China Is Backing Off Coal Power Plant Approvals (apnews.com) 91
Approvals for new coal-fired power plants in China dropped by 80% in the first half of this year compared to last, according to an analysis from Greenpeace and the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies. The Associated Press reports: A review of project documents by Greenpeace East Asia found that 14 new coal plants were approved from January to June with a total capacity of 10.3 gigawatts, down 80% from 50.4 gigawatts in the first half of last year. Authorities approved 90.7 gigawatts in 2022 and 106.4 gigawatts in 2023, a surge that raised alarm among climate experts. China leads the world in solar and wind power installations but the government has said that coal plants are still needed for periods of peak demand because wind and solar power are less reliable. While China's grid gives priority to greener sources of energy, experts worry that it won't be easy for China to wean itself off coal once the new capacity is built.
"We may now be seeing a turning point," Gao Yuhe, the project lead for Greenpeace East Asia, said in a statement. "One question remains here. Are Chinese provinces slowing down coal approvals because they've already approved so many coal projects ...? Or are these the last gasps of coal power in an energy transition that has seen coal become increasingly impractical? Only time can tell." [...] Gao said that China should focus its resources on better connecting wind and solar power to the grid rather than building more coal power plants. Coal provides more than 60% of the country's electricity. "Coal plays a foundation role in China's energy security," Li Fulong, an official of National Energy Administration, said at a news conference in June. The report notes that China is also looking to nuclear power to help reach its carbon reduction targets. The country approved five nuclear power projects on Monday with 11 units and a total cost of $28 billion.
"We may now be seeing a turning point," Gao Yuhe, the project lead for Greenpeace East Asia, said in a statement. "One question remains here. Are Chinese provinces slowing down coal approvals because they've already approved so many coal projects ...? Or are these the last gasps of coal power in an energy transition that has seen coal become increasingly impractical? Only time can tell." [...] Gao said that China should focus its resources on better connecting wind and solar power to the grid rather than building more coal power plants. Coal provides more than 60% of the country's electricity. "Coal plays a foundation role in China's energy security," Li Fulong, an official of National Energy Administration, said at a news conference in June. The report notes that China is also looking to nuclear power to help reach its carbon reduction targets. The country approved five nuclear power projects on Monday with 11 units and a total cost of $28 billion.
Batteries (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if that's what Chinese officials think, but battery providers like BYD and CATL are now investing in sodium-ion batteries (without stopping their lithium investments, of course).
Being slightly less energy dense and more bulky than lithium-ion, they don't require scarce materials and have the potential to reach very cheap prices. With this batteries, classic coal has even less chance than before.
This batteries will be phenomenal in daily storage. Still a long term storage is needed, but using coal for that it's not profitable. For now, natural gas will fill the niche better.
Other technologies could fill the gap. like Hydrogen.
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I believe China now mandates all new renewable projects include 10-20% storage, which seems like an eminently sensible move. That might not eliminate the need for coal plants, but it will certainly significantly reduce the use of fossil fuel peaker plants. Places like Spain, where they've been building too much solar and not enough storage should take note - when you have electricity prices going negative at peak production times, it's difficult to make a profit, even if building a solar plant is quite chea
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It's funny how we have gone from "solar will never produce a meaningful proportion of our energy" to "oh no we have too much of it, people are getting paid to use electricity!"
Another way of looking at it is that Spain doesn't have enough storage. They could do like Ireland and build some flywheels. Convert old fossil plants. They could also improve long distance transmission options so that they can export more of that energy.
Re:Batteries (Score:4, Interesting)
They could do like Ireland and build some flywheels.
Ireland is not using flywheels for storage but for grid stability.
The old heuristic is to store energy in capacitors for seconds, flywheels for minutes, and batteries for hours.
Renewables need hours of storage to do time-of-day shifting.
But the cost of batteries has come way down. Flywheels make little sense anymore except for niche applications, like very hot environments.
Re: Batteries (Score:3)
In some places a battery may even take the form of pumped storage, with water being pumped up to a reservoir when electricity is in low demand and then used to power a turbine when demand goes up.
Iâ(TM)m actually curious if there are other types of non-chemical batteries being proposed or already in use?
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a battery may even take the form of pumped storage
That's really stretching the definition of "battery".
If pumped storage is a "battery", so is a flywheel.
Iâ(TM)m actually curious if there are other types of non-chemical batteries being proposed or already in use?
1. Pumped storage
2. Gravity blocks
3. Flywheels
4. Compressed air
5. Molten salt
6. Concentrated brine (for osmotic power [wikipedia.org])
7. ???
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curious if there are other types of non-chemical batteries being proposed or already in use?
Gravity batteries. [interestin...eering.com]
Take a mineshaft from a closed mining operation, and use excess energy to lift a really heavy thing to the top, and when you need the energy back, drop it back down the shaft with resistance provided by turning a really big generator.
Even if you don't have a pre-existing mineshaft, it's really not that hard to drill a really deep hole in the ground and put a structure over the top of it [popularmechanics.com].
You just need to get rid of the idiots that are against anything but burning crap for heat to convert i
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Compressed air, liquefied air, molten salt, reversible fuel cells...
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Flywheels don't even store energy as such; they provide inertia to stabilize grid frequency. They do that by storing and releasing energy of course, but their purpose isn't to provide power in bulk, only to smooth fluctuations. They serve the same inertial function that turbines and spinning generators provide by merit of being large spinning masses.
Renewable energy, especially solar and battery systems with electronic inverters, don't have that kind of inertial quality to it.
For reference, the flywheel the [en-former.com]
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Flywheels don't even store energy as such; they provide inertia to stabilize grid frequency.
My brain, it hurts. Ow, ow, ow.
For reference, the flywheel they installed in Ireland at 120 tons and spinning at 3000 RPM, stores only about 820 kwh of energy. You could take ten Tesla Model 3 Long-Range cars - the entire vehicle - and have the same energy storage at a third the mass
The long range cars use NCM batteries, though. You should compare to vehicles with LFPs, because flywheels don't combust.
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> You should compare to vehicles with LFPs, because flywheels don't combust.
But they do explode violently if they fail, releasing all that stored energy almost in an instant... if we're considering only failure modes I'll take my chances with the NCM batteries.
=Smidge=
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Flywheels can be constructed to shred themselves when they fail, but a better plan is probably just to bury them.
Flywheels [Re:Batteries] (Score:2)
Flywheels don't even store energy as such;
Yes, they do. I think what you mean is, flywheels are not currently used in the electrical power industry to store energy.
There are many proposals for flywheel storage; it has some advantages in some applications. https://scholar.google.com/sch... [google.com]
Their main problem is that batteries have gotten better so fast (driven by laptops and cell phone demand, not by electrical power uses) that it's a moving target that's increasingly hard to hit.
they provide inertia to stabilize grid frequency. They do that by storing and releasing energy of course, but their purpose isn't to provide power in bulk, only to smooth fluctuations. They serve the same inertial function that turbines and spinning generators provide by merit of being large spinning masses. Renewable energy, especially solar and battery systems with electronic inverters, don't have that kind of inertial quality to it.
For reference, the flywheel they installed in Ireland [en-former.com] at 120 tons and spinning at 3000 RPM, stores only about 820 kwh of energy. You could take ten Tesla Model 3 Long-Range cars - the entire vehicle - and have the same energy storage at a third the mass. Flywheels are shit for bulk energy storage... but they still have a purpose.
=Smidge=
Not really disagreeing with your analysis in general, but the fact that
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> Yes, they do. I think what you mean is
That I mean is exactly what I said. Read the whole comment before replying.
> but the fact that current flywheel storage isn't in use is not a demonstration that it can't be in the future
The fact that it isn't in use is a demonstration that it won't be. Nobody is saying it can't. Of course it can. It was tried [wikipedia.org] and the experiment failed. Costs too much, takes up too much land, doesn't store enough energy. There is a fundamental limit to the physics involved that
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Meh.
On this list of spurious objections to technology, "we tried it once and it didn't work" is high on the list. Pretty much every technology we use now started out as a technology that didn't work.
Can it catch up to the advances being made in batteries is a question. But you can't dismiss it out of hand.
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Flywheels don't even store energy as such; they provide inertia to stabilize grid frequency. They do that by storing and releasing energy of course, but their purpose isn't to provide power in bulk, only to smooth fluctuations. They serve the same inertial function that turbines and spinning generators provide by merit of being large spinning masses. Renewable energy, especially solar and battery systems with electronic inverters, don't have that kind of inertial quality to it.
This is correct. I think what is more typically used is synchronous condensers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You can even turn an old generating plant into one, as is frequently done.
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I'm not aware of Ireland using flywheels, but it could certainly use some batteries to ease demand rather than firing up oil, gas, or coal stations. Ireland also has the potential to be a net energy exporter thanks to the massive potential for windfarms along the Shannon estuary and elsewhere.
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all new renewable projects include 10-20% storage, which seems like an eminently sensible move.
Actually, it's a dumb move.
It almost always makes more sense to place storage near the demand than near the supply.
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Surely both are good. Your real biggest cost is transmission and you really really don't want to reduce how widespread that is, so you do want to get the cost per link down. The way to reduce that cost is to use it more evenly so that they don't have to increase capacity too often. Storage near to demand lets you send electricity when demand is low. Storage near to variable supply lets you continue sending when the supply is lower.
I'm sure the balance should favour storage close to demand, especially becaus
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Fair question. The sources I looked at don't make that clear, the original info is probably out there on some Chinese government site in Mandarin or whatever. The best I can find is this;
"Since the end of 2020, the compulsory allocation policy for energy storage in new projects, including solar+storage, has emerged as a significant driving force.
By the end of 2022, more than 20 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in China have issued new energy allocation and storage policies.
These policies ma
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I expect sodium ion batteries will become very popular for fixed emplacements of batteries - they're very cheap by battery standards and density doesn't matter quite as much as it does in a vehicle. Although sodium ion batteries will be used there too, especially on cheaper model cars with LFP supplanting NMC in the higher capacity models.
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I'm sure all of this factors into things. BUT the story goes that they were building coal plants that were never actually commissioned. They were doing it to keep workers busy, not because they intended to use them when built.
FWIW, I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. The plant was built, connected up and commissioned, but then shut down to serve as a backup. A small crew of workers remain, with a handful more on-call so that it can be brought into service as required. Again, a great way to keep som
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Do you mean energy dense as in the amount of energy per unit of volume, or did you mean specific energy as in amount of energy per unit of mass?
Go China (Score:5, Insightful)
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Trump.
Stop paying lip service to this 20th century climate change denier and the Republicans might actually see the monetary potential of renewable investment.
Oh and Rupert Murdoch and his media empire.
Re:Go China (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like even Trump and the GOP can't hold back the tide on this one though. Solar and wind are so cheap that it's going to be very difficult to stop people installing them.
Funnily enough The 8 Bit Guy just published a video about his off-grid solar set-up, which is primarily designed to help him get through the frequent blackouts that Texas experiences. The video is eye-opening for the wrong reasons. First he complains that if everyone has solar there won't be any money for the grid... And then that conventional solar doesn't work during a blackout. Neither of those things is true, but then comes the real kicker. He mentions his house needs about 50kWh/day. That's insane. And instead of insulating it, he just buys more solar panels to run his AC for a bit longer.
In other words, I think there is a cultural issue in the US. A lot of people just don't seem to have any clue about how to make their home energy efficient, how to utilize solar, and how to best save money. There was someone on Slashdot claiming to have spent over $100k on solar without bothering to figure out if that was a good idea before hand.
As the knowledge builds up and spreads to European levels, it's going to become much more difficult for the GOP and energy suppliers to prevent the transition from happening.
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He mentions his house needs about 50kWh/day. That's insane.
In Florida we'd call that an average electric bill. Unless you enjoy the idea of experiencing Florida's climate while indoors, a high electric bill just comes with living in a hot, humid southern state. Additionally, in many homes additional insulation simply isn't realistically feasible short of demolishing the entire house and rebuilding it.
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I think you would be surprised what you can do to insulate a home. What type of construction are they using in Texas?
Roof/loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, exterior cladding insulation, better windows and doors. It looks like Texas homes, and his one, typically have cavities.
He actually built a new outhouse workshop, but apparently didn't think to install any insulation.
I think many of his decisions were driven by the fact that he got Ecoflo batteries for free from the manufacturer.
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If you're building something new it's pretty foolish not to insulate it properly, sure. But if you're talking an existing home, it costs a small fortune just to get a contractor to come out and pick up their tool bag,
Yeah, if you have an easily accessible open attic, additional insulation can simply be blown in, but in hot climates that doesn't reduce your home's cooling load as much as you'd hope.
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You can install loft insulation very easily yourself. It comes in rolls and you just lay it out between the beams.
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The improvement is contingent upon your starting R value, and how much of the attic space is actually accessible. It's fairly common in Florida for homes to have cathedral ceilings, and without some major renovations you're stuck.
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It's only "average" because a ridiculous number of houses in Florida don't have solar on their roof to mitigate the cost of electric. It's actually depressing to go there in the blazing heat & sunshine and perhaps see maybe 1 in 10 houses with solar. Building codes should mandate EVERY new house has solar, and generous grants or tax incentives to upgrade old ones. Aside from building codes, Florida should start planting trees to provide shade and mitigate some of the heat island effect that comes with e
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Agreed but fat chance any of that will happen while DeSantis is running things. That guy's zero substance and all culture war.
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He mentions his house needs about 50kWh/day. That's insane.
In Florida we'd call that an average electric bill. Unless you enjoy the idea of experiencing Florida's climate while indoors, a high electric bill just comes with living in a hot, humid southern state.
I live in Winnipeg and use more than that in the summer months.
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He also has three electric vehicles, who knows how much he drives - if the family drives a lot I could see a high daily kWh usage.
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about 50kWh/day. That's insane
How is ca. 2kW insane for a house in the desert? It's a bit on the high side, twice as much as an average US household and four times as much as an average European household, but if that's what it takes to avoid a complete remodel of the house, or make the house significantly cheaper to build, why not? You can get that energy very cheaply from the sun, and the resource consumption for insulation is avoided too. In this case, demand probably aligns very well with solar electricity production, so there's no
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Insulation is very, very cheap. Southern Europe gets a lot of sun too, as does Morocco. He built his studio quite recently too, it's not like it was built before anyone knew about this stuff.
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Insulation is very, very cheap.
So are solar panels. 2kW average, with most demand when the sun shines, is a small installation. 4kWp of solar capacity costs less than $1000. I'd wager that you can't insulate a Texan home for that little money, at least not well enough that you won't need air conditioning at all.
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You would still need air conditioning, just not as much of it.
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First he complains that if everyone has solar there won't be any money for the grid... And then that conventional solar doesn't work during a blackout. Neither of those things is true
What does "conventional" mean?
Most grid-tied solar systems don't do islanding. Of those that do, most only work at reduced capacity.
Blackout [Re:Go China] (Score:2)
...And then that conventional solar doesn't work during a blackout. Neither of those things is true
If it's a grid-connected solar, true. Power companies do not want people feeding power into the grid during a blackout; they need to be sure that when workers are fixing problems, the grid is not energized by amateurs pushing power in from the user side.
The solution, of course, is to have a hard cut-off switch at the interface to disconnect the solar from the grid if the grid is down. But power companies don't really like this; they don't want to rely on consumers for safety issues.
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A typical hybrid inverter with battery will have an output for back-up power when the grid is down. You have to wire things you need when the grid is down to that output. It's usually not too hard since your consumer unit probably has circuits for lighting, kitchen, and in the US for 240V appliances.
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The power companies, at least in the US, get to give you "permission to operate" your solar if you are grid connected. And it's a hard requirement that the system disconnects if grid power isn't there, and there aren't on-site batteries to put power into.
If there are batteries present in the system, then the solar keeps working because it has a place for that electricity to go. But you will never get PTO unless you have an operational disconnect.
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First he complains that if everyone has solar there won't be any money for the grid... And then that conventional solar doesn't work during a blackout. Neither of those things is true
Neither of those things are false either. They fall squarely in the "it depends" category.
I live in an area where there is no money for the grid anymore. My utility would *CHARGE US* to export to the grid now for this very reason. Some other companies still pay for electricity from solar fed customers, but if you do export at any point they'll charge you a daily feed-in fee. It's really pushing you to run your own batteries, and the switch to solar is one of the biggest issues for grid operators right now.
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The days when the grid is a profit centre are coming to an end. We need to start treating it as the infrastructure that it is, like roads. Public ownership and maintenance.
Aside from facilitating a transition to renewables, it is also the only way to stop people who can't install their own solar getting screwed.
Many modern inverters support off-grid operation. They typically do it with a separate AC output that you connect critical appliances too, e.g. fridge/freezer, lights, air conditioning. You can also
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I think your right on Texas though. I just recently installed a power monitor in my panel and noticed where my power is going . Sure alot is going into AC but when I turn on rooms I do notice that now. I have been thinking of install solar to mediate daytime costs though.
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Re:Go China (Score:4, Interesting)
Cape Wind [wikipedia.org] was a proposed offshore wind farm for Nantucket Sound, which would generate consistently 454 MW of power. Offshore wind is far better than on-shore wind; you can build bigger turbines which are far more cost effective, wind off the coast is far more reliable for consistent power generation, and it's closer to population centers minimizing transmission/grid infrastructure costs. In all ways, off-shore wind is a winner.
The project failed in permitting. Who opposed it the most? The Kennedy's, pure Democrat royalty [wikipedia.org]. Sure, Mitt Romney opposed it too, but it was clearly a bi-partisan wealthy politician NIMBY effort. Why? Because Nantucket sound is right near the most expensive real estate in Massachusetts and it would ruin their sailing. 81% of Massachusetts citizens supported the project, but it couldn't pass permitting via the EPA during the Obama administration when the EPA bureaucracy was at the height of it's authority.
The first offshore wind farm to be completed in the US was Block Wind [wikipedia.org]. It was challenged in it's permitting by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under the Obama Administration, so the Republican Governor Donald Carcieri got the Rhode Island Assembly to amend their law so the state could authorize it themselves and got it built. They were then sued by FERC under the Supremacy Clause to stop the process saying the State of RI had no jurisdiction to do this, and RI got it thrown out of court.
The replacement to Cape Wind, Vineyard Wind [wikipedia.org], was held up by the Trump Administration to review fishing rights, but got approved under the Biden Administration and is under construction.
And I won't even talk about California, a solid blue state with the longest coastline and the largest bureaucratic inertia to off-shore wind anywhere in the world. This post is already too long.
NIMBYism isn't limited to the GOP. The Dems also will only support renewable power when the location is foisted on the average American but not when it would ruin their ocean view, and administrations of both sides have stopped projects. To date the US has installed maybe 100 MW total of offshore wind, where Europe is nearing 20 GW.
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Solar and wind are so cheap that it's going to be very difficult to stop people installing them.
Having to pay the local utility for energy you didn't use is a strong disincentive towards installing anything 'green'. Doesn't seem difficult to me.
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Why would people pay for energy they didn't use?
There is the issue of the standing charge which is for network maintenance, but that's not for the energy delivered.
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It pokes holes in the whole "American Exceptionalism" thing when China does anything better than the USA (and if you really want a shock, compare home ownership percentages). They're supposed to be a backwards oppressive communist society, so any time they get something right in spite of that we're supposed to cover our ears and shout "na na na not listening!"
Here in Florida we even have our own government propaganda against communism [miamiherald.com], which I'm sure is going to be completely unbiased and factual. Don't g
Re: Go China (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yep, pretty much. Yes, the US is _large_, but the only thing it is exceptionally good at is kidding itself.
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Spotted the European with the inferiority complex.
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Ha ha ha, you wish. I have the comparison. It does not look good for the US.
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Ha ha ha, you wish. I have the comparison. It does not look good for the US.
Please tell that to the hoards of people illegally entering our country. I have no desire for the US to be "bestest place EVER!" and am fine with us being "just another country". I just need you to start an ad campaign for whatever country you think is best and spread it to every third world country. Our economy can't sustain them and I'm getting tired of the rape [abc13.com] and murders in my state perpetrated by some of them.
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You're not doing your cause any good going on about immigrant crime. We've known for ages that they commit far less crime than native born Americans https://siepr.stanford.edu/new... [stanford.edu] .
Way to jump on the bandwagon of conservative media's attempt to make this seem like a real thing though.
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And I'm sure you feel very big and important making such a bold proclamation. Good for you.
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To be fair, there's a whole lot of us Americans that are not suffering from nationalistic delusion and understand that our exceptionalism is total horseshit and causes problems.
Let's not paint 340 million people with the same brush, eh?
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Hmm, everyone who are not American knows that their exceptionalism is a sad myth
It is just a piece of paper, but at least it says that Freedom and Liberty are the birthright of every person. What do your papers say?
Now if we could just enforce what the paper says...
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communism sucks
ALL economic models suck because the human administrators typically have a difficult time suppressing their greed, often finding ways to "game the system" and take extra resources for themselves.
Communism as a concept isn't horrible, where everyone basically owns everything equally and thus shares equally in those resources, it's the human operators doling out those resources succumbing to their greed thus taking extra which makes it suck. Capitalism as a concept isn't horrible, where everyone basically h
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US, what is holding you back?
Nothing. America hasn't built any new coal plants in over a decade, and none are planned.
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As a matter of fact, we've actually shut down and demolished coal plants that had decades remaining on their license [opb.org]. Public pressure works in some particular regions, not so much in others.
The particular plant in that article was the largest carbon emitter in the entire state. We shut that shit down, and they used the site to install much cleaner combined-cycle natural gas generators because the transmission infrastructure was already there. It's incremental progress, but still progress.
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Any time China breaks a record in installing green energy, the comments here go like: "but they keep investing heavily in dirty coal".
That's because this story is about reducing the number of approvals, not shutting down coal plants, and not about cancelling coal projects. Reducing the number of approvals still means they are planning to build more coal plants they haven't even broken ground on yet.
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Re: Go China (Score:2)
Maybe not as dirty as people are used to thinking.
https://www.americanprogress.o... [americanprogress.org]
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US, what is holding you back?
That's funny because I've been saying the same thing about China for quite some time now as we 100% stopped building new coal power plants in the US over a decade ago. I suppose for China better late than never and an 80% reduction is a good start though.
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Re: Go China (Score:2)
Re: Go China (Score:2)
Sounds about right (Score:2)
I mean, can they practically burn more coal at this point? Probably more efficient to simply burn money. Kidding aside, several articles have noted that they've built and are building, a shit-ton (scientific term) of wind and solar -- "equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week". Don't know what percentage has battery storage as well. (Google "china solar")
Not green - just supply and demand (Score:1)
The previous two years there were a record number of approvals for new coal plants which covered future demand expectations. The companies that make them are now building them. Will all those plants already approved, the demand for new approvals unsurprisingly has dropped. Approval levels are now right back where they were before the surge.
This has nothing to do with any kind of "green shift" in China, they are still by far the #1 producer of CO2 globally and they have no intention of hobbling their ener
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They are no. 1 installing renewables/clean power by a long long way. [globalenergymonitor.org]
They DO have intentions of hobbling their energy demands. [carbonbrief.org]
You can do your bit and stop buying products outsourced to China to make it cheaper for you and buy the more expensive locally made product.
Re: Not green - just supply and demand (Score:2)
https://www.americanprogress.o... [americanprogress.org]
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That is B.S.
Economics 101. China changed to wind and solar for new installs because it is much much cheaper, and the gap is widening. No coming back of coal.
Re: Real reason China would cut back in coal (Score:1)
When Iast saw Mao, he was not turning green. Nor was Pooh Bear, which some people seem to think is a rare thing in China, or banned or something.
So much ignorance on display, sigh.
Electric power (Score:3)
I was recently in China and the transition to electric vehicles, especially scooters, was very noticeable. I almost got run over by scooters a few times at night because they are so quiet and they ride on the sidewalks sometimes. This is in contrast to Vietnam were I developed a cough from the pollution, a lot of it from scooters. Then there is the electric high speed train in China that is a joy.
Re: Electric power (Score:2)
I guess you've not been to China in quite some time, if the electric scooters caught your attention. They been a thing for many years already. Even NEV cars have been noticeable for several years.
Yes, the scooters in the pavements are a problem. They're mostly delivery drivers, in my experience. Pedal bikes are similarly also a problem, but that is a different story.
The cleaner air is very noticeable, but there are still times when pollution is bad, and not just due to environmental factor. Still, it's vast
Educate yourselves about Chinese coal (Score:3)
Even this is a little out of date
https://www.americanprogress.o... [americanprogress.org]