China installing the wind / solar equivalent of 5 nuclear power stations a week

This sounds really good! If the largest population and probably the largest manufacturer in the world goes green, that is going to be really good for climate change.

I hope India follows suit.

It's a bit ridiculous to claim Australia is somehow falling behind when our target seems? To be more ambitious than China's is. It's not actually mentioned anywhere what China's 2030 renewables target is.

It's apparently 1200GW, but the grid's capacity in 2019 was 3TW - so after accounting for capacity factor (0.25) china was only targeting ~10% renewables by 2030, compared to Australia's 80% grid share. The share will probably be higher than that in China, but it's still ridiculous to not provide a comparable number in the article.

It's easy to beat a goal that's set low, surprise! Australia's goal of 80% seems like a solid number to me as well, and given the general trajectory of renewables it would not surprise me if the grid is defacto all renewables shortly after that time anyway.

Comparing absolute numbers is obviously stupid too. 1.4B is ~50x the Australian population, so china installing 50x the capacity ("they install in a week what we install in a year") is not at all surprising (and hilarious to compare the numbers directly anywU)

The whole article just seems to be a bit of a puff piece giving air to an unambitious target. The ABC has really gone downhill, and it's a bit sad how uncritical they can be nowadays :( (not to detract from china making progress - that's always good - but this seems like a pretty baseline result given their population)

Two small notes:

- p.v. modules, inverters, batteries in China have seen falling prices and not cost little enough to be very convenient, oh, the opposite happen in the west where after decades of high prices slowly lowering we even witness some spikes, especially for batteries witch now most understand are key elements to use p.v. and co ensuring power to anything on 24h... So the point is "why" and "who profit, in the short term" and the answer is OUR cleptocracy who talk about free trade only when they are free, not anyone else. Who loose most? Us, the people from the west...

- China have already hit various grids limits and start to understand that "the California model" of renewable can't scale, they works very well for SELF CONSUMPTION, meaning a gazillion of small plants for personal (domestic, single SME/local site size) where are a gazillion of individual small smart grid, because we can't have a large smart grid technically and trying to achieve it is such a security threat that no country so far want to try.

To resume: our cleptocracy want us "without nothing" in 2030 and they start to understand that the new deal is incompatible with this agenda, so they hit the new deal break hoping to find a way to keep it in their "smart cities", novel Fordlandia doomed to fails as the original and utterly unsustainable. Please try to prove I'm wrong...

> A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.

> "They have clear targets and every part of their government is harnessed to deliver the plan," he said.

Do they? The fact that this is off-plan and happening very quickly makes me think that we've probably crossed a threshold and people are just building the things because they are cheap. I never understood why these conversations always seem to have the frame that the governments of the world have to be so deeply involved in constructing power plants. It is only really a factor in nuclear power because the west keeps regulating new plants out of the picture. Free markets love renewables, they have low capital costs and are very modular.

I'd love to see Australia take up China's strategy of building everything. Harmonising our nuclear policy to mimic China's appears superficially to be an extremely clever idea.

They’re also building more new coal plants than the rest of the world combined. Hundreds of new plants.

> "weaponisation of dissent" from community groups over new wind farms and transmission lines.

Really baffling for an extremely sparse country with a huge desert in the center that shouldn’t be in anyone’s backyard.

Given that China produces most of the batteries the world uses as well, it seems like they have a clear path for baseline power supply to augment the renewables as opposed to the coal plants they’re still building (and nuclear for that matter). I guess those batteries fetch a better price on the global market for other use cases than grid energy storage, or the sheer scale is just too big still?

I wonder how long until smoggy Chinese cities are a thing of the past.

Related:

China Building Twice as Much Wind and Solar as Rest of World Combined

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40937714

I don't understand this renewable vs. nuclear rhetoric, when the comparison should be made with clean vs. fossil sources.

But as always humanity manages to get lost in a glass of water.

I have serious problems believing chinese data are there third party confirmations?

When you have surplus power you tend to start to tame it !! Install more servers !!

I'd give the journalist a C+ if they were in school.

Good intent but you're comparing a dictatorship with 1.4 billion people to a mostly conservative, sparsely populated island with 26 million people.

Australia's biggest problem is it needs to find a way to deal with its mining lobbies and political revolving doors hamstringing every attempt to move forward.

If that ever gets dealt with we would move incredibly quickly.