China To Save The World (Again)–AEP
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie/Ian Magness
Everything AEP writes about Net Zero seems to be infused with wishful thinking, no more so than where China is concerned:
China’s carbon emissions have either peaked already or will do this winter, seven years ahead of schedule. They may plateau for a year or two but will then go into exponential decline for mechanical and unstoppable reasons.
The country’s target of net zero by 2060 is likely to be achieved a decade earlier than previously assumed, and perhaps earlier than in Europe.
This is a remarkable turn of events. Xi Jinping has made a giant strategic and economic bet on clean-tech dominance, aiming to corner the world’s renewable market and to break dependency on sea-borne energy supplies running through the US 7th Fleet.
The International Energy Agency says China accounts for 60pc of all new solar and wind power being installed across the world this year and next. This roll-out has combined with a drastic slowdown in China’s rate of economic trend growth and the exhaustion of its Ponzi style property model.
China is building a gargantuan network of ‘clean energy bases’ in the Gobi, Ordos, and Tengger deserts, and further across the arid wastelands of the northwest. Solar and wind parks run along an arc from Inner Mongolia to Qinghai on the Tibetan plateau
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/21/chinas-carbon-emissions-falling-xi-jinping-net-zero/
Let’s start with a few simple, basic facts:
As I have been reporting for years, large scale investment in renewable capacity has not been enough to meet increasing demand for electricity in China, which has had to be met with additional coal power. Wind and solar still only accounted for 13% of China’s electricity in 2022, compared to 29% in what he describes as the foot-dragging UK!
China’s economic growth, and therefore energy demand, has slowed in the last two years, not least because of their disastrous lockdown policies. This inevitably means that the need for more coal power is reduced. Whether economic growth remains subdued is moot – so far this year it is up 4.4% year-on-year. And it may well be that the use of coal power does flatten off in the next few years. And it also may well be the case that eventually China will catch up with the UK in terms of the renewables share.
However AEP makes a schoolboy error, assuming that current trends will continue forward in a straight line, until all China’s electricity is supplied by renewables. He clearly still does not realise that neither we or China can run a modern economy on intermittent wind and solar power alone.
He also makes the mistake of ignoring all of the energy China consumes outside of the power sector, which accounts for half of total primary energy. A good indicator is their consumption of oil and gas, which are barely used for power generation. Since 2011, consumption has risen by 71%.
None of this energy can be replaced directly with wind and solar power.
China is of course building lots of EVs, which may help to reduce oil consumption eventually, but this begs the question of where the energy needed to build and run them will come from. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding to assume that this will come from wind and solar, as these are already maxed out on the grid. Any additional demand can only come from dispatchable sources, which basically means coal.
AEP is right about Xi’s concern for energy security, but that is precisely why China will want to maximise its own coal reserves. It is also why they have been strategically developing secure supplies of oil and gas, in particular from Russia and Turkmenistan, from where new pipelines are either being built or planned. China has also been assiduous in building relationships with the Middle East. Imports from Iran, for instance, are 60% higher than pre-sanction peaks in 2017.
Another indicator of China’s addiction to oil is the fact that the country’s oil refining capacity has grown by 40% since 2010, and is now bigger than the US.
AEP relies on Carbon Brief for advice in his article. Given that they are a lobby group set up specifically to campaign for climate action, they are hardly a reliable, objective source! Maybe he should have consulted Climate Tracker, another group keen to push the same agenda, but also determined to report the realities. This is how they sum up China’s climate policies:
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/
As Climate Tracker suggests, China’s emissions may well start to level off by 2030. But there is nothing to suggest that they will actually start to fall drastically thereafter.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Hopeless use of English by A E-P:
” may be falling” followed by
“in a watershed moment” with its inferred outcome
There is no watershed moment and may be never so no story.
I cannot understand why the Telegraph continues to employ A E-P, whose knowledge of energy issues is abysmal
“Abysmal…”
THAT good?
He’s a 100 Watt incandescent in a 20 Watt LED world. If he thinks that wind and solar which still only accounted for 13% of China’s electricity in 2022 is a good thing he is either, naively, guilty of believing in nameplate output delivery, or is stupid to think wind and solar is dependable. My assumption is that he is paid to make such assumptions public as a favour (cough) to the Chinese.
Are we sure that AE-P isn’t just a Chinese BOT?
Has anyone ever spotted him in the DT Offices?
‘He clearly still does not realise that neither we or China can run a modern economy on intermittent wind and solar power alone.’
Renewable energy is great . . . until you run out of other sources.
It can NEVER be more than supplemental.*
*Please forgive me for stating the bleeding obvious.
Gamecock, forgiven.
The likelihood of China reducing carbon dioxide emissions any time soon is ZERO.
They are currently in the midst of a major petrochemical expansion that in the next five years will exceed all the installed capacity in Europe. They will add an additional 237 million tonnes of refining capacity create a demand surge that will make them the largest consumer and importer of crude oil.
Much of the hydrogen will come form coal steam reforming which produces a lot of carbon emissions.
Meanwhile:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/22/north-sea-oil-refinery-grangemouth-jim-ratcliffe-starmer/
GC: ‘Supplemental…’ I had a push-bike once where the the cotter pin in the left pedal was worn and every so often the pedal would slip and I had to make up for it by pedalling harder on the right. I never thought of the left pedal being supplementery – more of a PITA.
Cheers mate!
Chinese energy economists have been complaining for years about the difficulty of getting adequate transmission capacity from the west to the east. It cannot be assumed that regional power utilities are just daft when they choose to build large amounts of new coal capacity in the centre and east of the country. Wind and solar production from remote areas are not reliable enough for industrial and winter demand in the industrial heartland of China. Useful as supplements but not to meet either baseload or peak demand. So coal serves as gas does in the UK – the core source of flexibility for the power system.
There is another point that this article misses. If anything China’s commitment to nuclear power is more important than renewables. They have 80 GW in operation or under construction. Adjusting for load factors that is equivalent to nearly 500 GW of solar – and it is dispatchable while the plants last for 60 years vs 20-25 for solar. I saw a piece in Reuters that claimed that China will have 1,000 GW of solar by 2026 without any understanding that solar power is worth almost nothing in China because of distances and demand patterns. Of course it is cheap to build in the western deserts and arid zones but using it is a completely different issue.
Standing back the central lesson is that most politicians, journalists and lobbyists are completely ignorant of the realities of running energy systems. Not only do they not know but they do not want to know anything inconvenient.
Thank you Gordon. Your writing is infinitely more valuable than that of A E-P.
GH : “Standing back the central lesson is that most politicians, journalists and lobbyists are completely ignorant of the realities of running energy systems. Not only do they not know but they do not want to know anything inconvenient.”
Yes, correct. As an example just read or watch the HoC Energy Security & Net Zero Committee’s evidence session dated 25/10/2023 on the subject “Keeping The Power On : Our Future Energy Technology Mix” where neither the politicians nor the renewable lobbyists have a clue :
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/13738/pdf/
Not only was the actual subject “Keeping The Power On” barely discussed, but the Committee failed to interview an electrical engineer working for the National Grid.
No wonder our energy is in such a mess.
With MPs, I feel that ignorance is trumped by brown envelopes or promises of promotion – usually in defiance of the Perer principle.
I’ve watched odd bits of the Covid Enquiry, including some of the evidence by Patrick Vallance.
What he said gave a clear picture of a cabinet and their advisors whose grasp of maths was tenuous and their grasp of science was non-existent and both could not be improved no matter how much effort was put into the task.
There’s no hope that any energy or Climate policies are going to change until the train wreck has happened.
It was truly depressing.
“a cabinet and their advisors whose grasp of maths was tenuous”
The problem extends into the realm of researchers. The Wiki page on base rate fallacy is a good start.
Well yes. That’s why they have advisers. And let’s not forget how utterly wrong those scientists who advised them were. As were those with a supposed solid grasp of maths. Valence made huge errors and now seeks to blame politicians. Its shameful.
It is also worth noting that Sir Patrick was partly responsible for turning Boris green with a biased slide show of the most unlikely IPCC conclusions: RCP 8.5, hurricanes, droughts, the lot. Boris then went to Glasgow wittering about the deadly tea cosy of CO2 and guilt for the Industrial Revolution.
China is committed to being the industrial base for the world. As pointed out above, their proportion of wind and solar in their energy mix is still quite small, just 7%. But look at the other numbers.
China more than tripled its energy consumption in the last 20 years. The portion of energy from coal did go down from nearly 70% to 55.5% but the overall supply of energy generated from coal went from 9,500 TWh to 24,570 TWh. Our World in Data breaks it down very nicely if you follow this link.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china
Energy source
55.5% Coal
17.7% Oil
8.5% Gas
7.7% Hydro
4.5% Wind
2.5% Solar
2.4% Nuclear
1.3% other renewables
I suspect China will reduce its CO2 emissions in the next 5 years but I’ll bet the contribution of Russian natural gas will be a much bigger factor in this reduction than wind or solar.
While China powers on, it will be happy to pick of the slack when western democracies can no longer compete in industrial products. China will produce these with fossil fuels much less expensively than can be done with renewable energy.
Agreed, Sean. The West is just pushing in the balloon, and it’s popping out in China. Indeed, most of the West’s efforts to reduce carbon (sic) emissions have surely INCREASED them. Production in the environmentally aware West has been shifted to the environmental monsters of China. The myriad new coal plants are directly connected to the transfer of production to China.
Click to access jrc110333_intercon_report_v03.pdf
“Exponential decline” ?
He clearly does not understand the term.
Indeed, exponential growth has an increasing rate of increase, exponential decline has a decreasing rate of decrease, like radioactive decay. I suspect that AEP was trying to say an exponential growth of renewables, though he was probably just throwing in a mathematical term to show off.
The derivative of an exp(t) growth is exp(t), which grows, the derivative of an exp(-t) decline is -exp(-t) = -1/exp(t), which declines.
I avoid articles by AEP in the telegraph,
he just raises my blood pressure, the man is an idiot with regards to green renewables. I guess he gets paid by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Covid “plandemic” showed how evil the globalist so-called elite and their captured puppet politicians really are. I doubt if AEP is making any “schoolboy errors”. He and his bought-and-paid-for newspaper are paid to write this false propaganda by Malthusian globalists pushing Net Zero in order to deliberately drive our economy off a cliff, see https://twitter.com/ElanderNews/status/1568891471637680128?t=ugqAXUxwfL20BP522L51-w&s=09.
And hydrogen is not the answer it seems as the green hydrogen plant in Heide in Germany is closing as it is not economically viable. Cue great gasps of surprise – Not! And on the subject of closures – Goodyear is closing its tyre plants in Germany next year and in 2027. Can’t compete with Asian plants using cheap coal electricity.
Asia? Tire plants in South Carolina are thriving!
Their Solar PV won’t be doing as much saving as the hype suggests.
Residential solar power saves less energy than expected
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-11-residential-solar-power-energy.html
Residential PV in South Carolina is a no go. Savings don’t come close to paying for it.
Looking at database of solar insolation measured in kWh per square metre horizontal area per annum, the lowest figure in South ‘Carolina is shown as over 1,800kWh. The highest figure shown anywhere in the UK is under 1,200 kWh. The annual spread is naturally much worse for the UK being so much further north with very little indeed for over 3 months of the year.
If it doesn’t work out economical in SC there is no way on earth it can ever be viable in the UK without huge subsidy.
China is likely to run out of suitable locations for wind farms long before it runs out of places to put a coal fired station.
Ambrose says they are building a vast array ‘in the Gobi, Ordos, and Tengger deserts, and further across the arid wastelands of the northwest. Solar and wind parks run along an arc from Inner Mongolia to Qinghai on the Tibetan plateau.’
But I’m not convinced they are “suitable locations.” I assume there are significant engineering problems when your power plant is a thousand miles away.
Won’t solar panels in the desert be affected by a buildup of dust? Or will the Uighurs be “re-educated” in cleaning them.
Might be a problem, and it raises a another problem. These places Ambrose describes are uninhabited. There’s no one there to maintain them.
May; either or…, likely.
Weasel words to cover up evidence-free claims so that a fairy tale seems to be real life.
Poor Ambrose, he has to earn his invite to Davos.
Beijing’s Coal Boom Is Here to Stay
I’ve stopped reading stuff by AEP. Increasingly all he writes is overexcited nonsense.
Out of a somewhat perverse interest I opted to do a google search on just “AEP”.
Oh dear, when I hit “anal enema preparation” (on a site that was somewhat uninterested in the female sex) I realised this was a click too far. Mind you it was a very good description of Mr Pritchard (one barrel only required for obvious reasons)
Oo arr missus!
Ray, what’s worse is the latency of that website in you subconscious. Oh dear…🤣
What he seems to ignore is that China is poor. Its GDP per capita is less than $20,000 whereas the US is over $70,000. Doubling that figure will require at least 50% more energy. It’s that simple.
You have to give China credit for their honesty. They have always said that they would go on increasing their CO2 until 2030 ignoring the pressure on them at all the COP meetings. They haven’t deviated from that until recently when they have stated that the peak level may be earlier.
They are targeting net zero by 2060. This would require a major increase in wind, solar and nuclear. Their projections are far more creditable than the UK’s dishonest and incompetent energy policy. China may also retain their coal powered stations for when the intermittent sources are not operating sufficiently rather than blow them up as we have done in the UK.
China is fleecing the world, one wokery at a time
Hi Paul, Interesting? Cheers, M.
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