China Cancels Over 100 Coal-Fired Power Plants (reuters.com)

In an effort to improve air quality, the Chinese government has canceled over 100 coal-fired power plants in 11 provinces -- totaling a combined installed capacity of more than 100 gigawatts. Reuters reports: In a document issued on Jan. 14, financial media group Caixin reported, the National Energy Administration (NEA) suspended the coal projects, some of which were already under construction. The projects worth some 430 billion yuan ($62 billion) were to have been spread across provinces and autonomous regions including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi and other northwestern areas. Putting the power projects on hold is a major step towards the government's effort to produce power from renewable sources such as solar and wind, and wean the country off coal, which accounts for the majority of the nation's power supply. To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie. "This shows the government is keeping its promise in curbing supplies of coal power," Yu said. Some of the projects will still go ahead, but not until 2025 and will likely replace outdated technology, he said.

Comments

Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming

[autonomouse]

Turns out the climate is quite big and complicated and trapping more energy in the system doesn't lead to perfectly distributed warming all over the planet, at all times.

Re:Pleasant surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to see a positive comment on Slashdot. For a change.

Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming

[KeensMustard]

Because apparently last year was the 'hottest year on record', even though it was a very mild summer in the U.K.

Aaaaand what percentage of the earths surface is covered by the UK?

And nothing like the drought of 1976.

Was there a worldwide drought in 1976?

And 'since records began' means 'in the past 150 years', and the planet has existed for millions of years.

Aaaand for how many of those millions of years have we been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and disabling carbon sinks?

Only half true article

[blindseer]

Interesting that the article makes no mention of China's plans to build more nuclear power plants.
Found this with a quick Google search:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09...

China intends to bring 58 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity into operation by 2020, up from the current capacity of roughly 27 gigawatts, according to World Nuclear News. China plans to follow this by getting about 10 percent of its electricity from 150 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030, according to the World Nuclear Association.

Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?

There is a bias in all news. The bias is in not only what they choose to report but what they choose to leave out. I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve, that way at least I know what they likely chose to report and leave out.

Re:Only half true article

[AmiMoJo]

Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?

They didn't mention it because it's not true and the parts that are true are misleading. The World Nuclear Association is basically the propaganda arm of the nuclear industry, so you wouldn't really expect anything else.

China had big plans for nuclear. Post Fukushima, it has massively scaled them back. They were talking about 240GW at one point, around 15% of their projected energy use. Yes, 15% was the highest goal, not exactly massive. Anyway, it's all been abandoned and reduced now, with approvals frozen and the reality of over-budget over-time current builds setting in.

Any way you look at it, China is moving away from both coal and nuclear towards renewables. Beyond the current short term plans for nuclear it looks like it will decline as a percentage of total energy generated.

I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve

Like people who take the World Nuclear Association's word for it... I appreciate what you are trying to do, but you are doing it wrong.

Trump will build them

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump will build the 100 plants in the US.

Re:Frank Yu doesn't know what he's talking about.

[scsirob]

And I want to become a Billionaire. I have saved up 25 Euro's already..
Replacing their nucleair power with wind/solar is naïve and unrealistic at best. They can 'want', but they can't 'do'.

Re:Saving the world with a Tax.

[TheRaven64]

The idea of a tax isn't as silly as you make it sound. The problem with most forms of pollution (from a purely economic standpoint) is that one person or company gains the benefits from polluting, but everyone pays the costs. This is known as an externality. Taxing pollution fixes this and means that the polluting technology becomes more expensive to operate and makes the barrier to entry for non-polluting technologies higher. If something is producing a lot of carbon dioxide but costs $5/widget, and you add a tax that amounts to $2.50/widget, then a replacement technology that doesn't emit any CO_2 but costs $7/widget is now cheaper to use. This means that you can bring it to market before you've got the economies of scale to push the price down below $5/widget.

Re:Frank Yu doesn't know what he's talking about.

[dbIII]

Second, it's a matter of reliability. Wind power only works when the wind blows. Solar power only works when the sun shines.

Consider a grid and you'll be taken a bit more seriously.

Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming

[smallfries]

The weird thing about racists is the way they need to inject their views into unrelated topics.