789
China Installed More Solar Panels Last Year Than the U.S. Has in Total
(www.ecowatch.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
789 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
59438 readers
4370 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
the coal is approved because on how power plants function. dirty energy is usually used to level out power spikes in demand, but not as a main source after you have a remeweable source. its a tually very hard to go 100% renewables.
It's why I'm a bit disgruntled many places around the world aren't getting their arses in gear and developing and building storage.
Even if that storage is woefully inefficient (liquid air energy storage, for example) it would be hugely beneficial. In Queensland, Australia, for example, barely any new solar is being built because energy prices are negative in the middle of the day and plants are being curtailed.
We need storage, any storage, a butt-tonne more of it, like now.
It's less about balance and more about raw needs. Providing power to a billion people is hard and they are building everything to meet the growing demand.
Balance is what determines the supply mix else everyone would just run nukes. Previous commenter is right about why fossil fuels are still used, we don't have tech to replace their capabilities, which are necessary for reliability of the transmission grid. Energy storage is an area of huge investment right now because of this, with batteries and flywheel storage pilot projects to try and mature this technology. SMRs are another area of research. Programs like demand response to incentivize heavy consumers to change their usage patterns.
Without the ramp rate of fossils to respond quickly to grid conditions, there would be constant frequency drops and spikes across the transmission grid. Turbines would become out of sync from the frequency on the lines and things would start tripping and we would have a blackout. This is even more complex with unpredictable renewal integration where fossil becomes even more critical for its capabilities, while slightly less for its capacity.
I thought China's population has stopped growing and is actually on a track to start shrinking rapidly?
But at the same time, quality of life is rapidly improving which means energy usage per capita will eventually ramp up to similar level with average western citizen's energy usage.
That depends on whether it'll keep its position as world's cheap factory. Quality of life improving tends to affect that too. What energy China now consumes for production may not be required in 20 years.
China already is losing cheap factories to India and other neighboring countries.