China has banned building new coal power plants as part of the BRI
Climate Change and Renewable Energy News and Discussion
- Thread starter FairAndUnbiased
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Hydrogen fuel cells and so called green hydrogen is sheer nonsense. The vast amount of energy losses in a system like that make it a non starter. Then add to that the huge costs such a system has compared with other ways to store or discharge energy on top.
Flow batteries are much cheaper than even sodium ion batteries. They also need much lower amounts of strategic materials.
Gas is expensive in China because it needs to be imported, and worst of all most of it comes via LNG by ship. Huge costs to liquefy and regasify the gas. It costs billions to build a liquefaction facility, billions more to build a regasification facility, and then you need to build tanker ships to transport it. Piped gas takes like a third the cost to build in terms of infrastructure. The pipelines themselves last decades. And piped gas uses the gas energy more efficiently as well. You only use LNG when you have no other choice.
Can't China improve their own gas production capabilities with coalbed methane or something?
The economic rationale for nuclear reactors is dependent on your own resource supply base and certain economic factors. For a country like China which has lots of coal mines the coal is cheaper. The biggest cost in coal is the transport because you need to transport so much volume of it to generate power. In the case of China you have Inner Mongolia, which is not particularly far away from the main cities in the north of China including the capital. The main issue with coal is the air pollution. This is why China is now building the power plants in Inner Mongolia itself and transporting the energy via electric power cables. For the southernmost cities in China which are further away from the coal mines nuclear might make more economic sense. The main cost for nuclear is financing, since it takes a long time to build a power plant and in the meantime you need to finance the debt, another issue is the decommissioning costs. But the longer a nuclear power plant operates the lower the impact of those will be with amortization. And modern nuclear power plants have estimated 60 years lifetime of the plant. Compared with 20 years for designs in the 1970s.
So I think we will see coal power plants in the north, nuclear in the south, gas for variable load, and it will be imported via pipe from Russia or Central Asia as much as possible to cut costs.
I think this is a major mistake. China should not have caved in to Western pressure with regards to this. Countries in the emerging world do not have either the economic nor the industrial base to run nuclear power plants. And coal provides the cheapest baseload. Not allowing coal is pushing the poor and emerging economies into economic backwardess indefinitively. And China itself certainly went back on its decision and is now building dozen of modern coal power plants in China proper.
No, China is going big on pump hydro storage
China’s National Energy Administration said last week it aimed to double pumped storage capacity within five years, to more than 62GW by 2025. It wants to further expand capacity to 120GW in the following five years and achieve an internationally competitive industry by 2035.
China never promised not to build new coal fire power plants in China.
@tphuang
MIT: Nuclear cheaper than Coal in China
energymonitor.ai/finance/regulation-policy/will-china-gamble-on-a-nuclear-future
Of course pumped hydro economically is the best one, but you cannot create pumped hydro storage everywhere. Hydro itself also has negative effect on the environment. Let's say they will have 4000 GWs of solar/wind power in operation in 25 years, how would you be able to store the excessive generation with purely pumped hydro?
They need to continue to invest in other forms of energy storage that are not as economic.
Do you know that China is the largest producer and consumer of hydrogen? 80% of the current hydrogen production is from fossil fuel. As we transition to a 0-carbon economy, there are many industrial and transportation usage of hydrogen.
I have not looked into flow batteries in the past, but it does look promising. I don't know how long it will take them to scale up the production of flow batter storage. They should invest more in there.
Sodium ion batteries will be seeing massive industrial sized investment and production in the coming decades for home/industrial storage and EVs. I don't see sodium prices going up. So as production ramps up, the cost will continue to come down as technology/factory efficiency comes down. So for example, CATL would not need to put in a lot of additional investment to put sodium ion battery into production for grid when it already has it in production for other usage.
Of course pipeline is much better than LNG. However until now, the vast majority of Russian gas was going West. China will need to invest in infrastructure to be able to generate more from gas. With 2060 0-carbon goal, I think there is limit to how much China will be willing to invest here.
I was born in the coal heartland of China. It's terrible for the environment, for climate change and most importantly the people that live in these places. Every time I visit there, I have a hard time just describing how terrible the air quality is. There is significant social/health cost to coal that don't show up in utility bills.
They need to move away from coal. And they are doing it.
Yet, China can make so much more money exporting low carbon technology to these country.
Nuclear power plants require huge capital investments which most poor countries cannot afford. Then you need highly skilled staff to operate the plant and most of those countries lack that as well. Even if it makes sense in the longer run, and is cheaper per unit of energy generated, to bootstrap the energy generation in a poor nation, like the ones in Africa, it is kind of nonsense. Even a middle income nation like Vietnam decided not to build nuclear power plants at least for the time being.
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China seeing the longest sustained carbon emissions drop. Looks like it will last at least another quarter. The renewable energy growth has been off the chart this year. Chinese solar manufacturers are doing great with domestic and European demands.
In Q1 even with 1% jump in thermal power generation, the actual emissions still went down due to improved efficiency and fuel switching from coal to nat gas/oil.
In April, 12% drop in thermal power generation due to weak demand + renewable growth.
Huge Uranium discovery in China, 10x the reserve
Largest ever floating wind turbine off Guangdong
This is going to be interesting as they start utilizing SCS for wind power generation and possibly floating solar farms in the future.
In Q1 even with 1% jump in thermal power generation, the actual emissions still went down due to improved efficiency and fuel switching from coal to nat gas/oil.
In April, 12% drop in thermal power generation due to weak demand + renewable growth.
Huge Uranium discovery in China, 10x the reserve
Largest ever floating wind turbine off Guangdong
This is going to be interesting as they start utilizing SCS for wind power generation and possibly floating solar farms in the future.
Between the new supercritical coal power plants, piped natural gas, and nuclear power, plus finishing the contruction of the hydropower projects of course the emissions will go down. You also had the lockdowns. I think energy use will come back up once the lockdowns stop.
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