[matthewdgreen]

China installed more solar PV and wind generation in the first 9 months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear power stations under construction will provide (already adjusted for capacity factor.)

It's true that China is beating the rest of the world on nuclear construction. It is also unfortunately true that current-gen (non SMR) nuclear doesn't scale the way factory-built solar PV and wind tech does. Again reposting this very illustrative chart: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...

[vlovich123]

If solar and wind is meeting all the needs, why is China building so much nuclear?

[matthewdgreen]

Starting in the late 2000s China began investing in nuclear, renewables and storage all at the same time. The original (optimistic) plan called for nuclear to peak at 18% of their electricity generation by 2060. But that was before the recent breakout expansion of renewables and cost decreases in battery storage. Since then China seems to have pulled back a lot on nuclear [1], coinciding with huge price decreases and deployment surges in solar PV and wind. Even adjusted for capacity factor, new wind+solar are seeing about 60x the installed capacity of nuclear (as of 2023) and that number has been on an upward trend.

[1] "It peaked in 2018 with 7 reactors with a capacity of 8.2 GW. For the five years since then then it’s been averaging 2.3 GW of new nuclear capacity, and last year only added 1.2 GW between a new GW scale reactor and a 200 MW small modular nuclear reactor." https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...

[vlovich123]

> However, teething troubles mean that power grids are still struggling to absorb the huge capacity expansions and it will be a while before the new plants meet viable levels of actual power generation

> China's renewable capacity growth is yet to reflect in electricity supply, with coal still occupying nearly 60% of the country's generation mix

So basically China built a bunch of solar power plants that aren't connected to anything. Given how little transparency there is in China, it's entirely possible the plants were built because the country was generating way more solar panels than was useful globally & thus had to purchase it to prevent an absolute cratering in solar PV price.

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

Oh wait, https://www.economist.com/business/2024/06/17/chinas-giant-s....

> China's giant solar industry is in turmoil. Overcapacity has caused prices—and profits—to tumble

Non paywall, similar sentiment: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-blistering-so...

> The country's solar power expansion is slowing due to tighter curbs on supplying excess power from rooftop solar into the grid and changes in electricity pricing that are denting the economics of new solar projects.

It's really starting to look like 2023 was a fluke and solar projects are running into the headwinds everyone's been saying they will - no grid is set up to switch to solar and the more solar you install the more you destabilize the grid. And since panel prices have dropped so low because of global subsidies to rooftop solar, existing policies around rooftop solar turn into another headwind which slows down growth of grid solar & should see panel prices start to rise back up as people stop installing rooftop solar, pushing solar projects back out of profitability at either end.

In other words, we've kind of hit "peak solar" in the near term and the outlook for grid solar displacing fossil fuels is very cloudy.

[matthewdgreen]

Except that China is on pace to exceed 2023 deployment in 2024. They've already installed 45.7GW in the first quarter. You're drawing a lot of inferences from a phrase in one article. They're also installing massive amounts of grid-stabilizing storage: 35.3GW in just Q1 of this year, which exceeds the 22.7GW they installed in all of 2023.

You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are. It's a strange thing to be comforted by; in any case, I don't think it's a particularly good idea to become attached to.

[vlovich123]

> You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are

No, I'm concerned that for all the amount of renewables they're deploying, almost none of it is getting connected to the grid and the amount of fossil fuel usage is unaffected by all this solar capacity they've installed. I'd love it if solar actually helped us get the grid to net 0 by 2050. The problem is that right now we're way off track to achieve that goal.

According to https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-battery-storage-ca..., China's expected to install less storage in 2024 not 2023:

> Growth in China's battery storage capacity could slow down in 2024, according to an industry association, as energy storage struggles with low profitability.

Confusingly other sources claim that they installed 10 GW in 2023 so it seems like for all of this concrete reliable numbers may be hard to obtain. Anyway, the point still stands - battery + renewables remains a pricing challenge vs fission and renewables alone cannot supplant the equivalent amount of fossil fuels in the grid due to how complex the grid is & gris are fundamentally not designed for intermittent sources like renewables & the more you install the more unstable & expensive it gets trying to stabilize it.

Thus my concern remains that solar has failed to demonstrate a power to actually displace fossil fuels within the grid reliably at scale whereas nuclear has a demonstrated track record of doing so consistently. I worry that deinvesting in nuclear in favor of renewables is going to continue to pour good money after bad and thus result in a prolonged decarbonization plan. It'll be the irony of ironies when we'll end up buying Chinese nuclear reactors so that we can actually decarbonize our grid.