You listed out a whole lot of excuses for America, suburbia this, heating that, etc etc, etc...
Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?
They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.
What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants instead of directing the same labor to building more nuclear or renewable generation? There is no reason to build coal, Trump is a schmuck for proposing it but China have been the ones actually doing it.
Chinese demand is increasing just like everyone else's, and they're both retiring older less efficient plants and using fossil fuels as both peaker and baseline generation. But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China. There's plenty of reason to build out coal capacity to keep grids stabilized while you transition to solar and wind (China finished their 2030 1200GW solar capacity target 6 years early in 2024 and continue to grow that number at an incredible rate).
I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita - despite much of the manufacturing and such not happening in our countries.
> But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China.
"Basically flat" only after running up an exponential curve so that coal consumption is now higher per capita in China than it is in the US and China is generating ~60% of its electricity from coal compared to ~16% in the US.
> I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita
You don't even get to say "westerners" anymore. CO2 emissions are higher per capita in China than they are in Europe because they burn such a disproportionate amount of coal, and are only lower than the US and Canada because the US and Canada burn more oil per capita from being so spread out.
The difference in coal power for china is basically purely from them using coal instead of gas, see comment here: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47276338
Despite higher carbon intensity (for now), they still emit less Co2 per person on electricity than the US (because they need/use less).
Sure but they don't burn oil because they don't have oil. So focus on fossil fuels in general, or emissions rather than just coal specifically - again it's not good to add new coal plants but they're growth negative. And EU has done an admirable job of reducing their emissions, with help of course from Chinese manufacturing of pv cells etc.
They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined, and are the biggest investor in renewables. Their emission of CO2 just recently peaked. But they need a lot of power, and most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.
> They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined
All the more reason they have no excuse for building coal. Yet they're also burning more coal than the rest of the world combined.
> most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.
If that was actually the case they wouldn't need to build new coal plants because renewable generation at 40% of normal plus the existing traditional power plants that used to be enough to supply 100% of power by themselves would be more than sufficient. More to the point, if that was actually the case then their emissions would be way down because they'd only be burning coal for something like one week every two years.
China needs some form of dispatchable power and is basically using coal instead of gas because they have none. See https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47276338 for numbers/more detail.
Japan, Spain and France also have negligible oil and gas production and didn't go all-in on coal as a result. Spain is 0.32% coal and 22.5% natural gas. France is 0.31% coal and 5.7% natural gas.
All those countries grew relatively wealthy much earlier than China, so simply buying ressources like gas is much more feasible for them.
If you want a fair comparison, I would suggest looking at countries in similar economical positions (good growth, but still playing catch-up with wealthy nations) and with big coal reserves (France never really had enough in the first place, which is why going "full coal" instead of full nuclear was not even an option).
Two very good examples would be pre-1980 Germany or Poland a few decades ago, and both of those were very reliant on coal for electricity as well (even Spain was at ~40% coal for power up into the 1990s).
It's not interesting to pick countries from the time before renewables and nuclear were realistically available and ask why they didn't use them.
If you want a country with less than China's GDP per capita, how about Ukraine?
Moreover, you keep talking dispatchable power, but nothing needs that to be 60% of total generation. Daytime load is generally around twice nighttime load. That implies something like two thirds of total generation is baseload (i.e. 50% of peak load for 100% of the day), and can use nuclear for anything up to that entire amount. Only one third needs to be dispatchable/intermittent, for which you can use renewables on most days and cover the large majority of that. You should only need coal/gas/hydro/storage on days when renewable generation is low -- which should be less than half of that one third, not 60% of all generation. China has enough for that in just hydro already, but then they're burning coal anyway.
Again, I'm not arguing that China is doing extremely well regarding CO2 intensity of their electricity. My point is that they perform pretty on par with most comparable countries.
Looking at CO2 per kWh (a much better metric if you want to boil country comparisons down to a single number) you will find that they are not doing significantly worse than most nations in their weight-class (GDP wise), and in fact doing better than quite a few.
Australia, South Africa, Poland, India, Indonesia and basically all of the middle east is doing worse than them. Even rich nations with heavy renewable commitments like Germany are barely 40% lower, and this is frequently negated by higher per-capita electricity use (like it is with the US).
In my view, not many wealthy western nations are actually in a position where they can demand significant improvements from China in this metric without getting laughed at (except France, Scandinavia, Spain). If you look at nations with more than twice the GDP per capita (and a headstart in development) it is more than reasonable to demand that they be at least below 50% of (current) Chinese CO2 intensity (in my view).
I strongly believe that we see so few actual demands in this regard (and so little progress in more direct CO2 taxation schemes) because most nations realize that they live in a figurative glass house. E.g. if the whole EU was at french emission levels, we'd be much more likely to see import tariffs linked to metrics like this, effecting improvement all over the world. Pointing the fingers at China on the other hand is neither accurate nor effective.
> What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants
Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?
Assuming you're American, it's a bit rich to have contributed more in absolute terms and then tell other countries what they can't do.
Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy? In rural I can sorta see it. But in cities, why drive a truck? These are all choices that America makes.
> Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?
This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.
> Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy?
The "best selling" light vehicles in the US are pickup trucks because the sales numbers aren't divided out into personal and business purchases and businesses buy a lot of trucks. The best selling non-pickup is the Toyota RAV4, which gets better than 30 MPG in the non-hybrid version and better than 40 MPG in the hybrid version.
> This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.
My friend, they're building the most nuclear and solar in the world... And yes, coal too. The US right now is actively trying to block renewables (at the federal level at least)
As to fuel economy, the US is the only country where 40 MPG for a hybrid might be brought up as a win. It's just all big inefficient cars over there. You can look up how much the car industry in the US fights increasing fuel economy standards.
They are building coal for things that cannot yet be handled by renewables because coal is the fossil fuel natural resource they have the most of.
It's the same reason it was the dominant fossil fuel for electricity in the US until the shale revolution made natural gas cheap and abundant.
The reasons Trump is a schmuck for pushing coal are (1) he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage, and (2) in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.
Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage, and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
The US grid is 18% nuclear, 10% wind and 6% solar. China is 5% nuclear, 9% wind and 6% solar.
The UK is 34% wind+solar. Uruguay Greece, Spain and Germany are all >=40% wind+solar. Lithuania and Denmark are >50% wind+solar.
How is it that nuclear, wind and solar can handle a higher percentage of the grid in all of these other countries?
> he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage
The only thing Trump wants is to shore up votes in coal-producing swing states for the midterms. He's going to slightly delay the shuttering of some coal fired power plants that are just going to close anyway for a ridiculous and purely political reason and the real-world consequences of it are going to be negligible, because this:
> in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.
And not only that, renewables are now the cheapest form of new generation until the grid gets above something like 40% renewables and you have to start actually doing something about the intermittency. Neither the US nor China have that much yet and in neither case do they need the percentage of fossil fuels that they currently have.
But the argument for continuing to operate existing plants is that you still need electricity while building new renewables. The argument for replacing coal plants with natural gas is that conversions are cheaper than new plants and natural gas is better than coal. There is no argument for building new coal when your grid is <40% renewables -- just build new renewables.
> Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage
Then why is their number lower than the US one, never mind countries in Europe?
> and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
The US is covered in 100+kV transmission lines. Even higher voltage transmission lines have lower losses, but you're talking about going from a single digit percentage to a lower single digit percentage. It's basically a cost trade off between building all new transmission towers or using the same money to build slightly more renewable generation capacity -- and the latter benefits you more on the normal days when you're not trying to supply power to someone hundreds of miles away and can just use the extra power locally.
Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?
They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.