You have to admire the initiative of the Electric Viking guy, above – he produces several videos a day, it seems, continuously. What’s useful for me is that to be that productive, he simply reads news items verbatim from the internet and throws in some B roll of power plants and EVs. What I do is just type some of his quotes into google, find the source articles, and usually they are reliable sources, as here.
China has reached its goal to have more non-fossil fuel installed electricity capacity than fossil fuels earlier than planned, with 50.9% of its power capacity coming from non-fossil fuel sources now, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported on Monday.
Back in 2021, the Chinese authorities said they would target renewables to outpace fossil fuel-installed capacity by 2025.
China is unmatched in renewable energy spending globally, investing in raising its solar and wind power capacity.
China’s wind and solar power generation has jumped in recent years to nearly equal domestic residential electricity consumption, but the relatively small share of household demand in overall consumption means that China still needs a lot of fossil fuels.
In 2022, China’s wind and solar power output surged by 21% to 1,190 terawatt-hours (TWh), according to data from NEA cited by Bloomberg. To compare, residential electricity demand last year rose by 14% to 1,340 TWh as people mostly stayed at home due to the zero-Covid policy.
Bloomberg:
Wind and solar output jumped 21% last year to 1,190 terawatt-hours of electricity, the National Energy Administration said at a briefing on Monday. That’s not far off total residential power consumption of 1,340 terawatt-hours, the NEA said, which was a 14% increase on the prior year as more people spent time at home because of the government’s stringent virus restrictions.
The near match underscores two important things about China’s power system. One, of course, is the rapid growth in renewables as the country sinks hundreds of billions of dollars into meeting climate goals and reducing its reliance on expensive fossil fuels.
But tempering that is a second point: the relative insignificance of household power when it comes to energy demand in China. Just 17% of electricity use there was classified as residential in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. In the same year, homes accounted for 29% of power consumption in Japan, and a whopping 39% in the US. In China, factories are still king, with industry accounting for 60% of all electricity needs.
You have to admire the initiative of the Electric Viking guy, above – he produces several videos a day, it seems, continuously.
Yes, but that’s in part because he doesn’t take the time to make them shorter. I enjoy them, but they are time-fluffy and fervently repeat points throughout, a style which screams for watching them at higher speeds.
And, of course, he doesn’t provide his own interviews with subject matter experts (including relevant local perspectives).