China’s Wind Sector Eclipses Growth in Coal

[kristopher]

China’s Wind Sector Eclipses Growth in Coal
Meanwhile, calls to cap coal production are growing as citizens deal with worsening pollution.


HERMAN K. TRABISH: MARCH 22, 2013
China’s use of wind to generate electricity grew faster than coal for the first time in 2012, according to just released numbers from the China Electricity Council.

While fossil-fired generation of electricity grew 0.3 percent last year, wind-generated electricity grew 35.5 percent. Solar-generated electricity grew 414 percent and nuclear generation grew 12.6 percent.

However, these numbers hid the scale of the shift because traditional generation has such a huge pre-existing base:

- Fossil-fired generation, which still accounted for 79 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2012, added 12 terawatt-hours for a cumulative total of 3,910.8 terawatt-hours of generation.
- Wind’s 35.5 percent growth meant an addition of 26 terawatt-hours of generation. But it achieved a much smaller cumulative 100.4 terawatt-hours of electricity production. Its growth did, however, put it ahead of nuclear energy’s cumulative 98 terawatt-hours of generation.
- Solar reached a cumulative 3.5 terawatt-hours of electricity production.
- Hydroelectric power had the biggest total growth of generation in China, adding 196 terawatt-hours to reach 864 terawatt-hours of electricity production.

Total power ...

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Growth-in-Chinas-Wind-Sector-Eclipses-Growth-in-Coal?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=headline&utm_campaign=GTMDaily

[pscot]

1. Do you think this is true?

[kristopher]

2. Do I think what is true?

Not being flippant, that is just a bit too general for me to be confident I'm addressing your point.
The headline is accurate and the body of the article does a good job of placing that in its proper context. There are a lot of data, though, so if you mean something more specific...

[joshcryer]

3. I do. Excess capacity.

http://en.ce.cn/Insight/201303/01/t20130301_24158906.shtml

[NickB79]

4. That's a huge fucking hill to climb

Coal: 3900 TWH
Wind: 100 TWH
Solar 3.5 TWH
Hydro: 864 TWH

And that doesn't take into account the 4800 TWH's of annual Chinese oil consumption either.

If we give any credence at all to the climatologists who say we need to reduce global use of fossil fuels by 80% in the next couple of decades just to have a snowball's chance in hell of stopping catastrophic climate change, we're screwed.

Fuck me, but that's depressing.