alphacyberrangerChina’s “Artificial Sun” Shatters Fusion Record With Over 17 Minutes of Plasma
Flying SquidWhat we need to do is find some way to make a giant fusion reactor and put it in the sky and get energy from it that way.
But that’s just a pipe dream…
FatCrabWhat we need is robust decentralized multimodal energy production fit for the local area where it is installed and contributing to a well maintained distributed grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage so that incidental costs are minimized and uptime is effectively 100%. Energy is a tool and its generation is a category of tools, whining about people developing a better screwdriver rather than only using hammers is counterproductive when we’re trying to build a house for as many people as possible that doesn’t fucking kill everyone.
I’m whining about China spending very little on current green energy technology while building more and more coal plants and taking advantage of these sort of PR stories.
I can’t help it, I’m one of those people who whines about climate change.
‘spending very little’???
They produced more new green energy than the total capacity of green energy for the rest of the world combined in 2024.
And yet they keep building more coal plants.
CarlLast year, China commissioned 96 GW of new coal production, retired 100 GW of old coal production, and commissioned 356 GW of wind and solar. This was the most coal production China has built in a single year since 2015, and it was still less than what they took off the grid, and far less than the amount of renewables that they put on the grid.
I wish China could wave a magic wand and have their entire energy grid go green, but the truth is that their middle class is still growing, and with it the demand for electricity, and even with the massive amount of spending they’ve put into wind and solar those forms of power simply can’t keep up with the rising demand on their own, so coal remains a necessary part of their multimodal grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage.
“The climate has to get worse for the benefit of the middle class” is a weird argument.
If that’s what you think I was saying then you need to work on your reading comprehension.
Sure looks to me like that’s what you were saying:
I wish China could wave a magic wand and have their entire energy grid go green, but the truth is that their middle class is still growing, and with it the demand for electricity, and even with the massive amount of spending they’ve put into wind and solar those forms of power simply can’t keep up with the rising demand on their own, so coal remains a necessary part of their multimodal grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage.
Calling coal necessary…
Coal is like 50% of their grid. If you removed it you would be plunging the whole country back into the dark ages.
The future is 100% green energy, but that isn’t going to happen overnight, and especially can’t happen overnight in a growing economy that needs to add energy at a high rate to keep up with demand.
China is spending more than the rest of the world combined on green energy, and they are currently putting more green energy on their grid than anything else. But they still need fossil fuels to maintain their current growth.
When that growth slows down, then it becomes possible for a shift to occur, where green energy is added and fossil energy is taken offline. It is not currently possible to do this in China.
You know where it is possible to do this? Fully developed countries like America, where demand has more or less peaked and there is no excuse for continuing to add fossil fuels onto the grid. If we spent half of what China spends on green energy, we could be retiring all of our own fossil fuel power plants by the end of the decade, but not only are we not doing this we have trained a certain sector of our population to clap like monkeys and point at other countries whenever the issue comes up.
Pointing at countries that have only developed recently and are still going through the process and saying “you can’t use fossil fuels” while living in a country that built its entire economy on fossil fuels is peak chauvinistic bullshit. Have some self awareness and think about context before you make broad proclamations.
You put something I supposedly said in quotes.
Please link to where I said it.
We’re back to the reading comprehension problem again.
That wasn’t a direct quote, that was a characterization of the shallow vapidity of your argument.
That wasn’t my argument, so I guess both of us have reading comprehension issues.