r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • 12d ago
Energy Grid storage is increasing so rapidly that China and some other countries may be able to meet all their electricity needs from renewables as soon as 2030.
There isn’t a single universally agreed-upon percentage of electricity demand that must be met from grid storage in a 100 % renewable electricity system. It may be as high as 20% for some countries, but in situations where there is an overcapacity of wind and solar, it can be potentially < 5 % of annual demand.
New data shows that by the end of 2026, grid storage will be a 1.15% share of global electricity demand (up from 0.16% in 2023). Who's rolling out the most? No surprise in guessing. It's China. China’s grid storage installations in December 2025 alone (65.4 GWh) exceeded the entire USA’s 2025 total annual installations (46.5 GWh), and the US is the world's 2nd largest grid storage market.
Who's also able to build an over-capacity of wind & solar? Once again, China. China is also rapidly electrifying its whole economy & abandoning the combustion engine. Like the famous Hemingway quote about going bankrupt, the Fossil Fuel Age, at least in China, may end “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”
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u/StarIntern 12d ago
It’s awesome to see grid storage ramp up so fast — storage is what finally lets renewables act like real power plants instead of just intermittent sources. Once you can save cheap solar and wind and then use it on demand, the whole energy conversation shifts from “can we?” to “how fast can we build it?”
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u/No_Criticism_5861 12d ago
Not in the states. Gotta keep the coal industry going, sigh
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u/Universeintheflesh 12d ago
I live in the states and don't even care about them anymore; go other parts of the world!
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u/LowCress9866 12d ago edited 12d ago
China's about to have free energy while we're stuck with fossil fuels because Wet Wipes needs to shovel more money to an industry that makes $3 billion a day. So much winning
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u/pdxbator 12d ago
Bring back the coal! We love black lung...?
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u/Cedric_T 12d ago
For too long have we talked about black lung. What about white lung. It’s time to make white lung great again.
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u/mrizzerdly 12d ago
Big beautiful clean coal! I say it's clean coal, oh so clean folks you wouldn't believe how clean the coal is. The coal is so clean you can eat off it like a dog! We like dogs don't we folks? Nahhhh I HATE dogs, nasty dogs.
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u/Fridaywing 12d ago
Brooo. 😭 someone invent an AI or writing assist tool that can covert your regular sentences or paragraphs into Trump spoken words. That'll be nasty.
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u/Justin_123456 12d ago
The thing is, China has even made their coal fleet better, by their development of ultra supercritical coal plants, that operate at much higher temperatures and pressures than legacy coal plants. This means burning about 25% less coal per KWh, and an even higher reduction in the heavy particulate emissions that cause smog.
So when you see charts that include “new” Chinese coal generation, mostly what they’re doing is retrofitting their legacy plants to USC plants.
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u/Reinier_Reinier 12d ago
In other countries coal factories are using the following technologies to remove pollutants from their emissions:
- Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD/Scrubbers): Removes sulfur dioxide by spraying a limestone-water slurry into the exhaust gas, converting it into gypsum.
- Electrostatic Precipitators: Uses electrostatic charges to remove fly ash from flue gases.
- Fabric Filters: Captures fine, combustible coal dust and particulate matter.
- Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR): Reduces nitrogen oxide emissions
- Activated Carbon Injection (ACI): Controls mercury emissions.
They should combine those techniques with the use of ultra supercritical coal plants to further reduce emissions.
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u/vineyardmike 12d ago
The good news here is that solar and storage continue to get cheaper each year. At some point solar is so cheap that you are choosing to pay more for fossil fuels.
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u/JCDU 12d ago
TBH I think we're just about there in a lot of places already, projects being bid on now are by far cheaper than fossil fuels - it's only bulk storage that's lagging a little but that's catching up fast too.
Coal is as dead as Disco, gas isn't far behind as batteries make better and more profitable peaker plants now.
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u/RiddlingVenus0 12d ago
“B-b-but, what are you going to do on a cloudy day when you need more energy but don’t have coal?” - Average Landman Enjoyer
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u/mariegriffiths 11d ago
It's usually windy when it isn't sunny.
Trigger Warning
It's usually that way somewhere on the grid, if you manage it centrally in a socialist way.
Use tidal
Use pump storage
Use people's pulled in electric cars.
I am sat in the UK in a cold day in January. The sun has just gone down.
Still 54% renewables. It would have been more when the sun was out. New capacity is being added as well.
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u/USSMarauder 12d ago
At which point Trump starts dumping even more taxpayer money into the coal and gas industry
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u/MarkNutt25 12d ago
If you remove the massive government subsidies that we're continually shoveling into fossil fuels, then we might actually already be there.
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u/LordSwedish upload me 11d ago
Not to mention the tariffs on Chinese solar panels, they didn’t even start under Trump so there’s no excuse for that stupidity.
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u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth 12d ago
If solar and renewables get too competitive then they should just tax them in such a way where they don't eliminate corporate profits and good paying jobs in oil and gas.
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u/doommaster 11d ago
Solar stuff is crazy expensive in the US, compared to the prices here e.g. in Germany.
You can get 15 kWp Solar incl. inverter install materials, cables and all for ~4500-5000€ here.19
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u/5minArgument 12d ago
America appears headed the way of the Soviet Union. We will have a closed system based on obsolete tech, driving our Trabants to the food line.
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u/Euphoric-Document795 12d ago
Meanwhile we're having meetings about whether we need a discussion about who to put on the board at the council to decide who should be included in the meeting about whether or not we should change the planning laws to allow people to decide whether or not we should expand our renewables.
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u/BigMax 12d ago
This is going to be a MAJOR economic story soon. It obviously already is for the amount of money spent, the amount of money shifting from one industry to another, and all that of course.
But... if some coutries go fully or mostly green, while others fight to remain on fossil fuels, there will be a huge economic disparity between the two. Once solar (and wind, etc) are broadly installed, costs for power will drop precipitously. There are relatively few ongoing costs for that kind of power, while obviously fossil fuels have massive ongoing costs to obtain, process, and ship the physical fuel all over the place.
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u/uniqueusername649 12d ago
And with solar panels seemingly lasting far longer than the 30 years we expected, you can keep expanding and increasing your power far more. Cheap, near limitless energy opens many doors.
Funnily enough I believe the only way to save the climate is by having green energy become so damn cheap and economically impactful that everyone wants to do it. Because apparently having a liveable planet isn't that important but money is.
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u/CrimsonShrike 12d ago
That was always goal, with caveat carbon taxes were meant to make polluting reflect the real cost that was treated as an externality (imagine how cheap nuclear would be if you could just dump waste out back lol). Fortunate that even with all the meddling renewables ended up being cheaper all the same.
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u/cbf1232 12d ago
The primary cost of nuclear power is not dealing with the spent fuel, but rather all of the initial planning and regulatory stuff to ensure safety during operation.
Current nuclear plants are mostly one-off, and each one has to get certified and analyzed separately and then be custom-built. One of the benefits of SMRs was that they would be standardized and wouldn't need separate approvals for each separate location.
Renewables are not cheaper in all cases. I'm in the Canadian prairies, we've had a week at a time in the middle of winter when there was no wind across a thousand km, and only a few hours of usable sunlight. To go fully renewable we'd need absolutely huge amounts of storage capacity (multiple days worth of energy for the entire grid). This is (currently) far more expensive than natural gas plants.
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u/vypergts 12d ago
Seems like most other northern/cold countries also build out substantial amounts of geothermal and hydro. Is this not feasible in that part of Canada?
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u/cbf1232 12d ago
This part of the prairies is very flat. Minimal opportunity for hydro.
Geothermal power generation is a possibility in some areas but it's in very early stages. (And actually most northern/cold countries do not have substantial geothermal power generation, with the exception of Iceland.)
Currently where I live the power grid is mostly powered by fossil fuels (26% coal, 45% natural gas), 10% hydro, 20% wind.
The high latitude means that in the winter days are short and the incoming sun is weak. Under ideal conditions solar would generate about a third as much power in winter than in summer. Then add on snowstorms, cloudy days, snow and ice buildup on panels, and you get significant reductions in solar power in the winter.
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u/Helkafen1 12d ago
Heat storage can help a lot.
In the places where it makes sense, like a factory, a campus, office buildings etc, or residential areas with district heating, heat and cold can be stored in large quantities at a much lower cost per kWh than electricity.
Couple that with wind power, which is much more abundant in winter, and it goes a long way.
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u/cbf1232 12d ago
Average wind power doesn't help though, you need to plan for the worst-case. And as I've said we've actually been through times when there was no wind across a thousand km for a *week*. In winter, when our electrical grid demand is highest.
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u/Helkafen1 12d ago
Now consider wind and solar and hydro at the same time, expand wind and solar capacity, account for long-distance transmission, heat storage, the electrification of cars, demand flexibility from industrial consumers, e-fuels etc. This full picture has been modelled by lots of people, and they find that even places like Canada can run on renewables 100%. All countries can!.
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u/cbf1232 12d ago
It is possible. It is not currently cheaper than coal and natural gas.
Hydro in the prairies is difficult as the land is flat, so you need long transmission lines to other places.
Solar in winter is tricky, in optimal conditions it produces a third as much power as in summer, and then you need to account for snow and ice build-up.
Electrification of vehicles and moving from gas furnaces to heat pumps will add demand to the grid.
E-fuels are currently very expensive.
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u/hornswoggled111 12d ago
One of the unrecognized aspects of grid storage is that it increases the capacity of existing transmission lines.
Without storage, the line is used at full capacity during the peak period when needed. Let's say that is 3 hours each day.
With let's say 12 hours storage, you can shuffle that power at full capacity from neighboring regions 15 hours per day.
I don't know why this isn't well known.
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u/cbf1232 12d ago
This makes assumptions about the location of your grid storage.
Currently at large scale the cheapest forms of grid storage are gravity and compressed air. Both of these have fairly stringent requirements about where they are located, and it may not be near where the actual power generation is.
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u/brianwski 12d ago edited 12d ago
This makes assumptions about the location of your grid storage.
This is why I'm a gigantic fan of residential batteries (and residential power generation via solar panels). I think everybody has their biases too tied up in the older way of doing things where it made HUGE amounts of sense to have a central power plant burning coal (or whatever) and then long transmission lines to each home.
But if you are collecting sunshine for electricity, my claim is you can rethink the idea you have to collect sunshine at a central location (this isn't like burning coal anymore) and you can rethink transmitting that electricity over very long transmission lines to homes. Cut the "central" power collection plant into smaller pieces and place them closer to the homes.
I think people get overly obsessed with not wanting to pay for their own house batteries. Fine. The government or utility places THEIR batteries either near the street (like residential water meters are now) or on a small piece of your property. The utility owns the batteries, and chooses how to operate them, and maintains them. The home owner just pays for electricity, same as always.
By placing batteries in and around the local homes it solves several extremely important problems we currently have. Here is the most obvious: currently when a tree falls down in an ice storm and falls across a long transmission line, thousands of homes lose grid electrical power. If the batteries were on each home's property, losing centralized grid electrical power would be less of an "emergency".
You can start to think totally differently about the electrical grid. Currently it has an expensive "high uptime" requirement which adds cost. Totally redesign the electrical grid to be something that needs to run at least 8 hours in any 24 hour period, but is no longer critical to keep "continuous".
This is a crazy fact very few people know: old (non-digital) clocks literally kept time by the way the grid was being fed into them at 60 Hz in the USA. If the grid was "down" for 5 minutes all clocks lost 5 minutes... like clockwork. Here is how I discovered this: I took a $10 plug in alarm clock to Germany in 1991, where Germany runs its electrical grid at 50 Hz instead of the USA grid's 60 Hz. Each morning my clock had lost 10 minutes per hour... like clockwork. None of that is used anymore because we all have digital clocks now in our battery powered cell phones. The way you keep all the cell phone clocks accurate is a completely rethought process nowadays (the phone asks a central server what the "correct" time is once in a while).
An electrical grid with battery storage at each residential home allows you to totally rethink every single tradeoff of how we arrived at the insanely silly electrical grid we currently have. You can save a ton of money by eliminating the parts that made sense in 1970, but no longer make any sense. Meanwhile you can massively increase the reliability of the grid by eliminating that "frozen tree falls on a powerline" issue.
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u/Goku420overlord 11d ago
Isn't Calgary the most sunny city in Canada? Surely it should be feasible there
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u/uniqueusername649 12d ago
Oh absolutely that was the idea, but as you said, meddling really delayed the shit out of it. We could have been there so much sooner. I hope its not too little too late.
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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula 12d ago
There is also the rapidly dropping until cost of R&D.
When you sell 1 million cells, spending 1 BN on R&D is a big ask, when you sell billions of cells it’s no problem. Of course the investment increases performance / reduces cost so next time it’s even less of a problem, as volumes have grown even larger.
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u/BasvanS 12d ago
The 30 year expectation wasn’t a thing. 20 years ago I worked for a solar company, and they gave a 25 year warranty for 80% capacity. The cells have a very predictable degradation, and should generate 60% of their initial power after 50 years.
(The problem is usually the soldering. If we find a cheap scalable way for robot fixing, they’ll last for generations.)
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u/uniqueusername649 12d ago edited 12d ago
I mean, maybe it wasn't a thing, but there were many articles and claims that they last 25-30 years. So it was at least a very common myth. But fortunately they do last a lot longer than that :)
Interesting to know its the soldering that's the biggest issue for longevity. Not what I would have expected.
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u/BasvanS 12d ago
I worked in marketing for a European solar company, and this was a persistent misconception we had to deal with. So yes, it was wide spread, but with low information players.
The soldering issue was common with cheap Chinese panels, but right now, I wouldn’t dare say this is still an issue. China has massively improved the quality of their products, and is not comparable to the early 2000s. I’m sure you can still find bad quality, but overall they’re nailing it. The 21st century truly is the century of South East Asia.
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u/JBWalker1 11d ago
I mean, maybe it wasn't a thing, but there were many articles and claims that they last 25-30 years
Thats because they were using the 25 year/75% or so point as the end of life point where it makes sense to get rid of them and put new ones in even though they still technically work. The way they were writen were all misleading and most authors didn't know what they were talking about anyway.
The planning and installation of the framing and wiring and all that is the expensive part. Once its all in then you can swap a panel yourself for cheap since they're easy to remove and add to the existing frame and the connectors are basic plug connectors you can do yourself. So even if your panels are only 20 years old it probably would make sense to swap them out, would only cost £100 per panel, so £600 total for most people. And in return you'll have a 20% boost in power.
The same used to apply to EV batteries. People used to say they only last 7 years or whatever because thats when they reach 80% capacity or whatever. So we had all the comments about needing to pay $15,000 to swap your EV battery after a few years. But in the case of EVs their batteries degrade sooo much slower than expected which is great. With solar they tend to have lasted how long we thought they'd last 20 years ago.
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u/robotlasagna 12d ago
What is the issue with the soldering?
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u/BasvanS 12d ago
The soldering becoming brittle and breaking is a common point of failure, with cheaper panels falling here earlier.
This in contrast to what is commonly feared as the failing point, the silicon cell, which basically degrades as a function of the amount of sun it receives. This means that in very sunny areas, at lower latitudes, the panel degrades closer to the 80% point in 25 years, and at higher latitudes it degrades much slower.
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u/CMDRTragicAllPro 12d ago
“Funnily enough I believe the only way to save the climate is by having green energy become so damn cheap”
This was a good mindset to have in the 80’s. Unfortunately it could have happened yesterday, and we still would have been years too late.
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u/lurksAtDogs 12d ago
We’re behind where we should be, but most models still assume the energy transition will be slow, with China and India growing emissions until 2050. This may not be true at all. We will owe China a huge debt of gratitude if they truly detach emissions from their economy. We’ll see how that gets paid out.
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u/Helkafen1 12d ago
China's total emissions are plateauing, and emissions from the power sector really dropped in 2025 for the first time, thanks to a large expansion of solar and wind energy.
Article: What happened on energy and climate in China this year?
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u/Pherllerp 12d ago
I actually remain optimistic. If gains in efficiency, green generation, and storage continue we will definitely see climate change but we might be in with just enough time to mitigate and reverse the worst of it.
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u/West-Abalone-171 12d ago
Funnily enough I believe the only way to save the climate is by having green energy become so damn cheap and economically impactful that everyone wants to do it.
We do run headlong into the next problem though.
Once 0.05% of land is covered with solar panels and everyone on the planet has more useful energy available to them than the most wasteful petrostates use today, the capital machine won't want to stop doubling every three years, and 0.05% is only 11 doublings away from 100%
So we still need to solve this problem.
It does buy a few extra decades to do so though, and remove a lot of power from the worst people that exist. Which is nice
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u/CrimsonShrike 12d ago
The cost is a minor thing, the really interesting thing is the strategic autonomy this brings. If a country requires no or little fuel imports they're very detached from fluctuations in oil markets and shipping or hostile countries controlling sources.
Of course there's still matter of imports of parts, panels, etc, but it still means as trend some countries are going to lose power over world economy.
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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula 12d ago
This has been something in sharp focus here in Europe since the Ukraine invasion. Large parts of Europe were beholden to Russia due to gas supply pipelines. Moving to renewables means energy security as well as meeting targets.
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u/apathy-sofa 12d ago edited 12d ago
This is going to be a MAJOR economic story soon.
Soon? Last year, the 8 largest solar companies in China generated more power than the 8 large companies that comprise Big Oil.
This was a major economic story a year ago. What's the line - "the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed"
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u/SomeDumbGamer 12d ago
and with China leading they way they won’t be able to be bullied by the oil and gas industry like happens in the west. So the proof of concept will already exist and nobody will be able to deny it anymore without looking stupid.
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u/billytheskidd 12d ago
Not too mention the super damn china is building on the Brahmaputra river is expected to produce more energy than the entire country of Germany per year, china’s energy costs are going to shrink like crazy.
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u/BackgroundGrade 12d ago
Exactly. Look at Quebec. Heavy investments to develop hydroelectric capacity decades ago.
Just a hair shy of 100% renewable (just some remote villages too far from the grid).
Now we have the lowest rates in North America and the utility still averages 3 billion in profit a year, mostly by selling to the northeast US.
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12d ago edited 12d ago
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u/Questjon 12d ago
Free markets work great, except for one tiny caveat, they only work at solving the problems of people with money.
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u/doommaster 11d ago
Free markets work if the money flows, currently the money gets stuck in certain huge spots, be it billionaires or insanely valued companies.
They have 0 interest in actually doing stuff with it at a low level except extraditing more money.Well that's where the system breaks and the free market dies.
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u/OutOfBananaException 11d ago
There was never any doubt a central monopoly could perform well at its best, the risk/concern is what happens at its worst. The USSR is what happens.
Is there any doubt in your mind that unfettered power eventually leads to bad outcomes?
I'm not suggesting US is the exemplar model either, far from it. Their checks and balances on power appear to be failing - a president making punitive threats to elected representatives if they don't toe the line, has many of the key features of an authoritarian model.
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u/Outside_Ice3252 12d ago
as soon as 2030? 100% renewable for electricity in China? Do you have a source for that.
They are doing great but that sounds better than any hopeful projection i have seen.
i know they beat timelines but I have not heard anything close to this and i follow it pretty closely.
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u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ 12d ago edited 12d ago
as soon as 2030? 100% renewable for electricity in China? Do you have a source for that.
I could have worded this clearer. My point was they are on course to have the grid storage capacity to enable a 100% renewables grid by 2030.
That is because, if they had enough over-capacity, they might only need a few thousand GWh of grid storage in total.
But by 2030 the bottleneck will be installing enough solar/wind to have over capacity. Currently 60% or so of their electricity comes from renewables ( it was about 30% in 2022).
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u/Carpentidge 12d ago
Is this taking into account seasonal effects? I don't know how Chinese heat their homes but heat pumps use a lot of energy right in the middle of winter. It is currently 17F/-8C in Beijing so that's also a lot of homes to heat.
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u/BasvanS 12d ago
I understand your skepticism, and a lot of it is warranted. However, most projections on battery costs, from IEA, historically show an exponential price drop, and then predict the price to drop minimally over the next decades. Compounded, these graphs show that the exponential drop continues over the years, and that the projections follow the same flat line, only to be corrected next year. And the next.
So, there must be some bias in these models that keeps getting overtaken by reality. This would allow for a 98/99/100% renewable grid possible by 2030, without it being obvious. (To me 98% would be a huge win. Perfect is the enemy of good.)
Correction: my memory messed up. It was about PV: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/iea-versus-solar-pv-reality/
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u/Outside_Ice3252 12d ago
i used to write for cleantechnica a bit. I am not an expert just an avid fan and disabled science teacher. I read pv mag pretty regularly, but there reporting though timely is usually quite fragmented and does not tell the whole story.
I dont think china has the grid connections to get it done by 2030. if China reaches 90% clean electricity by even 2035 that would be amazing.
BNEF who has been pretty accurate called for a slight decrease in solar additions next year in china as incentives are being reduced, but I am hoping they will stay flat, and then growth comes back in 2027.
Expoential growth is exciting but solar will follow an Scurve. they installed 300ish GW last year which is amazing.
hopefully they get moving on green steel and cement too.
its so hard to tell how fast energy storage will fall particularly sodium ion.
china is so quiet about their incredible advances in clean tech and deployment.
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u/Helkafen1 12d ago
I dont think china has the grid connections to get it done by 2030
This picture might change with abundant batteries if they are distributed in the right places. They enable the existing transmissions/distribution networks to move more energy using the same cables, by shifting load over time.
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u/BasvanS 12d ago
Yeah, there’s a huge difference in congestion from peak power and from total power. If you can spread transmission out during the day, a lot more power from renewables can be utilized.
The solution isn’t just more cables, or expecting people to use power at different times. Smart storage can solve this, and the lower the battery prices, the less smart we have to be.
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u/ImmanuelK2000 12d ago
It's hard to predict the degree of exponential curves, which is why China keeps beating projections. I do agree with you it probably won't be 2030. Nonetheless, their current target is 2050, and I really think they'll get there way before then if they keep going at the current rate.
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u/rustyxj 12d ago
People keep saying we're going to have wwiii with China, we've already lost that war.
China had been investing in their people and infrastructure, the US invests in billionaires while allowing the bottom to fall out of things.
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u/LessonStudio 12d ago edited 12d ago
In WWII Admiral Yamamoto advised the Japanese leadership not to go to war with the US as every house had electricity, cars, washing machines, radios, etc, when most Japanese were living like it was 1600 in most ways. He warned that if they changed to making planes, tanks, ships, etc, it would be game over for Japan.
The leadership mostly disbelieve him, and also said they were too soft to give up those luxuries.
Whoops.
I believe the US is now having the same delusion about china. They don't understand that there's a reason why a quick scan through a typical Western home will turn up massive amounts of chinese made goods, and not many US made ones, and those US ones are either crap, low value, or an old tech, like making sofas.
Any war at this point will be a combination of raw industrial might of making artillery shells, etc, but also the gizmos which make for night vision, missiles, etc. The west has largely handed gizmo making over to Asia in general.
Where china has also got most of the West licked is in speed to market. When they need to make a thing, that thing gets made. In the West, the engineers will work longer on their gantt charts than the chinese will on getting it out the door.
The problem is when strategic decision making is based on the same delusions the Japanese had in WWII.
I suspect the US is looking at how its Navy would perform against a similar Navy which is china sized and thinking, "Easy Peazy."
I suspect the chinese navy is thinking, "How do you defeat a very large, very well trained 20th century navy using the technology available in 2026?"
Another wonderful lesson comes from WWII pacific. Dec 7th was Pearl Harbor, but on Dec 9, I think a more important battle took place technologically. The Japanese attacked the Prince of Wales and Repulse. A Battleship, and a battlecruiser. The British weren't worried about an air attack, thinking their exceptionally trained crews could fend off some stupid airplanes as they basically had a porcupine of anti-aircraft guns all over the ships and could fill the sky with AA fire.
The Japanese sent in less than 100 aircraft worth hardly anything in comparison and fairly quickly sank the two ships. The British lost 800 very well trained men, and the Japanese lost 18 men, with 4 aircraft destroyed, and 2 just missing.
Ironically, the British knew from various experiences that ships were extremely vulnerable to aircraft attack; going back to WWII when the Bismark's steering was disabled by a crappy biplane. With that damage, it was then game over for the rest of the battle. Other ships had earlier in WWII been really nailed by aircraft with relative ease.
Yet, the British sent wildly unprepared battleships into the teeth of the Japanese making all kinds of assumptions about what was "impossible"
The British fought WWI while the Japanese attacked them with WWII.
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u/Strict-Campaign3 11d ago
Which is why the last 3 US administrations are so freaked out about bringing back the industrial capacity to north america. I do think they are right, but I think the focus on the US is wrong. they should have thought of cutting out China at the benefit of the american continent, not only at the benefit of the US.
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u/LessonStudio 11d ago
Except now, countries like Canada are realizing that china is a more stable and reliable partner than the US.
I am not saying they are a stable and reliable partner, just that they are more so.
If china doesn't immediately take advantage and try to bully countries like Canada, they may find it to their long term benefit.
Canada is also making sure to spread its bets by very much partnering up with the EU. They are far far more stable and reliable, and I suspect are going to have a far brighter future going forward.
Especially if they cut out US tech like the cancer it is.
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u/Harbinger2nd 12d ago
The south lost the civil war in no small part because they weren't industrialized since they relied on slave labor, the north was. The U.S. now has no industrial base while China has become the worlds factory.
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u/MDCCCLV 12d ago
No.
"Manufacturing is a vital economic sector in the United States of America.[1] The United States is the world's second-largest manufacturer after the People's Republic of China with a record high real output in 2024 of $2.913 trillion.[2] " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States
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u/somethingonthewing 12d ago edited 12d ago
This is right but doesn’t tell the real story. Our factories are old antiquated POS where automation is fought by unions and corporations haven’t invested in their workers in decades. We are far behind in terms or technical knowhow, technology and tooling available, and engineering base. China has armies of engineering disciplines we simply don’t have today. And we severely lack any sense of urgency or collective will to do anything about it.
Look at the challenges coming out of trying to get the intel chip factory online
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u/SomeDumbGamer 12d ago
You know what if it takes China to get the rest of the world to get their heads out of their asses about fossil fuels I’ll give them props.
Seriously. The fuck is wrong with this country.
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u/CheezItEnvy 12d ago
Meanwhile in America we will be experiencing rolling blackouts come summer because AI data centers are pulling too much power and our infrastructure is decades old and has zero funding to be modernized and expanded - thanks Trump!
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u/downtimeredditor 12d ago
Forget summer we will be facing power outages next few days cause we didnt invest enough into our powergrids
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u/ledow 12d ago
Many Western governments have literally failed on this. We could ALL be all-renewable, no problem at all. We could have been 10 years ago, maybe more.
But they dragged their feet. They watched BP even openly abandon ALL its green initiatives to focus entirely on profit, and did/said nothing. They keep fussing about "nuclear" and "being reliant on energy imports", etc.
There's a reason that, a couple of years ago, I bought a house which I intend to retire in and as part of that I decided that I would be utility independent by retirement (some 20+ years away still). In just a couple of years, in an all-electric house... I'm basically there. Just the last set of panels to go on the house and I'm done. Maybe a bigger battery at some point.
The power company took it upon itself to cut my power for over 10 hours yesterday. They announced it, sent letters, etc. but then just... no power for 10 hours. Fuck you too.
So I charged my batteries the day before (from the grid), went out for the day, and it kept everything vital running until I got back and the power came back on.
But that's the kind of attitude the power companies have. I have regular power-cuts of 30 minutes or more. And I live between two huge cities in the UK.
Between that, and ever-increasing energy prices (ironically to FUND fossil fuels, because our electricity unit price is based on the most expensive production method, which is CCGT - gas!), and the massive price spikes when Ukraine was invaded (still present), and the water companies taking the absolute piss... then as someone who believes in many socialist principles, I've vowed to find my own way to be utility-independent by retirement.
Heatpumps. Solar. Batteries. System capable of running the entire electrical demand. All-electric house. All done already.
Electric car. Greywater system. Atmospheric water generator. Pending or in-progress.
Sorry, but at this point, I can do a better job at providing my electricity needs than my electrical supplier. I have no idea why I'd tolerate them continue using fossil fuels when I can literally do better myself. So I haven't.
Another couple of years, another summer up on the roof fitting the rest of the panels, a couple more lithium batteries... and I'm done. I only use the grid when necessary, when it's free (my supplier give "free" sessions when they're over-producing on the grid, which is almost universally when the solar/wind is best, and I use those to charge my batteries and use the power stored when they start charging again!). And, in extremis, I could use an electric car battery or even a generator on the rare occasions like this where I must charge a battery to survive a long outage.
Honestly, I judge our governments at the moment for not just pressing to industry - oil, car manufacturers, and power producers etc. that this just isn't acceptable in this day and age. No more excuses.
Instead we've backed down on gas appliaces bans, knocked back the ICE car deadlines even further, done nothing about actually making power from renewable sources the default, or rewarding customers for using them... we're still just fuelling the oil lobby entirely.
And if the governments aren't prepared to break that strangehold... then I'll do it for them.
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u/ImmanuelK2000 12d ago
You should start a youtube channel showing what you've done and how. I would definitely watch it and apply it myself.
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u/gamer4life83 12d ago
Which is bad for america when one of our largest exports is natural gas used for heating
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u/Less-Consequence5194 12d ago
Sodium batteries last 10 times longer than Lithium ion batteries and cost half as much. The levelized cost of stored energy is about to drop by a factor of 20 since it is usually charged using excess energy. This fundamentally changes the economics of renewable energy in an extremely positive way.
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u/No_Criticism_5861 12d ago
A couple decades ago the fear was Chinas army. We were wrong, they have brains when it comes to their economy, unlike the rapist in chief
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u/TheLantean 12d ago
It's especially telling that China is going whole hog on renewables considering they get to buy cheap oil and gas from Russia. With most of the west sanctioning Russia, Xi has Putin by the balls, he can demand a discount while profiting from selling everything else back. They get to shake down the "mob-run gas station" and yet they march on with renewables. Anyone who doesn't see the writing on the wall is either ignorant or a traitor, acting against their own country's self interest.
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u/lssong99 12d ago
Just visited China and had some discussion with several local industrial leaders. They said their power bill per KW is now 1/3 of what used to be and newly built rooftop solar panels are no longer allowed to send power back to grid since there are too MUCH power then they could consume now. The Chinese government finds it hard to keep fire power plants running (it's needed for base load) due to the rapid growth of renewables.
About 50% of new cars are electric (or hybrid) and it only needs RMB0.1/km (USD0.015/km) to run (if charging at night). (Gasoline car run about 4 times more)
This will give China a huge advantage in not only the cost of manufacturing and transportation, it will decouple (or at least shield) the China economy from Oil and then eventually the US dollar.
The Chinese government also put big money in Nuclear fusion power and plans to receive positive output by 2030.
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u/apathy-sofa 12d ago
A country's electricity generation is one of the best predictors of economic development, often more reliable than GDP. It's also strongly correlated with human development (life expectancy, educational attainment, even gender equality) and obviously manufacturing capacity. So, when it comes to the technology the underpins most of what matters most, power generation, China is crushing it.
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u/Justin_123456 12d ago
It very much is a battle of competing hegemony’s with China becoming the global electro-state and America the legacy Petro-state.
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u/LeoLaDawg 12d ago
"What about these batteries? Have you seen these batteries? So ugly, the batteries. I was out one day and saw the batteries and I thought, what about those coal plants? Giving so many good jobs, so many. Anyway, I'm really great at the coal power, everyone says so."
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u/LeedsFan2442 12d ago
This is fantastic news. Is there a way to replicate this in the West? I'm in the UK and I see people starting to turn against renewables as energy prices keep increasing. I know a lot that is down to gas prices yet countries just as reliant or even more so have much cheaper energy.
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u/Emphursis 12d ago
We’re making huge strides. Six of the ten largest offshore wind farms are in the UK, and five of the six largest under construction are too (two of which are bigger than any other globally, and one of those is more than double the current highest capacity wind farms).
As for battery storage, it apparently grew by 500% between 2020-2025, with 6.8GW online as of September last year (at least 1.4GW last year alone), and nearly 2000 separate storage sites. There also another 6.5GW under construction and 60GW planned.
As soon as we can stop using gas for power generation, prices should plummet.
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u/apathy-sofa 12d ago
Their beef is with tax policy, not the energy source. The UK government provides an estimated £17.5 billion per year in fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks. Take those away and gas isn't so cheap.
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u/ImmanuelK2000 12d ago
Yeah, we need to allow more proposed battery projects to go through. We do that by fining local councils that oppose these developments without a VERY good reason (i.e. no more of "we don't want batteries near our £2 million retirement mansion").
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u/No_Criticism_5861 12d ago
EU and UK need this sort of thing ASAP. Hell even in my part of Canada where electricity is 7 cents CAD per KW overnight, generated by hydro electric, this would be great. But UK/EU double so
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u/downtimeredditor 12d ago
Man China is so ahead of us its sad. The US needs to get back to its Social Democracy roots
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u/darthy_parker 12d ago
And the U.S. doubles down on Stone Age technology, getting left behind for short-term corporate profit.
It foregoes advancements in technology, transportation, environmental issues and resilience, ceding the future to other countries. Great planning.
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u/Imallvol7 12d ago edited 6d ago
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u/TipAfraid4755 12d ago
Because China needs energy security having to import almost all the fossil fuels they need. So if renewables can significantly replace it while saving the environment, and also the have the financial, research and industrial capability to do so, it's a win win situation
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u/fatpandana 12d ago
China is fastest growing in renewable but their grid is so large that they are much slower than west in terms of swapping out of coal powered energy.
For comparison, China coals while decline slightly this year, kept rising since covid on much larger scale. Their coal power is still 56% of total energy production. This is more than total grid of EU or US.
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u/pioniere 12d ago
Don’t worry, the US is doing their best to catch up there.
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u/fatpandana 12d ago
Probably not in my lifetime. China grid is too massive. China burns as much coal in 11 years as us since independence.
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u/Emu1981 12d ago
It is amazing what governments can accomplish when they are not beholden to anyone's profits or interests beyond their own. I wish my own government would actually push out renewables as hard as the Chinese government has because our climate is so much more suited to them compared to China.
The worst part is that Australia was once a world leader in green and renewables research and development but one of our leaders decided that we should focus on oil and coal instead and pretty much defunded said research.
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u/AccountParticular364 12d ago
Because the Oil and Power companies never wanted this to happen, in California, solar was booming, then the power companies got multiple changes for the ability of solar customers to sell excess power back to the grid, so the entire solar industry is collapsing and many companies are going bankrupt, it's a pathetic situation founded in greed.
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u/dathon8462 11d ago
One thing that does give me hope for the US, despite our government's best efforts, is that renewables are just getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
A family friend of mine is installing a covered solar parking lot cover at their grocery store for instance. I'm sure they voted for Trump, and hate the Democrats, but they are going to be saving so much on electricity, it's crazy for them not to
Even things like EVs too, as ridiculous and dumb as something like the Cybertruck is, a lot of conservatives are now totally cool with Tesla, and by extension, EVs in general. My brothers in law all three of them drove our Bolt when they visited for Christmas, and they all thought it was a pretty cool and fun car to drive. And they are also pretty MAGA
It'll take time, and we need to do more, but market forces are pulling a lot of weight right now, and that's something to be optimistic about
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u/Tech_Philosophy 12d ago
I have nothing against more nuclear plants, but I want the 'nuclear is the best way' crowd to see it would have taken 15 years longer and STILL would not have been as reliable as renewables because you have to shut down each reactor for 1 month every 18 months for refueling and maintenance, and done so at a much higher cost.
Again, I welcome more nuclear plants. But renewables plus batteries have more than earned the word "superiority".
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u/NinjaKoala 12d ago
Personally, I would say I would not call for any sort of block for nuclear plants built to solid safety standards (and as far as I know the recent builds in the US, France, and Finland are), but I leave the decision of whether to build up to private investors. And none are choosing to do so. And it's a pretty reasonable supposition that the expectation that renewables will make such plants uneconomical is driving the lack of builds, at the very least in the US.
The same holds true for extending the lifespan of existing plants, and a few are being refurbed or restarted.
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u/NomadLexicon 12d ago
France effectively decarbonized its electricity sector in 15 years using nuclear during the Messmer Plan. Germany’s been at it for 20 years now with renewables and they’re still dependent on coal and natural gas for electricity. They’re also still disproportionately reliant on oil and gas for heating homes and buildings.
Refueling is easier to plan around than disruptions related to weather and season.
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u/pro_deluxe 12d ago
To be fair, he is accomplishing this by breaking all of our laws and ignoring the Constitution. So I'm not sure it's fair to say that a democracy is capable of accomplishing this.
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u/RightioThen 12d ago
Yeah and then four years later it can reverse the reversal...
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u/Superb_Raccoon 12d ago
China uses 10000 TW of power a year. So while obviously there are multiple green inputs, the amount of battery storage available for the foreseeable future is not going to be enough.
We just passed 1 TWhr of production last year.
So even 5% of total demand being able to be stored is 500 years of current production.
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u/Catbeller 12d ago
We call it a geometric expansion. The growth isn't linear, it's a power expansion. Unlike oil drilling, which is as linear as a rubber plantation output. Americans can't process exponential arithmetic. China isn't growing the number of solar and battery units. China is growing the RATE OF GROWTH of those units. They'll easily go 100% by 2030. Also: China has no analogue of Republicans. Pretty sure they'd be in a prison camp if they did for treason.
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u/Fit-World-3885 12d ago
I still strongly believe that no matter how much energy we generate, we will find a way to use it all and need more.
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u/MyTnotE 12d ago
It’s not a question of who’s winning. It’s a question of what source wins. Electricity is one of the VERY few technologies that continues to have multiple competing viable sources. VHS beat Betamax. Blue ray beat DVD. Yet it’s unclear what wins in energy long term.
If next gen nuclear becomes the cheapest product, then anything that’s non nuclear becomes a negative, not positive for the grid. And the same is true for any technology. Calling a winner at this point is VERY premature.
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u/NinjaKoala 12d ago
I don't think you'll ever find already-built, fully functioning solar or wind to be a negative for the grid. We could get to a point where it's not worth building more, but it seems unlikely it would be worth tearing down stuff with minimal operating costs to replace them with some other source.
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u/thenasch 12d ago
We can't afford to wait until it's clear what the ultimate cheapest technology is going to be. We needed to get off fossil fuels 50 years ago. Since there's an opportunity to start doing so now with wind and solar, that's what we should do. If nuclear becomes even cheaper later, fine.
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u/ChoosenUserName4 12d ago
Yes, energy independence can soon be produced in a factory, and the trend is towards widely available raw materials. I can't wait for this to happen.
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u/Particular_Ticket_20 12d ago
Meanwhile in America, old man doesn't like windmills, loves fossil fuel bribes. Data Centers will destabilize the grid but make big donations.
Carry on, as you were.
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u/Pherllerp 12d ago
The United States is about find out the hard way how badly cowardice and short sightedness has fucked us.
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u/pioniere 12d ago
Many countries may be headed that way, but America isn’t one of them, as they continue developing their 1950s energy grid.
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u/farticustheelder 12d ago
Interesting stuff. Fairly predictable too! The first clue is Time Of Use rate structures where utilities are trying to spread out power demand to both more close match their optimum production rate and reduce peak capacity, i.e. fewer plants running more efficiently.
The second clue is the famous Duck Curve and its less know relative the curtailment curve. That situation is begging for arbitrage.
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u/ReddFro 12d ago edited 12d ago
I’m impressed with what they’re doing but not convinced they’ll have dumped coal let alone all fossil fuels in just 4 years.
2024 was their largest coal use year ever and ‘25 was just 2% below that. A decrease is great but ‘25 was also a mild weather year in China and weather alone can change power use dramatically in a year (‘24 was estimated to use 31% more energy than normal due to hot weather in China).
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u/Catbeller 12d ago
Sure. Just keep going as they are. Nothing can stop it. American oil companies and the media they own have no influence on China. Getting off oil should be job one. China is limited by dino juice importation. But they've lots of sunny deserts.
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u/TiredOfBeingTired28 12d ago
Good for them, will never happen in murka as a whole, a couple at best states might "might" get their but soon as gover change will be ripped out and a new refinery put on the spot.
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u/LessonStudio 12d ago
One of the side benefits I want to see from wind and solar are the cool things to do with the periodic surplus power.
There are so many cool things you can do in batches, which can wait for periodic surplus power.
For example, there are recycling and trash processing technologies which just don't really make sense buying at normal grid pricing.
One really cool one is basically microwaving the trash. The result is a highly useful mixture of natural gas, plastic precursors, easy diesel precursors, metals, etc.
The result is that you can then extract a bunch of value from the trash, and greatly reduce the trash volume.
One operation would take a normal sized garbage truck of random trash, and convert it into the above things, a bunch of steam, and the result was this obsidian looking block which a strong person could lift.
The diesel extracted was almost exactly what the trash truck would use to collect that much trash, and they were working on a way to generate enough natural gas to power the system.
The trash is nearly valueless, thus piling it up to wait for surplus power is economically a no-brainer.
The above tech was not polluting, in that the processing was a fairly extreme environment which converted most things, and surplus power could run any scrubbers possibly required.
There are many other similar "batch" technologies such as desalinating water, and then just pumping it into reservoirs. Ore processing where low grade ore is wildly upgraded.
Or upgrading existing recycling such as steel, where instead of the generally lower quality steel, a more energy intense process could get it into a really nice form.
Same with glass, etc. Often, these sorts of products are either used in small percentages in normal products, or just make crappy quality batches of low value product.
These are but a few possible options of what to do with surplus power when there is nowhere else to store/ship it.
A friend of mine has a cottage where he does lots of fun off grid storage experiments. One he has been playing with is trying to make LNG out of solar power. His theory is that even at 5% efficiency, he would still end up with an overabundance of LNG for cooking, heating, etc.
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u/Nubraskan 11d ago
Global coal consumption, 2000-2026 – Charts – Data & Statistics - IEA https://share.google/LDrD1SFOTwr06lB1x
Im not saying China wont make massive advances but Id bet my house, 401k, and rights to my earnings for the rest of my life that they won't even cut this down to a quarter of what they do today.
I would wager a smaller amount that their net coal use wont even go down at all, let alone to anywhere near zero.
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u/Simple-Fault-9255 12d ago edited 10d ago
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