The scale of Chinese production since 2010 has driven the price of these technologies down by 60 to 90 percent, the researchers found. And last year, more than 90 percent of wind and solar projects commissioned worldwide produced power more cheaply than the cheapest available fossil-fuel alternative, they said. That cost advantage might have seemed laughable before China began pumping billions of dollars of subsidies into the sector.
I know a few people who drink the right wing coolaid and hate renewables, but they also think China is a great place and outsmarting western democracies at every turn. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.
Good thing solar and other renewables are still going strong some placed at least.
Good on China.
They may be an authoritarian surveillance state, but at least they’re not a mentally ill death cult who worship pedophiles.
They have a long term vision and the means to see it through. Sometimes that too ends badly but for some things it works better than aiming for next quarter or next election.
China is also building coal power at an unprecedented rate. https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/
The article mentions that and explains it as gandalf_ did.
they build coal power capacity, i.e. power plants that can turn coal into electricity.
the twist is, they’re not actually using that capacity. They produced just as much electricity from coal this year than last, even though the capacity for production increased. In other words, as they’re building more capacity, they’re utilizing it to smaller degrees, sothat the total production stays the same.
And last year, more than 90 percent of wind and solar projects commissioned worldwide produced power more cheaply than the cheapest available fossil-fuel alternative,
This is NOT because of China, All the technologies for the multi MegaWatt wind turbines were developed in Europe, and the race to make them cheaper per Watt also clearly is more due to European innovation than Chinese cheap production. There has been heavy competition among western producers pressing the price ever lower per kW. This has been done by making larger more efficient turbines, where Europe has been clearly in the lead for decades.
On that front China merely joined the race, and the European Vestas remain the world largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world, and AFAIK Siemens is the worlds largest manufacturer of offshore wind turbines.
China is of course a formidable competitor, but they have in no way surpassed us on wind turbines yet.
On Solar China is making massive amounts of good cheap panels, but both Germany and South Korea make better panels, that aren’t that much more expensive.
“China is the engine,” said Richard Black, the report’s editor. “And it is changing the energy landscape not just domestically but in countries across the world.”
Nope, that’s just not true, China is a major participant/player now, but the engine that drives green energy was started in Europe way before China became a major factor.
I know from personal experience, because we’ve been working on that shit since the 70’s, and made very good progress on it way before China became a factor.
To say China is driving this because they are big today, is like saying Toyota is behind the success of cars around the world. Both are nonsense, Toyota make good cars but that does not make them the “engine” of car production.
China also make good products for green energy, but that doesn’t make them the engine. This development would very obviously have happened without China, because it was already in full swing before China was a factor.you talk about the innovations a lot, but that’s not everything there is to it.
China massively subsidized its solar panel production for 20 years, at a loss. The reason they did that is because they ideologically believed that it would eventually pay off. Without these massive investments, solar might not have grown so much and might still be more expensive than fossil fuels due to a lack of economies of scale.
If you take china out of the game, you end up with solar panels that are not the cheapest source of energy, and that massively changes the outcome. It is only because solar panels are so cheap today that we see so many of them being installed. China was simply brave enough to invest billions and billions of dollars into them, instead of leaving it to the free market. That is what china did well.
