alt Hacker NewsThey still mostly rely on coal. Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal, whereas in the US, it's only 15%. The renewable energy share in generation is roughly the same in the US and China, but not for capacity.
Replies
This is misleading, because China has no gas, and they use coal power as dispatchable source with lower capacity factor (similar to gas elsewhere).
Coal+gas electricity is basically the same fraction in China than in the US.
But countries like Germany or Spain are significantly ahead in this regard, with much higher fraction of electrical energy coming from solar/wind.
See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
China is also ~4x the population of the US and accounts for 30% of the worlds manufacturing and energy production.
The scale is so crazy that these numbers rarely make sense on their own.
The direction of travel is clear though. China is making massive investments in renewable energy (and dominating sectors like solar in the process) while the US seems hell bent on going the other way.
Slightly less than half now as of the most recent figures.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...
> That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed.
> Renewable energy's share grew to 41.2% — topping 40% for the first time — and of that wind and solar accounted for 24.6%, Xing added. Wind and solar's share was up from 9.7% in 2020.
GP was talking about energy independence. They use domestic coal not imported coal, so the goal of energy independence is still achieved.
Things are changing. Look at starting points and direction, not just things as they currently are.
That said, renewable sources are so cheap and consequently economically appealing that not even the incredibly dumb Trump admin can stop them.
> Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal,
So this means, slightly less than half is other sources (hydro, solar, etc)
[flagged]
You can look at current levels, or look at trends. China has stopped increasing coal. They're building a small number of new coal plants, but this is outstripped by the coal plants being underutilized or decommissioned
China is really only building new renewables, almost 100x as much net renewable capacity per year compared to nuclear.