oh, so just the two biggest centers of population in the world!

In the same way that your local power plant isn't solely responsible for the pollution created in heating surrounding homes, it's probably not reasonable to look at the places that have done the fabricating, weaving, injection molding, spinning, etc for the rest of the world as being the major center of pollution.

China specifically is decarbonizing fast, and at some expense to their own economy over the last decade or so.

Regarding China: China accounted for 95% of the world's new coal power construction activity in 2023, according to the latest annual report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Construction began on 70 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in China, up four-fold since 2019, says GEM's annual report on the global coal power industry China started construction on 70.2 GW of new coal-power capacity last year, almost 20 times the rest of the world's 3.7 GW.

That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.” https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants#....

By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year. IE adding ~20GW in December has 1/12th impact in 2023, but it’s now online for the next ~25 years. Which is why some predictions have China using less coal in 2024 despite bringing new power plants online in 2023.

China alone represents 30% of the world’s electricity production/consumption so it has real impact, but they just don’t have the natural gas supplies which the US has used to ween itself off coal.

Apparently part of the issue is that the Chinese grid is very badly managed.

They can build physical grid connections much more easily than we can manage (for the usual values of “we”), but they manage interprovincial transmission according to fixed schedules rather than responding to demand.

Which means that they have a relatively easy lever they can pull to significantly lower emissions even further.

Undoing dumb rules that favour existing vested interests is hard everywhere.

I mean, the US doesn't exactly cover itself in glory in its own utility regulations. "cost-of-service" regulation means that monopoly utilities are allowed to charge such that they make a regulated rate of return on the cost of providing the service. So the more they increase their costs, the more money they are permitted to make!

"Relatively easy" is a poor phrasing choice on my part. It's still very hard, but it's one of the easiest in a list of really hard tasks. Solving climate change involves a lot of really hard problems.

Also critically they don’t have to build these coal plant to be economically used in the same way as free market states do. They’re building them mostly as a hedge - if they end up barely used , which is likely given renewable trends, that’s ok for state owned power. It makes everything a bit more expensive, but you can’t exactly vote for an alternative.

If they need to get used a lot for whatever reason, no one is unhappy either, you avoid shortages and discontent.

Whereas coal stopped being built in market economies roughly as soon as it became uneconomical.

How do you vote for an alternative in the US?

If a state gov made choices that made power way more expensive than it should be, and people get upset enough it theoretically could hurt them in an election. I realize this hasn’t happened in California but it’s possible

> That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.

That doesn't sound all that misleading then? If they've installed 20 times more coal generating capacity than the rest of the world and are operating it 50% of the time then they're still adding 10 times more emissions than the rest of the world combined, and that's assuming the rest of the world will all be operating their coal-fired power plants fully 100% of the time.

> By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year.

217 GW of nameplate capacity or of average generation? These are very different numbers for solar because of the low capacity factor.

China is simultaneously also adding much more solar, wind and nuclear power than any other country, plus much of the new coal construction is also meant to replace old, horrifically inefficient/polluting ones.

Also China's population are moving from the frozen north to the warm south, construction standards are increasing (better insulation), cooking is being outsourced (fewer kitchens), and they lead the world in mass transit / ride hailing / vehicle sharing / portable e-vehicle (scooter/wheel types). China has possibly reached peak personal vehicle. Local governments frequently spray water along main roads to bring down air pollution levels - surprisingly effective for PM2.5 - and most cities are pushing industrial land use far out of town.

If I am not mistaken, a good portion of these newly constructed coal plants are meant to replace existing ones that are obsolete and inefficient. It would be hard to judge its impact on net pollution without relevant data on plants retired.

What of it?

China + India = 2.864bn

Not China or India = 5.244bn

I think the characterization that a turning point has occurred is perfectly supportable.

The article never even tried to say anything other than that it only just barely happened 11 minutes ago and a few metrics metrics don't show a clear past peak yet.

"The article" https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023/supply

was a few paragraphs summerising the global coal supply as a subsection of the IEA Coal 2023 report.

If you fell that detail was lacking you can look to either the executive summary

https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023/executive-summary

or download and read the full 130 page report (PDF) https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/a72a7ffa-c5f2-4ed8-...

Whatever China and India do, their neighbors follow with impunity.

Your math might need adjusting for that.

Do you believe what you wrote here is a constructive, insightful comment? The comment you are replying to addressed that even India and China are building renewables.

It requires very little energy for you to spread negativity but potentially thousands of people then have to internalize it. Why choose to do that?

Like burning coal, your negativity pollutes the environment of HN and the internet at large.

China still builds more coal power, but they intend to use it only as a backup for when renewables are not producing enough. The YouTube channel Just Have a Think did a video on China's energy future recently, highly recommend checking it out (sorry for not linking directly, writing on my phone).

Doesn’t it take a while to bring a coal station up to energy producing capacity ? Isn’t they why gas is more popular for this ?

China has domestic coal reserves, so they build coal. It's the same reason as West Virginia and just as bad.

If you have any amount of energy storage then the time delay doesn't matter. You turn on the alternate generation method when the storage is starting to run down. It doesn't matter if it takes an hour to come up to temperature because you still have two hours of storage left.

The actual problem is that "shortfall" is a relative concept. Do you have to burn coal because it's cloudy all week, or just because you spent a lot of resources building coal-fired power plants instead of solar panels or wind turbines or nuclear reactors? How often are you going to run the things?

The economics of building and maintaining an entire fleet of coal power plants to use only in a demand emergency is extremely poor. Like you're better off spending half the money on nuclear reactors you can run 100% of the time and the other half on electrifying transportation so you can have a huge demand buffer in the form of vehicle batteries and then get people who only drive a few miles per day to delay their charging by a few days through pricing because a full charge lasts them three weeks anyway.

Let’s hope their renewable strategy works out because they’d otherwise be burning a lot of coal

They're building more renewable capacity than anybody else. I'd say they have a fair chance of succeeding.

This is what makes me think it’s all a lie. It makes no economic sense to use coal as a “backup”?

If you don't want to be dependent on foreign gas (in case you want to invade a neighbor for example) and you have coal at home it makes a lot of sense.