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Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

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Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#281

Post by dahart »

chaostheory wrote: post #224
dahart wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend is clear that if we keep using fossil up, then soon nobody will have a good source for it. And it’s clear that for geopolitical reasons in addition to environmental reasons, energy independence will be a core necessity everywhere on earth. It’s handy that the sun is sending us enough energy, directly (solar) and indirectly (wind, hydro), that nobody has a good reason not to be “green focused” and phase out…

Who is going to pay for it? Even when it was cheap, solar uptake was low except in Texas. EV adoption is still poor outside of California. Then there’s the issue of a K Shaped economy. Outside of our bubble in Silicon Valley, a lot of people can barely afford necessities let alone go green.

You might be confusing consumer purchasing choices with the national energy policy and infrastructure we were talking about. Going green personally is only more expensive to consumers in places where our country isn’t building and offering green power by default. EVs are a bit of a different topic. But what difference does it make when fossil fuels run out? Left unchecked, sooner or later market forces will make oil much more expensive as it becomes scarce, and eventually there is no choice. Yes we might be decades or even hundreds of years away from that, but in the big picture that’s not far away, and it doesn’t matter because the eventuality is obvious. Eventually there will be no such thing as non-renewable energy. Might as well start now.

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#282

Post by roxolotl »

appointment wrote: post #41
roxolotl wrote: post #21

It genuinely makes me so sad to see the US not doing the same. Having grown up to the constant beat of “energy independence” as the core goal of a party it seemed obvious that the nearly limitless energy that rains down from the sky would be the answer. But instead we’ve kept choosing the option which requires devastating our, and other’s around the world, community. That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining…

> That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns. This is Big Oil propaganda. The impact from this is massively less than the horrific damage caused by every part of the fossil fuel industry.

It’s so interesting seeing some of the comments about this. The sentence I wrote after that blames war and global devastation on fossil fuels. I was expecting to get flak for being too harsh to fossil fuels but somehow it swung the other direction. Which, as someone who shouts at the radio when the greenwashing oil ads play on NPR, is heartening.

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#283

Post by ebruchez »

ragazzina wrote: post #273
ebruchez wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's just no way to deny this. Of course there is "way". All the above above in itself sounds like propaganda. You forget other political (authoritarian system making massive mistakes), demographic (1.0, probably less in reality, birth per woman), psychological (disillusioned young population), and geographic (food and other imports) aspects, among other things.

> authoritarian system making massive mistakes Compared to the US democracy?

Yes - so far.

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#284

Post by MaxHoppersGhost »

senordevnyc wrote: post #256
MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think there is oil in Greenland I think you should not contribute to these types of discussion for lack of knowledge on the topic.

Was curious, so I did a 30 second search: "The US Geological Survey estimates that onshore northeast Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains around 31 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in hydrocarbons – similar to the US’s entire volume of proven crude oil reserves." Source: https://theconversation.com/greenland-is-rich-in-natural-res...

Another 30 second search would show you that their oil is not readily available and is unproven. Otherwise Denmark would already be an even wealthier petrostate like Norway.

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#285

Post by soundwave106 »

raducu wrote: post #136
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely. Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten sal…

> Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, night is a thing, it might not be windy Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar. Nuclear is transcedental. If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.

One of the problems with nuclear is, um, it's ability to cause an "extinction event". Sort of.

In that:

* Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative.

* What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.)

* Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such.

This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere.

The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still.

(There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.)

(Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#286

Post by [deleted] »

NickC25 wrote: post #257
lvl155 wrote: post #50

China is far more incentivized to champion renewable considering that they do not have the same access as the US. US is also on a path to quite literally invading other countries to extract crude and other resources. I don’t think China is in a position to do this, yet. If China invades Brunei or arrests Bolkiah, they will face irreversible repercussions. All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers. G…

>All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers Found the Oil & Gas lobbyist / apologist. China might not have oil, but at least they are trying to figure something else out. Credit to them. Say what you want about The Party (I certainly have) but gotta give credit where and when its due. They have an interest in pushing alternative fuels, and by god they are doing it.

[deleted]

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#287

Post by Y-bar »

gs17 wrote: post #280
Y-bar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see the pillars they are built on in for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-13/china-s-s... (direct link to image: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iy93Jvbye2e... ) Solar panels are meant to be water proof, after all they are meant to survive rain storms and melting snow and coastal weather.

"meant to survive rain storms" doesn't really mean the same as "meant to survive flooding", especially not "meant to survive flooding with salt water". For example, a car survives outdoor weather year-round, but you probably wouldn't want to buy one that was submerged in a flood zone. This plant seems to be floating, though, so they stay above water regardless.

Do you have any specifics about the implementation that makes you say that the engineers have not considered this?

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#288

Post by [deleted] »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #87
zipy124 wrote: post #74

It is incredible to see just how many big-oil talking points there are in this thread. From renewable energies resource costs, to their land use impact. I didn't realise just how effective their propaganda was in the tech space till reading this thread. That is not to say that these projects should be free of criticism, but anyone who believes these negatives are remotely close to the damage that fossil fuels are doi…

I was just about to make precisely the same comment. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt about renewables here is ridiculous, and I expected better. I suppose everyone watched too much Landman . China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy indus…

[deleted]

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#289

Post by AuthAuth »

All this praise around China's buildout is just encouraging others ignore a problem to sell the solution. When the major nations started coming together to reduce emissions it was agreed that they would all aim to reduce emissions. However China did the opposite and purposefully scaled coal at record rates for nearly a decade and implemented no environmental regulations so as to outcomplete the nations who were transitioning and to be the ones to sell the solution. So now that its 2025 and they are finally starting to deploy some solar and wind im just not impressed. Its a dirty move and going forward I doubt we will see global trust in tackling these kind of problems again.

Re: Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

#290

Post by overfeed »

expedition32 wrote: post #124

If the US ever blocks Chinese ports the lights will be kept on. Although I'm sure that situation will end with a mushroom cloud.

It would be interesting to see how Carrier Strike groups fare against hypersonic weapons, as well as witnessing what the modern fighting doctrine is when there is no absolute air superiority.
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