China is building coal because you can’t replace reliable generating capacity with solar and wind.
The notion that you can has been disproven repeatedly. One day there may be a form of affordable storage which makes this feasible. Meanwhile they have to build dispatchable power. They are building nuclear and coal and gas. Ultimately nuclear will probably replace coal as the stations last much longer.
South Australia, like Denmark, show that you can reach ~70-75% with wind and solar if you have good wind resources, and you can rely on neighbouring grids to provide dispatchable energy. There are two problems:
(1) Price. South Australia has the highest electricity prices in Australia, a country which has high electricity prices already. Similarly Denmark has the highest electricity prices in Europe. This makes decarbonisation of other energy sectors (heating, industrial, transport) much more difficult. We need to reduce electricity prices to facilitate this.
(2) There is no feasible route from ~75% to 100% clean energy. All modelling studies I have seen show the costs increasing exponentially as you try approach 100% with mainly solar and wind. Getting to 100% clean energy relying on mainly solar and wind is unaffordable unless you add nuclear or solve the storage problem. Might as well just build nuclear from the outset. That way you get extremely cheap electricity with minimal environmental footprint.
I like nuclear. Technology is not the enemy. Carbon emissions are the enemy. The top priority is quitting coal.
I just don't see nuclear expanding fast enough to play a large role in limiting emissions by 2050. Only a few countries, e.g. France and Finland, are committed to large fractions of nuclear, i.e., > 30%. The U.K. government is projecting fractions between 15 and 25% by 2050, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6464ac150b72d30013344604/annex-o-net-zero-power-sector-scenarios.pdf . Your present nuclear build, in the U.K., Hinkley C, is over budget and behind schedule. The government is stepping in and subsidizing Sizewell C to help ensure that it gets off the ground.
Sadly there is widespread militant opposition to fracking for gas. Countries with gas like the USA and Russia are unreliable sources. That is why so many countries are building coal generation. They will build wind and solar, but you have to have reliable generation first. These people are not idiots, unlike proponents of 100% renewables everywhere.
Nuclear buildouts have, historically, achieved BY FAR the fastest decarbonisation of electricity production. The reason nuclear was killed and remains slow is our insane regulatory environment. To give you an example of how insane it is, our current regulations value a life lost to radioactivity AT LEAST 130 time more than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels. For nuclear waste the difference is 2500 fold. There is no justification for this, especially given the urgent need to reduce emissions.
Because there are long periods when there is no sun and no wind you have to have dispatchable power generation that equals at least 100% of grid demand. That is why there is no country that has come even close to 100% renewables with mainly wind and solar. Denmark, Germany and California have tried but they remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels like coal or gas, either generated themselves or imported from other countries. Getting close to zero emission for electricity generation is currently only possible with nuclear, hydro, or geothermal.
Places that have achieved this are Ontario (nuclear and hydro), France (nuclear), Sweden (nuclear and hydro), Norway (hydro), New Zealand (hydro), and Iceland (geothermal). Since only a handful of countries have the required hydro and geothermal sources, and many are resolutely anti-nuclear, they need to continue building coal and gas power indefinitely, just to back up solar and wind.
What solar and wind can do is reduce the amount of fuel used by power plants. But they still need to be built and ready to turn on 24/7.
Consequently countries with lots of solar and wind have a duplicate energy generating system, which is why electricity prices are so high.
Ultimately nuclear will become cheaper and more widely accepted, and will replace all fossil fuels, as well as wind and solar.
Denmark benefits from having a huge amount of offshore wind because of its unusual geography.
So it is unlikely any other country will be able to emulate it.
Despite this advantage it has only has managed to get emissions down to ~210 gCO2/kWh per annum which is awful.
It also has the highest electricity prices in Europe, which is making electrification of other sectors very difficult.
The only way to get to net zero is to get electricity prices low. That is not possible with solar and wind because of the costs of storage.
The only remotely viable storage option is hydrogen. It not been shown to work at scale. It will definitely be more expensive than backing up solar and wind with fossil fuels.
Nuclear power is by far the cheapest way to get to net zero.
It could be a lot cheaper if regulations did not value a life lost to radioactivity 130-2500 times more than a life lost to air polution from burning fossil fuels or biofuels.
100% agree on changing the regulations valuing a life lost to radioactivity 130-2500 times more than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels or biofuels.
In your statement about Denmark having offshore wind and others can't emulate it. What about states like South Dakota, Iowa and Kansas that get from 30-50% of their energy from wind? Is there a good source of 'wind potential and tapped wind potential' data source?
You can see that Denmark and the UK are particularly well-endowed with wind because of their off-shore wind resources. But even in these countries it is very difficult to see how we could get to zero emission with wind because to the long windless period. Seasonal storage with hydrogen would be essential. That, however, is likely to be extremely expensive, if at all feasible. That is why the UK is building lots of nuclear and still relying on gas.
Would it make sense to build a significant overcapacity of power stations if you were concerned that at some point in the not too distant future you might be involved in a conflict that could result in some power stations being destroyed?
This. The Western world has been too blinded by the "just in time" supply chain philosophy and maximising short term profits. We have also been too complacent that the world will continue to be peaceful and predictable.
However, there is virtue in building in redundancy. We do this all the time in our personal lives; think about your "rainy day fund". Its there to protect against future unforeseen shocks.
A more simplistic example is always having excess loo rolls sitting at home. Wouldn't it be more efficient to keep the money in a bank, earning 5% interest, and only buy loo rolls "just in time"?
But we have these redundancies in our lives because we know that in a period of "shock", they will come in handy. China building excess power production capacity is just that. Whether its a war, climate impacts (eg lack of sun, wind), trade disruption (lack of oil imports). Building excess capacity makes sense.
China appears to following a logical, if unimaginative strategy towards a low carbon (but not zero carbon) economy.
1. Electrify what can be electrified. China is ahead of us in electrifying transport, and no doubt they are mandating heat pumps where ever needed.
2. Work out the maximum electricity demand. For the North of China, that will be in mid winter, for the South, with aircon, not so sure. (For the UK, I estimated typical demand in 2050 might be 60GW, but the grid might need to supply 120GW, perhaps for one day per decade).
3. Given people need heating and electricity, that peak demand is almost non negotiable. Sure, you can shut down industry for a week, but would China want to?
4. Assume the worst. That peak demand is on the day/week of minimum yield from renewables, and that it lasts long enough to deplete batteries and pumped storage. (The minimum yield will be higher over a wider geographical area - it will always be windy "somewhere in China", and with a mix of renewables - wind and solar yields are usually negatively corelated).
5. Assume the rest has to come from nuclear, coal, gas, biofuels, maybe hydrogen if in the strategy. That gives you the required coal or gas capacity. Storage can significantly reduce the use of coal and hence the capacity factor, but doesn't impact the peak capacity required.
6. Implement a capacity market. No one will build a coal plant that is needed one week 4 years, even if they can charge $1000/MWh (someone please tell Texas).
Hi Hannah, Michel's comment is accurate, but perhaps a little sparse and condescending.
Focus on rooftop solar. As it grows, everybody selling into the grid sees their income drop (including wind and solar farms). And what is worse, it hits the most profitable (retail) part of the market. So wind/solar farms only become profitable in such areas if they can sell their product elsewhere. Which is one of the reasons South Australia spent $2.1 billion on interconnectors to take excess w+s somewhere else. But building enough bandwidth is really expensive and only works if the somewhere else has low rates of rooftop solar. The obvious analogy is cars and mass transit. A high penetration of cars will make efficient/profitable mass transport impossible (e.g US, Australia).
Now think about China. Why build coal? China has a different approach to profitability. It's more focused on having a system which works, because electricity is a public good. On still nights, you effectively need a second fully functioning system to be able to take over. What would the capacity factor be for such a system? That would be the roughly the ratio of night to day. What about batteries? Coal is much cheaper.
And the last point is that the Chinese are working on a nuclear reactor which can be a drop in replacement for a coal boiler. This decarbonises the power plant while saving the rest of the infrastructure. The first of these reactors went commercial last year (HTR-PM). Is it ready (cheap enough) to be rolled out to China's coal fleet? I've no idea ... but that's been their plan for quite a while. Unlike western countries, China actually plans. They planned their EV and battery coup and the mineral processing required. That took about 20 years to produce fruit, but the harvest is in full swing now. Will their nuclearisation of coal work as planned? We'll see.
Does the Chinese carbon market play a role here in guiding incentives? It targets carbon intensity rather than absolute emissions. New plants likely to be more efficient than old ones.
With gas for example, open cycle gas turbines (variations on jet engines - RR even developed a Trent engine based power plant, but I think they sold it off, as usual) are more responsive than CCGT but much less efficient.
I was surprised not to read anything about "newer coal plants' high efficiency relative to older coal plants" being a contributer to lower emissions despite adding new coal capacity. Is that just not a very relevant factor?
I think China might be building coal due to bureaucratic inertia, which is a huge thing in China. The one child policy was enforced long after people realized it was bad, because it had a powerful bureacracy. There's a similar story with Chinese HSR, which is planned to expand into relatively remote places for seemingly no reason, after the core network was built up.
Thanks for a balanced view of the issues discussed here. Nearly everything you see is from an author who has obviously made up their mind in advance.
I would quibble, though, with your final sentence. The rest of Southeast Asia has about as many people as China and is likely to burn more coal. India has about as many people as China and is likely to burn more coal. Africa has about as many people as China and is likely to burn more coal, though at least some of that will displace burning biomass. It looks to me like human CO2 emissions have nowhere to go but up.
Running coal-burning plants as “peakers” is not necessarily going to lower carbon dioxide emissions. Typically, it takes over 24 hours of run time to bring coal-burning plants to peak energy-efficiency.
During the time the plant is warming up, it is producing more carbon, more pollution, and little or no electricity. So what is the point?
My guess is that this happening in China now. That is exactly why Western nations choose natural gas or hydro as peakers to load balance renewables with consumer demand.
I think that it is going to be very difficult for China and the reast of Asia to replace coal with wind and solar. Here are more reasons why:
I think you're thinking about "peakers" in the wrong time frame. I doubt this is much about changes over a few hours in response to say the diurnal cycle of solar. Rather, what they will be planning for will be events like last year's historic heat wave and drought that caused a simultaneous peak in demand while hydro output declined to historic lows at a time of the year when river flows are usually high.
Those things come on over days (heatwaves) to weeks or months (drought and drops in hydro output). You're not going to be burning coal 24/7 just in case there's a historic drought 6 months in the future.
Yes....before they understand the difference. While they're using the same technology to drill the holes and place the pipes, only what is pumped in is pumped out. This limits the amount of damage .....plus these holes will go down into solid rock 3 to 10 miles below ground much unlike shale.
What's the status of China's grid? Much had been said about the current status of the US grid, and its fragility in the face of weather events, solar storm impacts, extent of EV charging increasing demand, lack of reliable back-up as natural gas supplies get strangled.... How does China manage their load balancing? Simply by having a bunch of local plants, ready to turn up or down as demand suits? Do they even have a grid in the manner of what Western nations have built out?
China is building coal because you can’t replace reliable generating capacity with solar and wind.
The notion that you can has been disproven repeatedly. One day there may be a form of affordable storage which makes this feasible. Meanwhile they have to build dispatchable power. They are building nuclear and coal and gas. Ultimately nuclear will probably replace coal as the stations last much longer.
I agree with you. Here are a few articles that I wrote on the subject:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/can-increased-windsolar-retire-asian
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/prove-that-solarwind-replaces-fossil
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/can-increased-windsolar-retire-us
Thanks. I'll take a look!
Honest question, how has reliable solar and wind been 'The notion that you can has been disproven repeatedly'
Who has disproven it? We have large chunks of the US power by renewables. Several states get half their energy from wind alone.
Would love to see your sources etc! Thanks.
It is not a country but South Australia has shown it is possible to get to very high fractions of wind and solar, 70 - 75%, https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all&interval=1y&view=discrete-time . A good discussion of their success story is presented by "Engineering with Rosie," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daZvZ4fEOp8 .
South Australia, like Denmark, show that you can reach ~70-75% with wind and solar if you have good wind resources, and you can rely on neighbouring grids to provide dispatchable energy. There are two problems:
(1) Price. South Australia has the highest electricity prices in Australia, a country which has high electricity prices already. Similarly Denmark has the highest electricity prices in Europe. This makes decarbonisation of other energy sectors (heating, industrial, transport) much more difficult. We need to reduce electricity prices to facilitate this.
(2) There is no feasible route from ~75% to 100% clean energy. All modelling studies I have seen show the costs increasing exponentially as you try approach 100% with mainly solar and wind. Getting to 100% clean energy relying on mainly solar and wind is unaffordable unless you add nuclear or solve the storage problem. Might as well just build nuclear from the outset. That way you get extremely cheap electricity with minimal environmental footprint.
I like nuclear. Technology is not the enemy. Carbon emissions are the enemy. The top priority is quitting coal.
I just don't see nuclear expanding fast enough to play a large role in limiting emissions by 2050. Only a few countries, e.g. France and Finland, are committed to large fractions of nuclear, i.e., > 30%. The U.K. government is projecting fractions between 15 and 25% by 2050, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6464ac150b72d30013344604/annex-o-net-zero-power-sector-scenarios.pdf . Your present nuclear build, in the U.K., Hinkley C, is over budget and behind schedule. The government is stepping in and subsidizing Sizewell C to help ensure that it gets off the ground.
I personally think that the best project out there right now for demonstrating a successful nuclear project, i.e., on time and on budget, is in Canada, https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/province-of-ontario-to-deploy-additional-ge-hitachi-bwrx-300-small-modular-reactors .
Sadly there is widespread militant opposition to fracking for gas. Countries with gas like the USA and Russia are unreliable sources. That is why so many countries are building coal generation. They will build wind and solar, but you have to have reliable generation first. These people are not idiots, unlike proponents of 100% renewables everywhere.
Nuclear buildouts have, historically, achieved BY FAR the fastest decarbonisation of electricity production. The reason nuclear was killed and remains slow is our insane regulatory environment. To give you an example of how insane it is, our current regulations value a life lost to radioactivity AT LEAST 130 time more than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels. For nuclear waste the difference is 2500 fold. There is no justification for this, especially given the urgent need to reduce emissions.
Sadly almost no-one is arguing for sanity here. I am not sure why. Ignorance? Self-interest? Cowardice? It is a very lonely battle pointing this out but I will keep on trying. https://www.ft.com/content/e76cd8f6-f4bb-498f-bb22-8e692d1a6133
Great example, thanks!
Because there are long periods when there is no sun and no wind you have to have dispatchable power generation that equals at least 100% of grid demand. That is why there is no country that has come even close to 100% renewables with mainly wind and solar. Denmark, Germany and California have tried but they remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels like coal or gas, either generated themselves or imported from other countries. Getting close to zero emission for electricity generation is currently only possible with nuclear, hydro, or geothermal.
Places that have achieved this are Ontario (nuclear and hydro), France (nuclear), Sweden (nuclear and hydro), Norway (hydro), New Zealand (hydro), and Iceland (geothermal). Since only a handful of countries have the required hydro and geothermal sources, and many are resolutely anti-nuclear, they need to continue building coal and gas power indefinitely, just to back up solar and wind.
What solar and wind can do is reduce the amount of fuel used by power plants. But they still need to be built and ready to turn on 24/7.
Consequently countries with lots of solar and wind have a duplicate energy generating system, which is why electricity prices are so high.
Ultimately nuclear will become cheaper and more widely accepted, and will replace all fossil fuels, as well as wind and solar.
"there is no country that has come even close to 100% renewables with mainly wind and solar"
Initially I was shocked by that assertion. So dug into it.
According to a 2018 report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, seven countries are at or near 100% renewable power:
So I dug into the power mix of each. https://www.iea.org/countries/Denmark/electricity
Iceland: 100% (geothermal like you mentioned)
Paraguay: 100% (hydropower)
Costa Rica: 99% (73% hydro, the rest wind and solar)
Norway: 98.5% (88% hydro, the rest wind)
Austria: 80% (57% hydro)
Brazil: 75% (63% hydro)
Denmark: 69.4% (54% wind)
So for the countries that are 100% renewable, geothermal or hydro is doing most of the heavy lifting with the exception of Denmark.
You seem to think nuclear is the ultimate solution.
You don't think any storage technologies will change the cost structure of renewables?
Denmark benefits from having a huge amount of offshore wind because of its unusual geography.
So it is unlikely any other country will be able to emulate it.
Despite this advantage it has only has managed to get emissions down to ~210 gCO2/kWh per annum which is awful.
It also has the highest electricity prices in Europe, which is making electrification of other sectors very difficult.
The only way to get to net zero is to get electricity prices low. That is not possible with solar and wind because of the costs of storage.
The only remotely viable storage option is hydrogen. It not been shown to work at scale. It will definitely be more expensive than backing up solar and wind with fossil fuels.
Nuclear power is by far the cheapest way to get to net zero.
It could be a lot cheaper if regulations did not value a life lost to radioactivity 130-2500 times more than a life lost to air polution from burning fossil fuels or biofuels.
100% agree on changing the regulations valuing a life lost to radioactivity 130-2500 times more than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels or biofuels.
In your statement about Denmark having offshore wind and others can't emulate it. What about states like South Dakota, Iowa and Kansas that get from 30-50% of their energy from wind? Is there a good source of 'wind potential and tapped wind potential' data source?
Thanks for all the great info!
This is a useful source.
https://globalwindatlas.info/en
You can see that Denmark and the UK are particularly well-endowed with wind because of their off-shore wind resources. But even in these countries it is very difficult to see how we could get to zero emission with wind because to the long windless period. Seasonal storage with hydrogen would be essential. That, however, is likely to be extremely expensive, if at all feasible. That is why the UK is building lots of nuclear and still relying on gas.
brazil is near 90%
Here are a few articles that I wrote on the subject:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/can-increased-windsolar-retire-asian
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/prove-that-solarwind-replaces-fossil
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/can-increased-windsolar-retire-us
Or EGS https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652622007417 like FERVO just brought online in Nevada for Google.
Looks exciting! If the public oppose fracking will they not oppose this as well?
Would it make sense to build a significant overcapacity of power stations if you were concerned that at some point in the not too distant future you might be involved in a conflict that could result in some power stations being destroyed?
This. The Western world has been too blinded by the "just in time" supply chain philosophy and maximising short term profits. We have also been too complacent that the world will continue to be peaceful and predictable.
However, there is virtue in building in redundancy. We do this all the time in our personal lives; think about your "rainy day fund". Its there to protect against future unforeseen shocks.
A more simplistic example is always having excess loo rolls sitting at home. Wouldn't it be more efficient to keep the money in a bank, earning 5% interest, and only buy loo rolls "just in time"?
But we have these redundancies in our lives because we know that in a period of "shock", they will come in handy. China building excess power production capacity is just that. Whether its a war, climate impacts (eg lack of sun, wind), trade disruption (lack of oil imports). Building excess capacity makes sense.
China appears to following a logical, if unimaginative strategy towards a low carbon (but not zero carbon) economy.
1. Electrify what can be electrified. China is ahead of us in electrifying transport, and no doubt they are mandating heat pumps where ever needed.
2. Work out the maximum electricity demand. For the North of China, that will be in mid winter, for the South, with aircon, not so sure. (For the UK, I estimated typical demand in 2050 might be 60GW, but the grid might need to supply 120GW, perhaps for one day per decade).
3. Given people need heating and electricity, that peak demand is almost non negotiable. Sure, you can shut down industry for a week, but would China want to?
4. Assume the worst. That peak demand is on the day/week of minimum yield from renewables, and that it lasts long enough to deplete batteries and pumped storage. (The minimum yield will be higher over a wider geographical area - it will always be windy "somewhere in China", and with a mix of renewables - wind and solar yields are usually negatively corelated).
5. Assume the rest has to come from nuclear, coal, gas, biofuels, maybe hydrogen if in the strategy. That gives you the required coal or gas capacity. Storage can significantly reduce the use of coal and hence the capacity factor, but doesn't impact the peak capacity required.
6. Implement a capacity market. No one will build a coal plant that is needed one week 4 years, even if they can charge $1000/MWh (someone please tell Texas).
Hi Hannah, Michel's comment is accurate, but perhaps a little sparse and condescending.
Focus on rooftop solar. As it grows, everybody selling into the grid sees their income drop (including wind and solar farms). And what is worse, it hits the most profitable (retail) part of the market. So wind/solar farms only become profitable in such areas if they can sell their product elsewhere. Which is one of the reasons South Australia spent $2.1 billion on interconnectors to take excess w+s somewhere else. But building enough bandwidth is really expensive and only works if the somewhere else has low rates of rooftop solar. The obvious analogy is cars and mass transit. A high penetration of cars will make efficient/profitable mass transport impossible (e.g US, Australia).
Now think about China. Why build coal? China has a different approach to profitability. It's more focused on having a system which works, because electricity is a public good. On still nights, you effectively need a second fully functioning system to be able to take over. What would the capacity factor be for such a system? That would be the roughly the ratio of night to day. What about batteries? Coal is much cheaper.
And the last point is that the Chinese are working on a nuclear reactor which can be a drop in replacement for a coal boiler. This decarbonises the power plant while saving the rest of the infrastructure. The first of these reactors went commercial last year (HTR-PM). Is it ready (cheap enough) to be rolled out to China's coal fleet? I've no idea ... but that's been their plan for quite a while. Unlike western countries, China actually plans. They planned their EV and battery coup and the mineral processing required. That took about 20 years to produce fruit, but the harvest is in full swing now. Will their nuclearisation of coal work as planned? We'll see.
Does the Chinese carbon market play a role here in guiding incentives? It targets carbon intensity rather than absolute emissions. New plants likely to be more efficient than old ones.
Maybe not. The new plants will be targeted at flexibility. I'm not sure what the technology used is, but that may not always be the most efficient. (https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasification/gasifipedia/fluidizedbed)
With gas for example, open cycle gas turbines (variations on jet engines - RR even developed a Trent engine based power plant, but I think they sold it off, as usual) are more responsive than CCGT but much less efficient.
I was surprised not to read anything about "newer coal plants' high efficiency relative to older coal plants" being a contributer to lower emissions despite adding new coal capacity. Is that just not a very relevant factor?
Hannah,
There seems to be some diversity of opinion about the role nuclear energy will play in the net-zero energy transition for the U.K. I found this publication from your DES, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6464ac150b72d30013344604/annex-o-net-zero-power-sector-scenarios.pdf that projects levels of nuclear generation in 2050 ranging from 15% ( equal to the amount in amount today) to 25% with the balance provided by renewables.
What is your opinion?
I think China might be building coal due to bureaucratic inertia, which is a huge thing in China. The one child policy was enforced long after people realized it was bad, because it had a powerful bureacracy. There's a similar story with Chinese HSR, which is planned to expand into relatively remote places for seemingly no reason, after the core network was built up.
Thanks for a balanced view of the issues discussed here. Nearly everything you see is from an author who has obviously made up their mind in advance.
I would quibble, though, with your final sentence. The rest of Southeast Asia has about as many people as China and is likely to burn more coal. India has about as many people as China and is likely to burn more coal. Africa has about as many people as China and is likely to burn more coal, though at least some of that will displace burning biomass. It looks to me like human CO2 emissions have nowhere to go but up.
China is an inscrutable enigma and the emitter of the most CO2 by far. Unfortunately, the planet is stuck with what they do.
it's better than USA in per capita numbers....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
Running coal-burning plants as “peakers” is not necessarily going to lower carbon dioxide emissions. Typically, it takes over 24 hours of run time to bring coal-burning plants to peak energy-efficiency.
During the time the plant is warming up, it is producing more carbon, more pollution, and little or no electricity. So what is the point?
My guess is that this happening in China now. That is exactly why Western nations choose natural gas or hydro as peakers to load balance renewables with consumer demand.
I think that it is going to be very difficult for China and the reast of Asia to replace coal with wind and solar. Here are more reasons why:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/can-increased-windsolar-retire-asian
I think you're thinking about "peakers" in the wrong time frame. I doubt this is much about changes over a few hours in response to say the diurnal cycle of solar. Rather, what they will be planning for will be events like last year's historic heat wave and drought that caused a simultaneous peak in demand while hydro output declined to historic lows at a time of the year when river flows are usually high.
Those things come on over days (heatwaves) to weeks or months (drought and drops in hydro output). You're not going to be burning coal 24/7 just in case there's a historic drought 6 months in the future.
US faced the same situation, while its coal electricity generation peaked between 2005 and 2007, US coal generation capacity peaked in 2012.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php
https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/A-Review-of-Coal-Fired-Electricity-Generation-in-the-U.S..pdf
Here's a simple explanation:
China is preparing for war(s). And maybe civil unrest. For that, redundancy is king.
Yes....before they understand the difference. While they're using the same technology to drill the holes and place the pipes, only what is pumped in is pumped out. This limits the amount of damage .....plus these holes will go down into solid rock 3 to 10 miles below ground much unlike shale.
What if the new coal plants are temporary place maker for new EGS which China is known to be investigating. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652622007417 like the new EG System in Nevada that feeds into the Nevada grid....e.g. the one built by Fervo for Google .https://fervoenergy.com/
What's the status of China's grid? Much had been said about the current status of the US grid, and its fragility in the face of weather events, solar storm impacts, extent of EV charging increasing demand, lack of reliable back-up as natural gas supplies get strangled.... How does China manage their load balancing? Simply by having a bunch of local plants, ready to turn up or down as demand suits? Do they even have a grid in the manner of what Western nations have built out?