Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The sun's energy is plentiful. And China is capitalizing.
Images captured by two Earth-observing satellites, operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, revealed a rapid expansion of solar farms in a remote northern Chinese region, the Kubuqi Desert.
"The construction is part of China’s multiyear plan to build a 'solar great wall' designed to generate enough energy to power Beijing," writes NASA's Earth Observatory. (For reference, although all this energy won't directly power the Chinese capital, around 22 million people live in Beijing; that's over two and a half times the population of New York City.)
The two Landsat satellite images below show a section of the major solar expansion between 2017 and 2024. Use the slider tool to reveal the changes. (For a size and scale reference, the images below are about 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, across.)
And the solar complex is still growing. It will be 250 miles long and 3 miles wide by 2030, according to NASA.
Though China's energy mix is still dominated by fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas comprised 87 percent of its energy supply as of 2022 — the nation clearly sees value in expanding renewable energy.
"As of June 2024, China led the world in operating solar farm capacity with 386,875 megawatts, representing about 51 percent of the global total, according to Global Energy Monitor’s Global Solar Power Tracker," NASA explained. "The United States ranks second with 79,364 megawatts (11 percent), followed by India with 53,114 megawatts (7 percent)."
Energy experts say that solar energy, like wind, is an important part of an energy supply, as they're renewable and have been shown to reduce energy costs. Fossil fuels, of course, still play a prominent role in most states' energy mix today.
But the economics of solar are clearly there. The proof, via U.S. satellites, is in the Kubuqi Desert.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday January 21, @09:09AM (9 children)
SCOTUS: ...drill, baby, drill. Solars and EVs are communism!!1!one!
(co-SCOTUS): hey, keep out of EVs or else... (throws a fascist salu... [theguardian.com] no?... a "my heart goes to you"?... still no? ... then definitely "a get-out now, you're fired" gesture)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Tuesday January 21, @11:48AM (8 children)
Question is, will US industry and manufacturing actually kiss their new monarch's ring like most of the techbros have, (seriously, from what little I watched there was more pomp and ceremony in DC yesterday than at Charles' coronation), or will they realise where things are going and just pay lip service to it while gearing up to avoid being left behind when Trump and MAGA are in the rear view mirror.
Incidentally, on that last point and the tech bros, there's been a lot of coverage of who was represented at the highest levels, but not so much who wasn't. Apple, Google, Meta, NewsCorp, OpenAI, TikTok, X; all present and correct. Almost a full bingo card of the privacy raping and fake news facilitating/peddling crowd we typically love to hate. Microsoft and Oracle however? AFAIK, some vague congratulations on social media, but absent. Interesting...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday January 21, @12:13PM (3 children)
Is this the new form of Kremlinology (Trumpology?) where people try to interpret the boss from who was or wasn't there and their location or proximity to the boss? That have never really worked or produced results beyond just normal guesswork.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday January 21, @12:45PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday January 21, @01:09PM
OT, but too funny (?) to not post. Maybe it should even be front page: The new form of Kremlinology is AI. The CIA has trained models on people and now the analysts can talk to "them" (or rather heuristics on what they would likely respond based on past statements...): https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2025/01/20/cias-chatbot-stands-in-for-world-leaders [thestar.com.my]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 21, @05:26PM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 21, @01:17PM
Yeap, thank you.
Blaming it on MinGW, UNIX-like but not fully UNIX and I need those utilities ported like yesterday.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 22, @03:24AM (2 children)
The car had huge advantages over the horse and carriage. This isn't so for your narrative: the electric car doesn't have huge advantages over the ICE car. The latter will only come obsolete by fuel scarcity or onerous regulation. Neither is happening in the US.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday January 22, @08:31AM (1 child)
So, Trump's masterplan is to flood the market with carbon-based fuels when overall global demand is going down, many of the countries that are still heavily reliant on it have their own/alternative supplies or can't/won't buy entirely from the US, and Russia's need to sell their supplies in a manner that circumvents sanctions means they're having to sell cheap. Even OPEC realises what that means and has been tailing off production for years to try and keep prices high; the US dumping a glut on the market is just going to push the price per unit *waaay* down. AFAIK, production costs in the US are pretty low, and maybe it will create some jobs, but there's simply no way it'll be the kind of golden egg laying goose some seem to be hoping for, especially since if the US is planning on exporting a lot of it and still intends to start tariff-based trade wars, then it's going to be near the top of the list for retaliatory tariffs.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 22, @06:55PM
The renewable side has resulted in such clear advantages as a doubling of the price of electricity in Germany and Denmark. Buggy whips aren't working out here.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday January 21, @01:57PM (8 children)
The quoted area is 400 *5 = 2000 km^2. Assuming 200MW peak per sq.km, they'll get 400GW peak output at noon. For reference, that's as much as all nuclear power plants worldwide combined. It would also double China's current solar capacity. That's a LOT, and a lot of load change, which would have to be buffered in some meaningful way at least for some part.
I wonder what they have in mind for that buffering (and distribution) when they're done in five years. Just electric cars? Assuming daily 4000GWh from the plant for 200M cars (say 2/3 are electric then), that'd be 20kWh per day per car. About three times of what's needed for average car mileages.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 21, @03:50PM (5 children)
Nah, my guess electification of heavy industry is probably China's bag. They do too much mass transit for cars to be the end-goal. Heck, in beijing, they still basically make getting a license plate into a lottery as a traffic control measure.
Turn every steel furnace in the country into an electric steel furnace, increase automation, turn every boiler in every chemical plant into an electric, that sorta thing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 22, @03:39AM (4 children)
They can always about-face on such regulations. My take is electrification of heavy industry would require a high base load. You won't get that from solar, though it can be combined with dispatchable power (which would run when the sun wasn't shining) to generate base load. Perhaps some of their current fossil fuel base load can become dispatchable? Natural gas power would be naturally dispatchable.
Alternately, this might merely be a scheme to encourage the developed world to stick its head further into the renewable energy trap. Germany has done a remarkable job of messing up their grid. Imagine if the US and the rest of Europe were to follow. Throwing up a bunch of solar panels in order to encourage this lemming movement couldn't hurt much for China. And they can let those panels rust afterward.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday January 22, @01:19PM (1 child)
Assuming 1m^2 costs 100€, turnkey for panel, installation, wiring, a square km is 100M€, 4000 sq.km (assuming it really gets build) will come at a price of 400 billion €. That'd be a jolly expensive scheme. Nah.
Internet says China uses ~10.000 TWh/a, or 27000 GWh/d, for a (equalized ballpark) average 1000GW. Assuming they have 200M EVs, if they draw 5kW from each, they could make up that much. 10kWh buffer per car seems sensible, so the cars could gain them 2 hours if they mandated them to be available for grid stabilization
I assume that too. One can't just stop these smelting furnaces. With aluminium production, I could imagine that they insulate the ovens, sustain the temperature at night and only run the electrolysis when solar is available. Upfront investment would be maybe factor five (can only run a third of the time, plus insulation), but after that, they get the product for free, and in the end the western companies complain "we can't compete with free".
I had a look whether they want to go the hydrogen route, and indeed it says "the number of green hydrogen projects in China has surpassed 500...". 90% (10 Mt) will go into the chemical industry, of which half will be for methanol (to be used as fuel???), and a third for ammonia. 10Mt is 10kg/capita/a, or 330kWh/capita/a or 330TWh in total, so ~3% of the total energy balance. Not major (yet), but significant enough to scale up.
I guess they have decided to go for a multi-pronged approach, similar to the German "Energiewende", just done right. I.e. if there are some NIMBYs who don't want that HVDC transmission line anywhere nearby (the reason Germany has grid issues), these get a visit "Do you want nuclear waste storage instead, which you must personally guard for the rest of your life, or rather be shot on the spot?".
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Wednesday January 22, @06:58PM
Why would it cost that much for China? Especially if they're cutting corners and putting forth a sham effort. It's also a giant subsidy for a Chinese industry. They never spend too much for those.
Oh yea, we never get enough of those schemes that strangely never can be done right.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 22, @02:20PM (1 child)
Germany messed up their grid by abandoning nuclear. France is still doing quite well.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday January 22, @04:29PM
It's not that simple. Bavaria in the south had a number of big NPP blocks running (Grafenrheinfeld, Isar2, Gundremmingen B/C) and lost 6 GW base supply, which was the strongest regional hit. AFAIK they had the largest nuclear percentage in the mix. The electricity could be transferred in from the north, but Bavarian NIMBYs have been blocking new power lines for grid extension. Politically, it certainly would have sorted itself if the remainder of the republic had declared "Bavaria, you can keep your plants, but you keep the waste, too and find a terminal storage on your territory within 10 years". Get popcorn to watch the riots, Bavaria has repeatedly declared that they will not accept such a storage on their territory, even if they are the worst producers of the waste, btw.
Economically, it would have been sound to keep the latest PWR blocks on line at least until the grid extension is completed. That would have been maybe some of the Vor-Konvoi types at Grafenrheinfeld, Philippsburg 2, Grohnde, and Brokdorf, and all the three Konvoi types at Isar 2, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim 2. Most of the ancient stuff had become uneconomic anyway and/or were a special-needs dead-end like the BWRs at Gundremmingen. Keeping the Konvois would also have been preferable to importing French electricity from their rotting park of NPPs run by debt-overloaded EdF, which also have to go offline when their rivers overheat.
(Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday January 21, @10:20PM (1 child)
Yeah, it's insane numbers hey. It always is with China, they really do go big with their engineering. But they are, a big country, and a big population.
And you're not too far off with your 400GW assumption. Wikipedia says they are planning 455GW:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuqi_Desert [wikipedia.org]
[side note]
Interestingly, in other good news, they are re-greening the Kubuqi Desert
[/side note]
I thought it would have been beneficial to spread generation across the longitude of the country. They may be doing this though. But the peak load in big population centres would be early morning and late afternoon so having generation on the eastern and western extremes of the country would be most beneficial. It looks like the Kubuqi Desert is 800-1000km from Beijing.
Anyway, good to hear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24, @04:57AM
Big empty cities that they then demolish. Real successful, a model for others.