Slashdot Mirror
China Likely Cut GHG Emissions In 2015 (greenpeace.org)
mdsolar writes: Economic and industrial data released [Thursday] by the Chinese government's statistical agency indicates the country's carbon emissions likely fell by around 3% — with the contraction of key heavy industry sectors and the continued expansion of renewable energies driving a wedge between total energy demand and coal use. According to the data, China's coal output fell by 3.5% in 2015, thermal power generation by 3%, coal imports by 30%, pig iron output by 4%, coking coal output by 7%, and cement by 5%. All this suggests that both power sector coal consumption and total coal consumption probably fell by more than 4%. Total oil consumption grew only 1.1% in the first eleven months, gas consumption by 3.7% while cement production (which releases CO2 directly) fell by 4.9%. This indicates a fall of 3-4% in China's fossil CO2 emissions, roughly equal to Poland's total emissions.
They aren't the workbench of the world anymore -- there are cheaper countries for these tasks. Yes, its still full of industry, but the trend is towards salary raises and therefore higher cost which means less competitiveness on the international market.
Also, china has created an artificial bubble in the aftermath of the 2007 crash, which is now, slowly, collapsing. There had been a big real estate bubble as well, which collapsed too.
The shrinking economy then leads to less emissions. Its good that they can indeed cut their emissions, but it would be greater if they could continue to do it with their economy growing.
They ARE selling reactors to the rest of the world. The ACPR1000 is a pretty reasonable gen 3 reactor. They are selling them all over the place. (except to the US)
They are ALSO doing massive solar installations where it makes sense to - but yeah, most of the time nuclear is making sense, so they are ramping it up in a big way. They have massive research going into Molten Salt Reactors. Its one of the reasons I think they are "not ready yet" is that China is not shy in putting something like them in place, but haven't done so yet.
You can be sure when they are ready, they will be putting them in bulk,
and considering the problems they are having with the coal plants, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
--- Blair
Question -- when you say the Chinese have installed "installed 17 to 22GW of solar power" in 2015 does that mean the installations will produce an average of 17 to 22GW of power or do you mean the solar plants have that maximum capacity but will only deliver a fraction of that amount of electricity over the period of a year, day and night?
The nuclear reactors China is building and planning to build will operate with an uptime of about 90% or so, so the six (by my count) 1GW reactors they brought into operation in 2015 will produce an average of 5.5GW day and night, rain and shine. The twenty or so reactors under construction will add another 15GW or so of similarly reliable power over the next few years.
The bad news is that the Chinese are going to keep building new coal power plants, more efficient and less polluting than the older plants being decommissioned or retrofitted because they need hundreds of gigawatts of new electricity capacity to meet demand and coal is cheap and readily available (China mines about half the world's total output of coal annually) and no-one cares enough about the ongoing pollution disaster and its health effects for them to stop burning coal.