I'd suggest browsing through ourworldindata.org's energy section. It is an absolutely astonishing accomplishment what China has built with slashing PV and battery prices as well as production capacities in recent years. Dynamics are such that there's hope they'll reach peak CO2 emissions in the upcoming few years, way ahead of their own plans. I'm saying that as a German whose 20y old idea (be a global supplier for renewable tech) they copied and executed like 10x better.
China had 3 big goals for last 20+ years or so in their 5 year economic plans: getting rod of fossil fuel dependency, becoming a knowledge economy, increasing the share of service economy. Every government organization is working on to realize these. All the subsidies for EVs are there because they don't want to rely on gas and coal since it's not sustainable. Germany was lobbying to EU on the benefits of "clean diesel" till recently.
> the subsidies for EVs are there because they don't want to rely on gas and coal since it's not sustainable
China doesn't want to rely on gas because they have to import it. They're fine relying on coal, which they can produce reliably, which is why they keep building coal-fired plants.
Germany has the same reliance but Europe broadly hasn't done anything about it, substituting piped gas from Russia with shipped gas from America. (Which, unfortunately, is their only option absent re-firing coal or turning on nukes.)
I can't find any data to support this, just the figure that NEVs account for ~40% of new sales, no further breakdown. Do you have a reference, I'd be very curious to see the breakdown -- my view is biased by the high pure EV penetration in cities like Shenzhen.
And they missed all of them. And their PR pieces got peddled in the west by journalists, to keep the remainders of the "green" revolution going in the west in increments, by generating virtual progress of a imaginary opposition. Goto keep up with the Johnsons halfway around the world, whos house may or may not be cardboard. Well meaning, but in the end, even well meaning lies destroy your megaphone.
It does not quote its sources, but that sources seem to be the chinese government. Which then reports the progress of its provinicial governments- who miraculously always meet the set goals, by shifting goalposts and faking it.
So, that fluff peace this aggregated into up on an hill high, does mean nothing.
So, just because some provincial government buys scrapped solar cells to put them up unconnected some not used fields, buy a sattelite picture and doctor a report, while actually depending on coal plants that are planned and built. https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...
i do not believe that nonsense.
> The country is expected to reach an installed nuclear capacity of 400 GW in 2060.
Within the next ~14 months, the world will be deploying ~1TW/solar every year, ~200GW assuming 20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to thermal generation with a higher capacity factor. Compare to the rate of nuclear deployment and your 2060 figure, 35 years away.
> And, unlike wind and solar, nuclear power plants provide baseload and can actually drive an electricity grid.
There are numerous electrical grids in the world that operate without nuclear. There is minimum demand that needs to be met, but clearly nuclear isn't needed to do that (as evidenced by low carbon grids that operate without it).
Whilst I agree with most of the points, author is making here I cannot help but make a small snarky remark that we, as a dev community, have been talking and dreaming about those talking points since the advent of html5 which is roughly 15ys.
Marketing and availability, i.e. is it within reach when a customer thinks about it, are core problems needing to be solved.
The problem is that those regulatory committees always put some kind of idealistic nonplus ultra standards into the regulations without respecting the real world.
"Sorry kids, no kindergarden here for you because the regulator requires us to build parking space for SUVs and obeying this means we can't build enough parking space for all your parents which would break another rule. So we'll do nothing."
Parent was discussing systematic issues and I was answering to that. In fact, what I'm getting downvoted for (the problem of outsourced over-engineered regulations that frequently contradict each other) is openly discussed, at least in Germany.
Maybe you should check yourself in "seeing anti Europeans everywhere".
Sure, but here we have a concrete example of a regulatory committee making a rule that apparently doesn't do what you fear. So it seems like it's certainly possible for regulatory committees not to do what you described?
I get your point, but painting with such broad strokes honestly just poisons the discussion. If you're rejecting everything on principle by applying a slippery slope, why should people care about your position?
Lastly, I'm not sure I understand what "seeing anti Europeans everywhere" you're talking about, could you expand on that?
Not at all. E.g. Germany requires housing projects to build "enough parking lots" for newly built flats[0]. The result is that flats either don't get built at all or "green surfaces" (or playgrounds) get transformed into parking lots.
So the _real world_ result is, as a society, we favor parking lots over homelessness or green surfaces which is contradictory to pretty much everything else we're discussing. These laws are from times in which the legislator thought of them to be a good idea. Times have changed, the regulation hasn't and nobody is talking about exactly those issues. There's plenty more of those examples which can only lead you to the conclusion that most finely granular regulation is rather harmful than helpful.
Think of it as people who feel more frustrated than other by being interrupted in their thinking process. From my anecdotal evidence I think one can map different psychological spectrums like ADHD or autism to them liking or disliking such tools that "pop up".
German government will print out all messages on paper and hire thousands of civil servants to read each message. It's gonna be a Beschäftigungswunder.
Well somewhere in Czech Republic, some public servants are receiving well formed digital XML messages, and transcribing values from them manually to an information system. Sometimes they make a mistake and swap some values, which is how we know.
Our governments are a swamp of incompetence concerning anything "Information age". But still my fav story is from the private sector:
In order to "merry" digital and paper form data, they set up a system to send paper forms to Swiss post ("digitization-as-a-service") who routed them to (afair) Bangladesh where cheap workers (used to a wholly different alphabet) manually transcribed stuff as XML and uploaded it to some ftp directory. We SWEs then were supposed to build automated systems based on that handwritten XML data. Obviously, the cost they reduced with cheap labor they had to pay multiple times to have us building a resilient data ingestion system. Why again are we okay with having lawyers and MBAs making decisions?
I once had the opportunity to watch two crows attacking a swarm of sparrows.
I've never seen birds hunting birds before so it made me watch the whole scene for 3-5min and I was baffled how the crows systematically 1) induced chaos trying to isolate a sparrow from the swarm then 2) killed it and 3) while one crow was busy eating it the other crow kept the infuriated swarm at distance. After a while 4) the crows changed jobs.
You hit the nail. It's been almost tragically funny how people frantically tried to juggle 5 bars of wet soap in recent 2 years solving problems that (from what I've seen so far) have been already solved in a (boring) deterministic way consuming much less resources.
Going further, our predecessors put so much work into getting non-deterministic electronics together providing us with a stable and _correct_ platform, it looks ridiculous how people were trying to squeeze another layer of non-determinism in between to solve the same classes of problems.
The main problem is not even the ice wasteland which northern Europe would be but the dramatic temperature gradient to the Mediterranean which means storms and weather extremes we've never seen before.
