But if you read industry journals and look at the data, you'd see that the complete opposite is true.
The GP makes a legitimate point that China's progressive policies are helping to propel the country forward. In the US, progress toward the industries of the future is happening despite government policies, not because of them.
And yet coal plants are shutting down and production slowing.
Most of that "committed" has been throwing some money at research for political reasons, but I don't think there has been a REAL political effort to push coal for much of it as much as gather some votes with some funding and vocal support .... and just let the chips fall where they may.
I think there's a vast range of possibilities when it comes to "support" from elected officials and "control" of a market or such.
So?
In any democracy government is going to lag the population/private sector when it comes to basically everything because you need more agreement before doing anything than you do in a private cooperation or authoritarian government system so the government winds up deadlocked or going back and fourth on an issue until a strong consensus emerges.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/31/the-media-is-telling-on...
The beancounters who make the decisions see that renewables are now the cheaper option.
We've even seen cases where plans for cheap gas peaker plants have been scrapped because doing it with batteries is cheaper.
Tesla isn't having a great look on Wall Street, but that's because investors priced them as a tech company instead of a car manufacturer. They're having demand issues, but they'll adjust and markets will adjust the way they price Tesla shares. They still had no trouble raising funds despite serious new direct competition.
Solar is making huge international wins from cheaper, non-domestic manufacturers, including a few of the first massive installations to come in cheaper than coal.
Immigration is a real issue, of course, but a lot of companies have adjusted by opening R&D offices in Vancouver to be close to the border and the time zone of US tech offices.
When you have cheap storage in the form of coal or oil barrels, it makes sense to just use energy whenever. But that will change - people will change their behaviors and business processes to adapt to the new conditions. Energy-expensive activities will become asynchronous - programmed to run whenever energy is cheap. Guaranteed energy - knowing you'll have a certain amount of kWh to spend at a specific time - will be expensive, and will be mostly used for prioritizing when the production is low.
Once your real base load drops enough, you won't need much storage to keep up even when production is abnormally low. Keeping a coal plant for the rare situations in which storage isn't enough, simply won't be economical. A natgas plant is more likely.
"What we need for this fluctuating renewable energy in the electricity mix is not baseload. Baseload is poison for our electricity transition in Germany," -- Thorsten Herdan, a director general for energy policy at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy
"The idea of there being an average or 'base' electricity load, doesn't make sense. Let alone having this sort of big, slow-changing power station to meet that load," -- CSIRO Energy Director Dr Glenn Platt.
"Technology has moved on from base load, and now you want flexible power. And that's what demand management, batteries and pumped hydro is," -- Professor Andrew Blakers, director of the ANU Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems.
And reports like Brattle Group's "Advancing Past “Baseload” to a Flexible Grid", and a few more which I have forgotten the name of.
And of course, knowing about the tech (IoT and such) that enables real-time communication of energy prices. And finally, my own guess that people will change their behaviour if it hits their wallet.
Sorry if I misread or got the arguments wrong.
I could answer you by writing a very lengthy essay, but I do not have the time or motivation to do that. Instead, if what they are saying is true why does Germany has 7 outs of 10 of the worst CO2 producing sources in the EU all of them are coal power plants?
https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_17582_...
The answer is: German mass hysteria made the country to turn off its nuclear power plants (you know, the other type of base load power plant that does not produce CO2) while not having any other option because renewables are not going to give you enough power. As a result they run on coal.
Lets add to the mix of the price of doing that:
So to sum it up, Germany produces the most CO2 in the EU and having the most expensive energy price by a large margin. This happens when you try to bend reality to your ideology instead of facing the challenges of our world and try to solve it.
It should be clear at this stage that without serious advencement in storing energy you cannot have a green solution to our energy needs. My prediction to the future, we are going to use solar + nuclear in the future because the combination of these two gives the best option of humanity and also because these work in a setup when you need the energy in space.