[clarionbell]

I like how balanced their energy mix is. It is very obvious that China is optimizing for capacity and availability. There isn't really a push for clean energy sources for political, or climate, reasons. They are deployed when it makes sense, backed up by robust coal and nuclear sources.

In Europe, we approach energy generation as a political, or climate problem. We are building solar and wind power sources, not to make energy cheaper, or to make grid more resilient, but to fulfill an ideological goal.

The results are, not great, to be honest. The energy prices have increased substantially, and are now driving our chemical industry bankrupt.

Edit: I do not dispute the climate change. I am only highlighting impacts of current policy.

[toast0]

China is building all types of generation because they are rapidly growing their electric network (generation doubled from 2014 to 2024).

Europe's generation is roughly flat during the same period.

It doesn't make sense to build a lot of everything in a system without growth in generation. Replacing decommisioned generators would be enough. Growth in solar and wind generation (for ideological or economic reasons) means there's less reason to build new capacity of other types. There's complications there with firm vs intermittent capacity, but that's a different discussion.

US electrical generation was also flat from 2000 to 2020, but seems to be growing again since then, but not anywhere near China's growth rate.

[energy123]

They're not really building anything other than renewables. Nuclear is a rounding error and new coal is just replacing old coal.

[leonidasrup]

China is still installing much more new coal power capacity then is decommissioning old coal power capacity.

Also the average age of Chinese coal power plants is much lower then the average age of US coal power plants. These new Chinese coal power plants could be used for decades.

Last available data from 2025.

https://www.statista.com/chart/36007/power-capacity-of-new-d...

https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...

[energy123]

What you said does not technically contradict what I said.

You have to decide what it is that you wish to measure.

I do not pay attention to "decommissioning", because a binary on/off switch is an arbitrary threshold.

If China reduced the output of every coal plant to 1%, they would be "decommissioning" nothing, and yet it would be fair to say that they've abandoned coal almost completely.

That's why it's a better metric to look at change in net coal usage (which is flat or going down in China last year), which factors in non-binary underutilization of old coal plants, as new coal and renewables come online.

[toast0]

Stats on wikipedia [1] stopped breaking out coal from other fossil fuel ('thermal') production in 2021.

But coal was 4.1 million GWh in 2014 and 5.0 million GWh in 2021; that's a lot of (relatively) new coal. Fossil fuel growth since 2023 is a lot less than earlier years, so maybe they have hit saturation for fossil fuel generation. I would expect high fossil fuel prices so far this year would drive usage lower, the stats for 2026 should be interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

[ZeroGravitas]

Stats on additional generation for the last few years:

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[psd1]

Energy prices globally spiked in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine (again). I conclude that energy is tied more closely to fossil than solar. Happy to stand with you and throw rocks at stupid solar policy, though.

[trhway]

>I like how balanced their energy mix is. It is very obvious that China is optimizing for capacity and availability. There isn't really a push for clean energy sources for political, or climate, reasons. They are deployed when it makes sense, backed up by robust coal and nuclear sources.

yes, they don't seem to fall for the "solar is unstable" trap and recognize new reality - the solar + wind smoothed by nuclear/gas is the new baseline

To the comment on the coal below : not really. You don't need that much as a smoothing capacity.

[boelboel]

You mean + coal, they don't have a meaningful amount of nuclear (just under 5% of electricity mix and 2% of energy). 50% of electricity is coal.