news

A lot of hydrogen produced in China is actually clean, and they do have a concrete plan to move towards zero emissions hydrogen production:

• https://rmi.org/insight/chinas-green-hydrogen-new-era/

There are challenges to burning hydrogen for energy, but the upsides are really compelling. I was astounded to read in the article that China is already producing hydrogen from electrolysis, and that they are planning for 10% of their hydrogen production to be from hydrolysis by 2025! That’s absolutely astounding. This is the only project in the world actually trying to produce hydrogen through electrolysis on an industrial scale. Clearly they have a lot of confidence in the technology.

China is also developing stuff like sodium-ion batteries that could end up being a lot cheaper than lithium as well.

Excuse my ignorance but is this the sodium found in desalination sludge? If so does that they can reuse that sludge rather than dumping it?

Emissions in China have now entered structural decline and Clean energy was top driver of China’s economic growth in 2023, and they're building nuclear reactors faster than any other country.

• https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year
• https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-was-top-driver-of-chinas-economic-growth-in-2023/
• https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/30/china-is-building-nuclear-reactors-faster-than-any-other-country

Also worth noting that China has a concrete plan for becoming carbon neutral, and short term coal usage has been found to be in line with China's climate pledges

• https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-energy-transition-in-5-charts/
• https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-2060-climate-pledge-is-largely-consistent-with-1-5c-goal-study-finds

The coal plants are normally not active, actually. They have a policy that when building renewable energy, they need to hedge it with some amount of active power generation that can be used to supplement the green energy in times of exceptional demand. Since the new plants are rarely used, it's actually more eco-friendly than having to vastly overprovision solar panels or batteries for the 99.99% power requirement, when the 95% or 90% power requirement is a fraction of that (and the footprint of the coal plant used to stretch to the maximum power requirement is vastly smaller than equivalent solar power).

It probably would still be better to use nuclear power as a hedge, not coal, but it's not as economically viable to build a nuclear power plant that is rarely going to be active.

im far from a China hater, but the massive number of coal fired plants they are putting online with each passing year really reduces the impact.

I understand the concern, but I'm pretty sure those new coal plants are used for developing regions that don't yet have sufficient clean energy (renewable or nuclear) due to development (and therefore poverty alleviation, quality of life improvement) taking priority.