare:
https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/
> Nuclear, as a baseload generator, is not capable of meeting demand peaks, so if we are going to require batteries for solar, we should require batteries for nuclear as well.
Being a baseload generator is what nuclear is used for. It doesn't require batteries because you're not trying to use it for demand peaks.
Suppose you have 10GW of demand at night (minimum daily demand), 16GW at midday during peak solar generation and 20GW for two hours right after sunset (maximum daily demand). Do you want 20GW of nuclear? No, you want 10, to handle the first 10GW of demand at all times. That's baseload. Then you want another 10GW of solar, most of which is used directly during midday and the rest of which is used with storage to handle the demand peak just after sunset.
Doing it this way means you only need storage for the amount the demand peak after sunset exceeds baseload, which might be 20GWh of storage, instead of needing enough storage to satisfy the entire demand all night, which could be 140GWh.
It also improves resistance to low renewable generation because if renewable output is at 50% of normal for a week or more but the grid is half nuclear then the overall grid would have a 25% deficit instead of a 50% deficit. And then you need less in long-term storage, or peaker plants, to pick up that load.
Well, if hydrogen from electrolysis really takes off, it would be possible to piggyback an exchange tower on the system to also get heavy water production.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980IJHE....5..409H/abstra...
(that's an old reference; the CECE process has since been driven to maturity by Canada.)
* The investor's return, without subsidies.
* The cost to the public of replacing coal with something else.
The article says,
> the cost per tonne of CO2 emissions avoided is just $34.
Does anyone grasp what they mean exactly, and where that number comes from?
They don't mention cost of replacements, or the costs of climate damage.
It is my opinion that this should be a global roadmap. Double solar installed capacity every three years. It’s doable. We should do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/energy/whats-driving...
No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.
Having said that, given the increasing power demands of civilization, why not both in parallel?
I don't think nuclear power centrals should be rushed.
The dollar density is also huge.
Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive. And figuring in the cost of nuclear waste disposal kills the project.
All other means of grid power generation are able to externalize expenses. Our society, for better or worse, won't let anything "nuclear" get away with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Japa...
Presumably countries with a higher proportion of electricity from hydropower, like Canada and Brazil, could get even more out of this than Japan does in terms of stabilizing renewables.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/China-and-the-US-Are-Respo...
For current coal consumption:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Global-Coal-Production-Hits...
> "Global coal consumption also hit a new high, exceeding 164 EJ for the first time. This represented a 1.6% increase from 2022, a growth rate seven times higher than the average over the previous decade. China remained the largest consumer, responsible for 56% of global coal use. China’s coal consumption increased by 4.7% in 2023, more than four times the country’s 1.1% average coal consumption growth rate of the past decade. For the first time, India’s coal consumption in 2023 surpassed the combined consumption of Europe and North America. Meanwhile, coal consumption in both Europe and North America dropped below 10 EJ each, marking their lowest levels since 1965."
The planet thus continues to head full tilt towards Pliocene conditions last seen 2-5 mya. A rational civilization would at this point be investing in a massive infrastructure project on a global scale to adapt to these new conditions, while simultaneously stepping up wind/solar/storage deployment at scale.
> Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geo-chronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key, short intervals, rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions.
Modern CO2 increase has been going on for 200 years, and is theorized to be comparable to one of the bursts that occurred during the Permian-Triassic extinction. However the PTME witnessed a few such bursts over the course of tens of thousands of years. CO2 levels sextupled from a base that was not much lower than where CO2 levels are today.
It's a warning about the dangers of CO2, but given the corrective actions already taking place I don't think CO2 levels will reach anywhere near those seen during the PTME. Most importantly CO2 level increases are driven by human activity which is a lot easier to modulate than volcanoes.
I've seen an estimate that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may have reached as high as 30,000 ppm (3%).
It was bad luck for the Paleozoic world that this massive mantle plume came up in perhaps the worst possible place.
Some of these pipes became filled with magnetite and as a result are mined for this rich iron ore.
That’ll still leave concrete as one of the next largest sources, even if the rebar gets a smaller footprint.
Energy for steel production can come from coal, but doesn't need to, coal bound with iron to make steel is a different reaction to burning coal for energy.
"Green steel" (as odd as that sounds) is an active area of research ATM, promising but there's a looong way to go to reduce the emissions from a billion+ tonnes of steel per annum (and concrete production and other resource processing).
China does it well - they are building out nuclear, coal, and carpeting entire rooftops with solar and mountain ridges with wind turbines.