China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy industry like mining and processing, chemicals, ship-building.
Let's not even get into semiconductors. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.
Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.
Oil, cigarettes and alcohol were all clearly being pushed and promoted. Pretty sure it was episode four where a women rather matter-of-factly stated that one alcoholic beverage when pregnant was perfectly fine - inso much that it was good because it helped her body generate breast milk. Such a weird statement to shoe-horn into this soap opera.
Coupled with BBT chain smoking the coffin nails, the rampant shit-canning of renewables and incessant self promotion of how large and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is the money behind the show was as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Plus the sexual objectification of women in this show is ludicrous.
It's 2026. It seems everything old is new again.
Oh, and the
I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.
oh Paramount
the ones that just decimated CBS News, put talentless propagandist Bari Weiss in charge, and censored a critical report on human rights abuses ordered by POTUS
all running on Oracle (tm)
If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars.
There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China.
There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.
That may hamper us more than anything else. If AI proves to be as beneficial as its proponents hyped, the economic gains will just mostly get soaked up by landowners. Even UBI won't save us, because it will just get absorbed by landowners. Ditto for renewable energy.
Europe is also at least a decade ahead.
And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.
Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten salt, thorium, and more.
That's two baskets right there.
Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.
Nuclear is transcedental. If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.
Maybe tell the Chinese they have it wrong and are risking extinction.
The asteroid is just science unlikely fiction.
That's where long distance interconnects come into play.
I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons.
Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.
What makes this more valid than something like "it's incredible how many YIMBY talking points there are" in a thread about housing, aside from you agreeing with the YIMBYs? Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?
It is. I've read dozens of comments like this on HN, and repeatedly see the "it's incredible that...", "talking points"/"propaganda", and "wow look at how much bad stuff there is in this thread"/"I'm so disappointed in HN" memes, and every single time it's because the author is trying to dismiss the opposition's arguments without responding to them individually and actually addressing their points.
This kind of thing clearly fits into the "sneering" category of things that aren't allowed on HN and so is valid for flagging. I do it and I highly encourage anyone else to do it who wants to preserve the culture of HN.
Current US estimates for solar land usage are 500,000 acres.
The land use arguments are bunk. Anyone who complains is repeating oil and gas propaganda.
Conservatives, protesting on the street to save the whales. Talk about a sight to see.
For me, yes it is. It wouldn't if policy discussions were purely technical and well informed. In the arena of public discourse they aren't. The majority of the population (including HN) is tribal, ideologically biased, emotionally driven and badly informed. Public discourse, particularly in America, is contaminated by propaganda of established economic powers (i.e.: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Tech companies). They can easily advance their talking points because they have much more economic resources for propaganda and lobbying.
I agree that, eventually, most people will discover that oil & coal are doomed and destroying the world. Reality has a way to force itself into ideologies.
But that will take a long time. I need truth and certainty now.
We can speculate about how quick/slow all this will progress. But it's worth pointing out that e.g. IEA, EIA and similar institutes have been repeatedly wrong and overly pessimistic with their predictions for things like adoption and cost of renewables. People are still basing policy and important decisions on their reports. So this matters. The "What if they are wrong, again?" question might have some uncomfortable answers if you are betting on them not being wrong.
A lot of developing markets are skipping oil/gas/coal completely and are going straight to renewables. They are not first building a grid using coal/gas plants but working around what little they have in terms of unreliable grid by going straight for solar/batteries and microgrids. That's a pattern you see all over parts of Africa with historically very little/flaky power infrastructure and countries like Pakistan. These are growth economies showing much quicker economical growth than the world average. That's going to spread.
Lots of countries are going to be decimating their oil/gas imports over the next 20 years. That includes transport and power generation. They'll be installing wind/solar/batteries and buying lots of EVs. Fossil fuel usage won't go all the way to zero. But it won't stay at current levels or anywhere close to that. Some countries will be faster some will be slower. Being slower isn't necessarily good for economies.
Good advice here is to take an economic point of view and be aware of things like growth trends, cost curves, learning effects, technological changes, etc. You don't have to be an early adopter or believer. But there's a lot of data out there that supports an optimistic view. And a lot of pessimistic wishful thinkers that are not really looking at data or just cherry picking reports that support their believes. The fossil fuel industry sponsors a lot of reports research. And they are about as trust worthy as the Tobacco industry is when it comes to the pros/cons of smoking. That's why the IEA and EIA keeps getting it wrong. It helps to understand who pays for their reports (hint: fossil fuel companies and countries that depend on those).
A healthy personal perspective is maybe considering what happens if your pension fund bets on fossil fuel and that cliff I mentioned turns out to be very real in about 10-20 years. Because if you bet wrong, that affects the value of that. Before you knee jerk to an answer, take a close look at what institutional investors have actually been doing for a while. Hint: coal plants were written off as good investments ages ago and gas plants aren't looking much better at this point. I think you'll see them move on oil funds next.
That said "you're just repeating what you're told" is a comforting argument but doesn't go all that far.
You might notice comments simply arguing for less energy usage are buried at the bottom too. Have you considered whether you may have fallen for the "green" propaganda? It's so predictable after all.
Two wrongs don't make a right. We look back and curse our ancestors for their unbridled use of fossil fuels. Who is to say future generations won't look back and curse us for destroying all wilderness?
I curse my ancestors for destroying all wilderness to get at fossil fuels.
Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular unless their powers of observation are somewhat limited.
Which is understandable, you don't reach maturity overnight.
Edit: not my downvote btw
> Most people don't normally think it's the boomers in particular
Interesting because most of the critiques, especially to electric cars come from boomers. Also to Solar and Wind, the kind of silly criticism like "Why are we filling our barely-arable lands with Solar?!"
Now we'll watch how the European car manufacturers get swallowed by Chinese electrical manufacturers.
This is Big Oil propaganda. The impact from this is massively less than the horrific damage caused by every part of the fossil fuel industry.
Honestly, I think building regulations should mandate solar energy for homes.
Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...
My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
It happens all the time...
People have home solar, but it's hardly widespread. It's still a "fancy" thing to have.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
You can go out and buy solar panels to cover your roof for a few thousand dollars/pounds/euros. You could definitely not do that in 1999.
wars / empires etc are built on mastering an energy source
the Brits on Coal
the US rose on Oil
China is rising on renewables
my worry is can renewables be quickly brought online to power industry / power hungry Data Centers etc at a reasonable cost
I mean, clearly the answer is yes. The problem is political, not economic.
[0]: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/us-new-win...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/chart-the-...
This also happens in China. With better ratio for renewables but still. Globally there was more energy from coal than before. Much more was from renewables but in context of climate change absolute numbers of CO2 are what matters.
EU is also reverting it's green targets because of this new situation. So near future does not look good.
China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.
edit: looked it up, US is still ahead of China as of 2024:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/renewable-electricity-per...
Bear in mind that pre 2000 is likely hydro, in the early years of solar and wind that confused matters if lumped in together but I think it's now obvious when the new tech kicks in.
But no one talks about it because it doesn't provoke the only important narrative: "It's a shame that the US isn't doing that!"
People regularly talk about how much new coal capacity China has been building.
Quite often this is followed by "capacity, sure; they're not using all that capacity, those plants exist and are mostly not running", or some variation thereof. I've never bothered fact-checking the responses, but this conversation happens is most of the Chinese renewables discussions I've seen in the last few years.
Arguably the US is energy independent. It has Texas, Canada and Venezuela.
They never did discover any large oilfields in China despite decades of frantically searching for it.
My experience is that the UK (for example) doesn’t really know why it is building offshore wind. Is it to reduce bills to consumers (OFGEMS remit), is it to create local jobs in manufacturing (Clean Industry Bonus Scheme), is it to stimulate national wealth by ownership of projects (British Energy). It’s a mess unclear picture for me.
It would be nice if politicians could spend some time trying to work together, cross parties a come up with some sensible resolutions and long term plans instead of trying to score points for soundbites and clips.
The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.
Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.
That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.
The reality is that they don't have a good source of fossil fuels, and energy independence is a core necessity.
China has been building 5% extra nuclear capacity every year for the last 30 years. On target for making up 24% of their energy mix in 2060.
Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.
[1] https://www.renewableuk.com/energypulse/blog/uk-wind-and-glo... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1489147/uk-offshore-wind...
ps.: Per capita it's also not #1 — Denmark and the Netherlands both have higher offshore wind capacity per person.
(TBF Irish standards have gotten much better for airtightness)
Battery storage isn't quite where it needs to be, yet, so there's still some need for fossil and nuclear power, but when it is, decommissioning the remaining fossil power system is a no-brainer, and those with the biggest existing solar and wind estates will benefit most, and fastest.
> “All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”
One of the most factually BS statements ever.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattrandolph/2026/01/12/china-d...
(direct link to image: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iy93Jvbye2e...)
Solar panels are meant to be water proof, after all they are meant to survive rain storms and melting snow and coastal weather.
Even though associated costs exist, a free source is the lowest of its kind you can find.
Not so scenic any more... I get it, electricity good, but man are we destroying places just to get this stuff. In the UK I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it. Fossil fuels gave us too much. If only we could figure out how to want less.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.
I would rather they not have to be built in the first place. Yet, this is unfortunately the price we must pay today for not reducing our carbon emissions yesterday.
Had we taken a serious effort to do something in, say the mid nineties when the scientific community reached a large consensus regarding the major contributors of climate change it had been less urgent to do something now thirty years later and we would have had a much longer time for the academies and industry to research and improve performance of non-fossil energy production and do the same for energy using applications.
It's not the renewables which are to blame, because if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way we do then these places will either soon be destroyed, or nobody can appreciate them due to civilisational collapse.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear
If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.
They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.
Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.
If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.
> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?
No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.
If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.
> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.
Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.
Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”
I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.
And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.
Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.
Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.
But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.
For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
> gigantic waste of space
Good thing China isn’t running out of space
Anyway, they are going with nuclear too.
Especially Fukushima is more of a political issue than a safety one.
The supply chain for nuclear power, including fuel from mining to waste storage, is not tiny either.
Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.
It's also not just aesthetic - flat terrain is just so much more practical.
Outside of peak summer it's much more optimal to have a south facing slope actually.
As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.
Does this question make any sense at all?
The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.
[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
What is free of side effects for "nature" ?
https://www.iea.org/countries/china
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=line&facet=n...
Because fossil fuels have higher in/out losses this is number is larger than usage. This metric is generally used to track decarbonization.
Using the IEA number you can see the hydro+solar+wind production is about 9.5% of the total, not 18%.
ChatGPT or you favorite LLM can explain in greater detail, just send it the plot image and ask.
All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers. Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.
I think it's a bit better now. I don't think invasions change that much.
Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.
China needs power NOW though.
