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 doing needs to re-evaluate their world view.
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. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.
Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.
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 for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns. But it’s difficult to compare localized damage to war and globalized damage.
I recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben.
There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs.
This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year.
The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.
Solar panels etc. will last decades and can and will be recycled afterwards. Further, most materials needed for renewable energy infrastructure (iron, lithium) are highly abundant on earth. Most of the suppliers work to use cheaper (=more abundant) materials in their products, replacing lithium with sodium in batteries and silver with copper in solar panels. Wind turbine blades are produced now using re-solvable resins.
Yep. It's not just oil rigs in the desert. Chevron in Ecuador destroyed the Amazonian rainforest. Oil pipelines and open pit mines destroying Canadian primordial forests. Probably tons of untold stories.
My 65yo parents installed Solar panels on the roof of their house in a Tier 2 city in the poor parts of India. So did pretty much most of their neighbours.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
I guess at some level it is a matter of incentives. In their city, we have electricity 20-22 hours per day (used to be 12-18 when i was growing up) and we can’t rely on the state to provide us electricity consistently.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
I would say 10% of the homes in my estate in Derbyshire have rooftop solar. We haven't gone for it yet because I still think the cost is too high. It might work out when electricity gets even more expensive.
In 2025, > 90% of new energy capacity built in the US is from renewable [0]. So the US isn't building that much solar not because they're not building solar, but that the US has been generating and consuming so much energy per capita that there isn't that much incentive to increase energy capacity dramatically.
The US has done well historically, roughly on par with China on per capita renewable rollout, slightly ahead of China between 2019-2023 but probably falling behind now.
China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.
These are new electric power plants. The US is still ramping up oil and gas production, and is now producing more than ever before. No signs of transitioning away from fossil fuels for transport, industry, export.
Meanwhile the US is using its remaining carbon budget to bomb and burn in one last effort to expand its dying empire. Eventually this system will fall, and the west will realize they wasted all their energy (literally) on non-civilian hardware that needs massive amounts of cheap oil.
China has also just launched a megawatt scale wind generator a the helium-lifted balloon, the S2000 , they have active thorium rector the TMSR-LF1 and GW/h Vandium flow battery. The scale , speed and breadth of what they are doing is incredible and I think missed my people
Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.
The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.
That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.
Is your building listed or something? In most cases it doesn't require planning permission even in a conservation area, and some councils are actively installing them on council houses.
Not quite accurate anymore. The UK was indeed the world leader from 2008 until around 2021, but has since fallen to second place behind China. China now has over 41 GW installed (>50% of global capacity), while the UK sits at ~15 GW (~22%). [1][2]
Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.
By showing only your provided data it seems. But when looking at the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources it looks totally different!
Meanwhile POTUS has his head stuck in the sand [0]:
> “All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”
One of the solar farms is in a tidal flat. Are those solar panels meant to be waterproof? I’d imagine they may not last as long from sea salt exposure too.
I find the idea of blanketing mountainous wilderness in relatively short-lived e-waste just awful. Surely there are much better terrains for solar panels?
Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".
Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.
Given the vast amount of flat, well-lit terrain within the borders of China, it should be clear that the pictured projects (and the other "blanket a mountain in solar panels" projects that are easily discoverable) are not about the economics of power generation.
In this particular case I believe the mountain is largely karst (limestone) and the panels substantially reduced erosion -- particularly of soil -- leading to an increase in fauna that thrive in the shade.
As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.
Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear? Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it? And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear
If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.
They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
I don't think the characterisation of this as waste of space is correct. There's a growing body of research suggesting that solar panels are compatible with grazing animals and farming, and the wind farms don't really stop usage of the space unless you are planning to go ballooning.
This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]
Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.
Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.
If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.
> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?
No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.
If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.
> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.
Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
Take too long time and cost.
I honestly perplexed by the fethism towards Nuclear Power Plants. Have you seen the delay and bloating cost of Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Vogtle?
Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.
They'll just blame those delays and cost overruns on greens or liberals.
Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.
PRC Solar is cheaper (LCOE) than nuclear, more distributed, faster to build. Western PRC with good solar is mostly empty/depopulated (2/3 of PRC with 80% of solar/wind potential has like 5% of population, it's empty). Easy to install, lots of transferrable skills from general construction (vs nuclear workforce). Real estate crack down = lots of lower skilled blue collar installing solar as jobs program. Serendipitous synergy. PRC installed renewable capacity exceeds energy required to manufacture same equipment on GW basis, functionally makes production of entire sector carbon neutral/sink, as in will displace more fossil than used in production and sink after. Obviously manufacture works off grid mix, including coal, but broad point is every panel going to save more emissions vs embodied carbon payback through life cycle. There's also plans for recycling / recover materials for circular economy.
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”
I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.
And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.
Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.
For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
And you can buy them and use them right now, as i can go and shop some solar panels, inverters, batteries, some cables put them about anywhere and just have free electricity after the initial expense?
Not so scenic any more... I get it, electricity good, but man are we destroying places just to get this stuff. In the UK I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it. Fossil fuels gave us too much. If only we could figure out how to want less.
I would rather they not have to be built in the first place. Yet, this is unfortunately the price we must pay today for not reducing our carbon emissions yesterday.
Had we taken a serious effort to do something in, say the mid nineties when the scientific community reached a large consensus regarding the major contributors of climate change it had been less urgent to do something now thirty years later and we would have had a much longer time for the academies and industry to research and improve performance of non-fossil energy production and do the same for energy using applications.
It's not the renewables which are to blame, because if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way we do then these places will either soon be destroyed, or nobody can appreciate them due to civilisational collapse.
My local beaches on the Yorkshire coast have some of the biggest wind farms in the world.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.
I know nothing about the topic.
Although it seems a better alternative than coal or petrol, is it free of side effects for the nature?
I wonder if the heat that would be spread around the atmosphere and back to space can actually gradually serve as a trap for heat?
No it doesn't make sense. Every photon that hits the Earth is eventually either absorbed as heat, reflected back into space or both (eg. partially absorbed and partially re-emitted as lower energy photons.) There is no net global increase in heat from a wind turbine or solar panel. (There might be slight local shifts.)
The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.
Sure, everything has downsides. Even breathing. But none of the alternatives have downsides that are as big as taking carbon from the soil and pumping it in an already stressed ecosystem.
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. Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.
What is the question to which fusion and geothermal is the answer? From a climate perspective those will come too late to aid our planet much until decades of further change, if fusion even comes at all.
Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.
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 doing needs to re-evaluate their world view.
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. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.
Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.
I expect China to overbuild and the west to underbuild.
The EU is moving towards 50% sustainable with lots of countries that at 60-75%, while the USA is at 25%.
Europe is also at least a decade ahead.
And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.
Yeah while western boomers complain China builds
And a talking point in the other direction is to refer to people as "boomers".
In case you haven't noticed, it's the non-thinkers of all generations who willingly bury their head in the sand.
Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular unless their powers of observation are somewhat limited.
Which is understandable, you don't reach maturity overnight.
Edit: not my downvote btw
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 for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns. But it’s difficult to compare localized damage to war and globalized damage.
I recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben. There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs. This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year. The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.
Solar panels etc. will last decades and can and will be recycled afterwards. Further, most materials needed for renewable energy infrastructure (iron, lithium) are highly abundant on earth. Most of the suppliers work to use cheaper (=more abundant) materials in their products, replacing lithium with sodium in batteries and silver with copper in solar panels. Wind turbine blades are produced now using re-solvable resins.
But it creates enough cash to redirect all ire away to weakly lobbying industries, like aggrarian-sector or other weakly lobbied sectors like nuclear.
> 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.
Yep. It's not just oil rigs in the desert. Chevron in Ecuador destroyed the Amazonian rainforest. Oil pipelines and open pit mines destroying Canadian primordial forests. Probably tons of untold stories.
it seems us is fighting yesterday's war
wars / empires etc are built on mastering an energy source
the Brits on Coal
the US rose on Oil
China is rising on renewables
my worry is can renewables be quickly brought online to power industry / power hungry Data Centers etc at a reasonable cost
Its crazy that in 1999 "home solar" was a fancy, new millennium idea, and now we're still barely any closer.
Honestly, I think building regulations should mandate solar energy for homes.
My 65yo parents installed Solar panels on the roof of their house in a Tier 2 city in the poor parts of India. So did pretty much most of their neighbours.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
Maybe his "we" is more USA-centric than your "we".
It happens all the time...
My "We" is Australia and UK-centric.
People have home solar, but it's hardly widespread. It's still a "fancy" thing to have.
I guess at some level it is a matter of incentives. In their city, we have electricity 20-22 hours per day (used to be 12-18 when i was growing up) and we can’t rely on the state to provide us electricity consistently.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
I would say 10% of the homes in my estate in Derbyshire have rooftop solar. We haven't gone for it yet because I still think the cost is too high. It might work out when electricity gets even more expensive.
Sorry to disagree, but we are not just closer, we’ve been there for a while.
You can go out and buy solar panels to cover your roof for a few thousand dollars/pounds/euros. You could definitely not do that in 1999.
In 2025, > 90% of new energy capacity built in the US is from renewable [0]. So the US isn't building that much solar not because they're not building solar, but that the US has been generating and consuming so much energy per capita that there isn't that much incentive to increase energy capacity dramatically.
[0]: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/us-new-win...
The US has done well historically, roughly on par with China on per capita renewable rollout, slightly ahead of China between 2019-2023 but probably falling behind now.
China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.
These are new electric power plants. The US is still ramping up oil and gas production, and is now producing more than ever before. No signs of transitioning away from fossil fuels for transport, industry, export.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/chart-the-...
Meanwhile the US is using its remaining carbon budget to bomb and burn in one last effort to expand its dying empire. Eventually this system will fall, and the west will realize they wasted all their energy (literally) on non-civilian hardware that needs massive amounts of cheap oil.
China has also just launched a megawatt scale wind generator a the helium-lifted balloon, the S2000 , they have active thorium rector the TMSR-LF1 and GW/h Vandium flow battery. The scale , speed and breadth of what they are doing is incredible and I think missed my people
Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.
The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.
That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.
I feel like energy is the most critical aspect to any economy and military. It's the beginning of anything and everything you want to achieve.
That's GWh and vanadium flow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
Technological, manufacturing and energy advancements aside (congrats China on those), the pictures look beautiful. Amazing work from the photographer.
Came here to appreciate the same. Not only it truly captures the scale, but does it in a great way.
Meanwhile, in London, UK, local council doesn't allow you to put anything on your rooftop that doesn't gel with the Victorian look..
It's a big town. You might want to specify which of the 33 boroughs this stupid policy exists in. There's no problem with solar where I live.
Is your building listed or something? In most cases it doesn't require planning permission even in a conservation area, and some councils are actively installing them on council houses.
The UK is actually world leading in wind electricity generation (especially offshore). So it's not all bad.
Not quite accurate anymore. The UK was indeed the world leader from 2008 until around 2021, but has since fallen to second place behind China. China now has over 41 GW installed (>50% of global capacity), while the UK sits at ~15 GW (~22%). [1][2]
Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.
[1] https://www.renewableuk.com/energypulse/blog/uk-wind-and-glo... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1489147/uk-offshore-wind...
ps.: Per capita it's also not #1 — Denmark and the Netherlands both have higher offshore wind capacity per person.
Also worth checking out some of the mega projects on Open Infrastructure Maps like this one in central China.
https://openinframap.org/#9.12/36.0832/100.4215/A,B,L,P,S
This planet-scale map of the global electricity network is incredible.
OpenStreetMap (the DB behind this map) is incredible. It has so much useful information inside it.
Beautiful pictures. To be clear: China runs on coal and will for the foreseeable future.
https://www.iea.org/countries/china
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
By showing only your provided data it seems. But when looking at the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources it looks totally different!
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=line&facet=n...
Meanwhile POTUS has his head stuck in the sand [0]:
> “All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”
One of the most factually BS statements ever.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattrandolph/2026/01/12/china-d...
One of the solar farms is in a tidal flat. Are those solar panels meant to be waterproof? I’d imagine they may not last as long from sea salt exposure too.
I would suspect they are floating on pontoons.
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.
Wow, pictures look great, well done Mr Weimin Chu
When you're not trying to act like the "richest" country in the world, the sensibility of asource of energy is a complete no-brainer.
Even though associated costs exist, a free source is the lowest of its kind you can find.
I find the idea of blanketing mountainous wilderness in relatively short-lived e-waste just awful. Surely there are much better terrains for solar panels?
Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".
Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.
Given the vast amount of flat, well-lit terrain within the borders of China, it should be clear that the pictured projects (and the other "blanket a mountain in solar panels" projects that are easily discoverable) are not about the economics of power generation.
Yes let us wait for an optimal aesthetic solution for another 50 years while we choke on our own fumes. Plenty of time to rearrange the deck chairs.
China already has one (if we're insisting on solar power generation) - 700,000 sq. mi of desert.
It's also not just aesthetic - flat terrain is just so much more practical.
> flat terrain is just so much more practical.
Outside of peak summer it's much more optimal to have a south facing slope actually.
Bring back those big beautiful chimeys, burning their beautiful coal and blanketing us in the warm glorious embrace of soot and fly ash.
Still much better and lower impact than whatever the fuck we'd been doing for the past 200 years
In this particular case I believe the mountain is largely karst (limestone) and the panels substantially reduced erosion -- particularly of soil -- leading to an increase in fauna that thrive in the shade.
As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.
Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear? Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it? And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear
If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.
They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
I don't think the characterisation of this as waste of space is correct. There's a growing body of research suggesting that solar panels are compatible with grazing animals and farming, and the wind farms don't really stop usage of the space unless you are planning to go ballooning.
This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?
Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.
Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.
If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.
> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?
No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.
If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.
> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.
Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
Take too long time and cost. I honestly perplexed by the fethism towards Nuclear Power Plants. Have you seen the delay and bloating cost of Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Vogtle?
Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.
They'll just blame those delays and cost overruns on greens or liberals.
Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.
PRC Solar is cheaper (LCOE) than nuclear, more distributed, faster to build. Western PRC with good solar is mostly empty/depopulated (2/3 of PRC with 80% of solar/wind potential has like 5% of population, it's empty). Easy to install, lots of transferrable skills from general construction (vs nuclear workforce). Real estate crack down = lots of lower skilled blue collar installing solar as jobs program. Serendipitous synergy. PRC installed renewable capacity exceeds energy required to manufacture same equipment on GW basis, functionally makes production of entire sector carbon neutral/sink, as in will displace more fossil than used in production and sink after. Obviously manufacture works off grid mix, including coal, but broad point is every panel going to save more emissions vs embodied carbon payback through life cycle. There's also plans for recycling / recover materials for circular economy.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Power-Play-The-Economics-...:
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”
I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.
And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.
Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?
But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.
For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
Nuclear still have to deal with nuclear waste.
> gigantic waste of space
Good thing China isn’t running out of space
The latest generation of Nuclear power plants are full cycle, produce close to nothing amount of waste
And you can buy them and use them right now, as i can go and shop some solar panels, inverters, batteries, some cables put them about anywhere and just have free electricity after the initial expense?
Sources?
The world of information is literally at your fingertips. Maybe try researching yourself for two minutes? This isn't breaking news.
There's two big parts of the earth that are uninhabitable because of nuclear.
Anyway, they are going with nuclear too.
If it was 2.5-3x cheaper, sure. But alas.
The problem is that it is extremely expensive and takes a very long time to build.
The supply chain for nuclear power, including fuel from mining to waste storage, is not tiny either.
Why can't you do both? Why does it always have to be either or?
Beautiful!
> Heidu Mountain Scenic Area
Not so scenic any more... I get it, electricity good, but man are we destroying places just to get this stuff. In the UK I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it. Fossil fuels gave us too much. If only we could figure out how to want less.
Less scenic, sure. But still beautiful.
I would rather they not have to be built in the first place. Yet, this is unfortunately the price we must pay today for not reducing our carbon emissions yesterday.
Had we taken a serious effort to do something in, say the mid nineties when the scientific community reached a large consensus regarding the major contributors of climate change it had been less urgent to do something now thirty years later and we would have had a much longer time for the academies and industry to research and improve performance of non-fossil energy production and do the same for energy using applications.
It's not the renewables which are to blame, because if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way we do then these places will either soon be destroyed, or nobody can appreciate them due to civilisational collapse.
My local beaches on the Yorkshire coast have some of the biggest wind farms in the world.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.
Fossil fuels have destroyed far more places than renewable energy's land coverage ever will.
Why aren't we doing it in the rest of the world as well?
The rest of the world is, in fact, doing it as well.
I know nothing about the topic. Although it seems a better alternative than coal or petrol, is it free of side effects for the nature? I wonder if the heat that would be spread around the atmosphere and back to space can actually gradually serve as a trap for heat?
Does this question make any sense at all?
No it doesn't make sense. Every photon that hits the Earth is eventually either absorbed as heat, reflected back into space or both (eg. partially absorbed and partially re-emitted as lower energy photons.) There is no net global increase in heat from a wind turbine or solar panel. (There might be slight local shifts.)
The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.
[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
This is actually quite a sizeable chunk. If in the future needs grow 10 times the area needed might become big problem.
> is it free of side effects for the nature?
What is free of side effects for "nature" ?
Sure, everything has downsides. Even breathing. But none of the alternatives have downsides that are as big as taking carbon from the soil and pumping it in an already stressed ecosystem.
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. Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.
What is the question to which fusion and geothermal is the answer? From a climate perspective those will come too late to aid our planet much until decades of further change, if fusion even comes at all.
Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.
You can get a lot of stationary batteries for a couple of trillion dollars.