alt Hacker NewsNormally I try to go with the most charitable interpretation, but this article makes it difficult.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything....
China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
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> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
On the contrary, check out this graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024. New coal production swamps everything else combined.
This is designed for "fast" and "high power", but not for efficiency: it's not a combined cycle plant.
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.
They are adding everything. They know baseload is important so they build nuclear. They know they can't fill the hole fast enough, so they are still building some coal.