• warm@kbin.earth
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    3 hours ago

    People arent understanding how free solar is, its cheap to install and maintain and has no further cost for producing energy, the fuel is the sun. Why would China want to spend money on coal, on the plants, the maintenance of them, when they can erect a solar array in the vast space they have and cut some grass around it every couple weeks.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 hours ago

      There’s issues of base load, of compactness, of reliability, and of yield. That’s why new Chinese coal plants (and Indian and African/Latin American plants) keep getting built.

      But there’s a bottleneck in material supply across the pie of energy options. China gets much of its coal from Australia, a country that’s increasingly hostile to the CCP government. As a result, domestic coal production in China has picked up notably.

      It’s still a grim picture of the future, precisely because these emerging market states state puts mid-term economic growth ahead of long-term ecological preservation. The current western governments are, similarly, prioritizing annualized rates of growth/consumption over real ecological limits.

      But for Oil/Gas production, this war is definitely reshaping what countries consider viable or sustainable even in these short-term time horizons.