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Why China is Winning the Clean Energy Race (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. politicians have been warning for years that America couldn't let China win the clean energy race. That's exactly what has happened, with the trends most stark in electric cars, solar and nuclear energy. Why it matters: Building for the last decade, these trends have accelerated in the last couple of years. Politicians and business leaders said America's dominance in this space would bring jobs to the U.S. and security to our clean-energy resources, and now both of those goals are at risk. Why China is doing this: It needs to literally energize its 1.4 billion people, both how they travel and how they power their homes. Its leadership feels compelled to do it in a cleaner way than the U.S. did. Air pollution is at dangerously high levels across many of China's cities. People are seeing and feeling health repercussions of China's dependence on fossil fuel-fired cars and power plants in an acute way. Traditional air pollution, not climate change, is a big driver.
Your comment makes little sense, gurps_npc is not making anything black and white. If anything, their explanation is pretty nuanced, and far from ignorance.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
China is building 700 coal plants, with 80% of the energy generation capacity within China. And that's just in the next few years. I guess when China deploys an order of magnitude more power generation as coal rather than wind or solar it's considered a "clean energy win"?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
China dominates the market for rare earths, which are necessary for the high strength magnets that windmills need, and for the interesting material high efficiency solar panels need.
Why doesn't the U.S. have a stronger edge in rare earths? Because you can't dig them up without also digging up lots of thorium, which we classify as a nuclear source material - and so impose a lot of requirements on how it's handled. And then we don't use it, even though we've known how to use it as a clean energy source for decades. Mostly because environmentalist groups scare people with the "N" word.
China is also constructing Thorium reactors, btw.
It makes sense to measure absolute production output if your goal is to grow a domestic industry. It doesn't matter how many people you serve (well, the more the better; more customers). The more you build, the better you get at building it.
This leads to better, cheaper, superior products that other countries will line up to buy.
It happened with electronics; they're trying to make it happen with advanced energy.
this shows China way ahead of Europe and America on nuclear power. However, in 2020, China will have 58 GW of nuclear power by 2021.
America has over 100 GW of nuclear power, but sadly, the same idiots from groups like this, continue to drive up our costs.
Europe has over 163 GW of nuclear power, and yet, this article claims that China is winning that?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You overlook the way China dominates PV panel production. For solar they might or might not lead in deployment but they own the production side and it's become almost impossible for the developed world to compete. The scale of production gives them an overwhelming price advantage.
Chinese PV prices are falling so fast in markets that don't use tariff proctectionism it's threatening traditional energy companies. Here in the UK our idiot gov are trying really hard to kill PV by premature subsidy removal and failing to outrun the price drops. In the US you as usual let the incumbent energy companies lobby and sue PV out of many states even before Trump declared war.
It's big business and you're lost the war for the production business.
Your story was out of date and wrong even when it was printed. See here and check the end, also note the dates are written differently such that while your article was written later it was also wrong when published.
On top of that, China has been through 4 straight year on year reductions in the amount of coal consumed while their energy generation has increased year on year. Even if they are still playing with coal, they are most definitely trending correctly.