China’s coal bubble: 155 coal-fired power plants in the pipeline despite overcapacity

[GliderGuider]

China’s coal bubble: 155 coal-fired power plants in the pipeline despite overcapacity

China has given the green light to more than 150 coal power plants so far this year despite falling coal consumption, flatlining production and existing overcapacity.

According to a new Greenpeace analysis, in the first nine months of 2015 China’s central and provincial governments issued environmental approvals to 155 coal-fired power plants — that’s four per week.

The numbers associated with this prospective new fleet of plants are suitably astronomical.

Should they all go ahead they would have a capacity of 123GW, more than twice Germany’s entire coal fleet; their carbon emissions would be around 560 million tonnes a year, roughly equal to the annual energy emissions of Brazil; they would produce more particle pollution than all the cars in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing put together; and consequently would cause around 6,100 premature deaths a year.

But they’re unlikely to be used to their maximum since China has practically no need for the energy they would produce.

Coal-fired electricity hasn’t increased for four years, and this year coal plant utilisation fell below 50%.

It looks like this trend will continue, with China committing to renewables, gas and nuclear targets for 2020 — together they will cover any increase in electricity demand.

Jobs, jobs, jobs...

[DetlefK]

1. China doesn't care about the plants. It desperately needs those construction-jobs.

China has 62 million empty surplus-appartments. China has empty surplus-skyscrapers, empty surplus-airports, empty surplus-stadiums, empty surplus-shipyards...

China needs to keep unemployment-numbers down. Get everybody a decent-paying job and they won't complain that telling the truth is a jailable offense. (No, literally. Truth is what the chinese government says is the truth. If you tell a different story than the government-line, you get jailed for telling "lies".)

Construction-jobs are the easiest way to get people an employment, any employment.

[kristopher]

5. I don't think so it's just that. This is also a way to reduce emissions with more efficient plants.

As counterintuitive as it is, building modern coal plants is, for some systems, a part of phasing out coal.

The new plants will have two characteristics that the ones being closed down lack - they will probably be far more efficient and the plant's design will allow it to perform better at load following the expanding base of variable renewables.

This is the same thing Germany did to position their system to handle a heavy renewable input. Now they are getting more than 30% of their power from renewables and as that number continues to grow it will be substituting for generation from the new coal plants.

I knew this would be in the article before I checked it:

"Because there’s no room for this much new coal, and because China is sticking to its 15% non-fossil fuel target by 2020, older plants will likely be closed.

Because of that it’s unlikely the new fleet would cause a net increase in carbon emissions, particulate pollution or premature deaths."

[hatrack]

2. At least they now have ghost power plants to run their ghost cities with . . .

Riding the tiger's not the hard part; getting off is.

[GliderGuider]

3. Good noticing!

[NNadir]

4. Oh wow, an analysis from Greenpeace.

Last edited Thu Nov 12, 2015, 09:45 PM - Edit history (1)

It does nothing for one's scientific or ethical or envirnomental credibility to go around quoting the hare brained crap oozing out of that bunch of intellectual Lilliputians at Greenpeace.

Greenpeace analyses are all classic. What we have is a bunch of bored trust fund kids with poor educations and a penchant for dressing up in duck suits to protest climate change, nuclear power, or whatever else pops into the vacuous dark reaches of whatever that stuff inside their skulls is...complaining about, um, China.

In their bizarre little imaginations, China is the problem, while assholes driving to the edge of glaciers to get naked in their "green cars" (made by Volkwagen probably) are not the problem.

The per capital average continuous power consumption in China - not limited to electricity, but all sources of energy - is around 1000 watts. By way of contrast, American per capita average continuous power consumption is between 11,000 and 12,000 watts.

Greenpeace is very popular in the United States, useless and trivial in China. Most Chinese have living standards that don't allow driving to glaciers to get photographed naked. They're busy trying to eat.

A while back, bourgeois that I am, I had an occasion to watch a documentary by the Chinese artist Xu Bing, who constructed a huge dragon made entirely of discarded industrial parts strewn around the Chinese country side. In it, he filmed the conditions of Chinese industrial migrant workers. The shit for brains morons at Greenpeace couldn't possibly imagine the conditions under which these people live. Greenpeace doesn't have time to contemplate poverty. They're too damn busy dressing up in expensive orangutan suits and driving to protests in cars powered by "renewable" biodiesel to pretend to give a shit about the environment.



Greenpeace Asia

One wonders how much an exquisitely tailored orangutan suit costs, and how that cost compares to the annual income of your average Chinese industrial migrant worker.

China won't "need" more electricity if its people agree - in order to satisfy stupid, oblvious Westerners - to remain at a living stand that is 1/10th as high as that of Americans. Why, oh why, oh why, can't they see the innate wisdom of doing this? Don't they understand that our need for cell phones, "green cars" and computers is much more important than theirs? What's wrong with them?

There are about 1.3 billion people in China, and I note, with due contempt, that their carbon dioxide output is only marginally higher than that of the United States, where the population is less than 1/4 that of China.

This means that it would only take 1 American to commit suicide for the environment to equal four Chinese who committed suicide for the environment.

But I also note that the number of people who commit suicide because they're concerned with consumption and its impact on the environment is, in percentage terms, very close to zero. They whine a lot, but the do nothing.

China doesn't need less electricity. It needs more electricity. Only a barbarian with his or her head up his ass could think otherwise. And despite their current reliance on coal - which also powered the rise of Europe and the United States - they at least are doing something about it. For one thing they are building a strong nuclear infrastructure. One need not worry in China about majoring in nuclear engineering because a bunch of idiots at Greenpeace, none of whom could pass an entry level physics course at a mediocre university - have worked to strew idiot propaganda around the world.

Predictions are often trash, but based on my education I will make one anyway: In fifty years, Chinese electricity will be cheap, clean and sustainable. There's no one, basically no one, in the West who can say the same.

As for right now...

Basically, anyone writing anything on a computer has nothing to say about China, particularly because it is China, and not the West, that has agricultural fields laced with cadmium, children with enormous loads of polybrominated biphenyls in their plasma - before they turn five - acid leaching out of lanthanide mines, rivers flowing with solutions of lead, etc, etc, etc.

Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

[kristopher]

6. Nnads lecturing GreenPeace on ethics!?!?!?

Meanwhile, in India...

Solar power could be 10% cheaper than coal-based power by 2020: KPMG
By ET Bureau | 16 Nov, 2015, 01.01PM IST

NEW DELHI: Solar will be a significant energy source by 2025, with the market penetration of solar power expected to be 5.7% (54 Giga Watt-GW) by 2020 and 12.5% (166 GW) by 2025, states KPMG India, a consultancy firm in a report, titled 'The Rising Sun - Disruption on the horizon'.

The report was released by Piyush Goyal minister of state for power, coal, and new and renewable energy and Dharmendra Prad ..

The report talks about how the scale up and competitiveness of solar power could disrupt the traditional generators. The disruptive force is expected to start being felt from 2017 and may accelerate post 2020, KPMG said in a statement. In some states which are promoting solar (and also wind power) aggressively, conventional coal generators could see their Plant Load Factors (PLFs) fall by as much as 10-15 per cent by 2020, as solar replaces coal-fired generation in the daytime hours. This effect ..

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/49800045.cms

[NNadir]

7. Giggling while not giving a rat's ass about 7 million deaths per year from air pollution?

This constitutes what passes for "ethics" among Greenpeace types, making it crystalline clear, that they are, in fact, ethical Lilliputians.

I'm personally relieved that you and I have never met, but when I picture you, it's generally in an Orangutan suit which I find unfortunate, since, unlike a Greenpeace fool cheering from rototilling the rain forests in Indonesia to make "renewable" biofuels, I rather like Orangutans.

One suspects they have infinitely more humanity than the assholes dressing like them in order to further trivialize serious environmental issues.

There is, however, as noble as the nearly extinct great apes are, one similarity between Orangutans and Greenpeace types, not that I wish to insult the Orangutans: Neither of them have any familiarity with the contents of science books, and even less familiarity with the contents of the primary scientific literature.

Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895

Do send along a picture of all the other airheads in Ape suits cheering for a Chinese car battery plant oozing heavy metals to serve the electric car dreams of other morally paralytic trust fund brats.

Have a great weekend, and don't trouble yourself for a minute about the 38,000 people who will, according to Lancet, die this weekend from air pollution related causes. Of course, being a party animal, you never have been so troubled before, so the advice is probably unnecessary.

You clearly couldn't care less.

[cprise]

8. Ironic, since you're the one flinging poo. n/t

[NNadir]

9. There's no irony in it at all.

I'm just making a point. Every weekend 38,000 people die each weekend, every weekend, from air pollution while anti-nukes lie around on their fat asses, picking lint out of their navels and burning coal, oil and gas to tell us all about how someone has cancer because of Fukushima.

Typically, anti-nukes don't like it when I make this point, and they seek to make puerile jokes about fecal matter.

For the record, not that I find too many anti-nukes interested in REAL environmental issues, fecal matter kills almost as many,not quite as many, but almost as many people as die from air pollution.

This takes place while we hear from anti-nukes all about electric cars, and other stuff irrelevant to the future of humanity.

Have a nice day.

[cprise]

10. "Have a nice day."

Have a banana.

[NNadir]

11. Like I said...

...there is not a single, not one, anti-nuke, present company included, who can intelligently discuss an environmental issue.

Not one. Zero.

For example, suppose one encounters an anti-nuke who accuses someone of throwing poop because he points out that 38,000 people die each weekend, every weekend from air pollution while they whine and whine and whine about Fukushima.

One can ask them to compare the death toll from the reactors to the death toll from collapsed buildings, but that would be pointless.

One can then point out that "poop," to use the puerile word for fecal matter, is, unlike used nuclear fuel, a form of waste that actually kills people. One can, in fact, easily, google one's way to statistics on this matter from, say, the World Health Organization, and find that the number of deaths in 2012, for example, from this cause is estimated at 842,000:

WHO: Mortality and burden of disease from water and sanitation

Now, one could ask an anti-nuke to compare this figure, 842,000 human beings killed (in 2012 alone) with the total number of people killed in over a half a century of commercial nuclear operations, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima combined but one could never expect such a person to have a remotely intelligent response.

What is more likely than an intelligent response is "Have a banana" or "You're the one throwing poop."

This is because anti-nukes are not reflective people, not people with decent educations, moral or scientific, not people who care about the world and its future. In my opinion - and in many years in the planet I have seen little to contradict this opinion - they are all, to a fault, simpletons.

Speaking only for myself, I find this set appalling, their indifference, their blather, their capacity to do evil through sheer ignorance.

Enjoy the evening.