“There are no Windmills in China.”
A US congressman with power to make policy actually said this.
Even “X” gagged on this one.
China achieved a new milestone in its energy transition, with wind and solar power together generating a quarter (26%) of the country’s electricity in April 2025, the highest monthly share on record, according to the latest data from global energy think tank Ember. This surpasses the previous record of 23.7% set a month earlier in March 2025.
The April record was driven by both wind and solar hitting individual record high shares. Wind power accounted for 13.6% of generation while solar contributed 12.4%. The rise of solar power in particular has been remarkable. The share of solar power has tripled in the last five years, from just 4.1% in April of 2020. In 2024, China installed more new solar capacity than the rest of the world combined, more than tripling its rate of installations in just two years, from around 103 GW (DC) in 2022 to 333 GW in 2024. Installations have continued at pace in 2025, with 72 GW of new solar added in Q1 alone, up 18% from Q1 2024, according to Ember’s monthly wind and solar capacity data.
Burchett’s name also popped up today with Marjorie Taylor Greene. He’s the co-sponsor of her ‘weather modification’ bill:
https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-weather-modification-bill-2095076
I also learned from Burchett that ‘wind is subjective’.
It’s really like we’re living a cartoon. This stuff is so ridiculous, it can’t possibly be real, right? Sadly, it is real.
So ridiculous and nonsensical in fact, his little speech makes me think it’s mercury poisoning from burning coal and oil. Mad Congresscritter Syndrome, just like in Alice in Wonderland. And lead poisoning, also from burning fossils, reducing IQ and increasing aggression (and hate speech).
26%…
means 2 doubling times left, to 100% solar and wind. Tripling solar in 5 years means it doubled in 3.3. Wind has been a little slower but let’s say 4 years doubling time for the combination. Given a little fudging for the sheer population size and relative poverty of the country, the vast increase in the size of the grid as primary energy is electrified, the much-thrown-about but I think hugely over-hyped difficulty of the last few percent, taking into account other renewables, and the inevitable crushing of nukes by solar and wind on price alone, that comes out to China achieving virtually 100% renewable energy sometime between 2035 and 2040 if not sooner. (Some reactors may be kept limping along with subsidies as a bridge to a sane energy system, until they can be replaced by sun and wind…in 2041.)
Bear in mind that demand is also a growing target, so simple doubling of the absolute amount of RE won’t double its percentage of total power (since coal power plants are run more in times of very high demand).
Already accounted for. The US, the most corrupt and insane country in the world, may be a laggard in transitioning (to both recognizing trans people’s rights and switching to renewables) but China’s speed means it’s effectively doubled the real work done by those GWs in a few decades. The inherent efficiency of renewable electrification, as I’m sure you know, reduces demand by at least half. (Some experience is showing more like 60%.) Upgrades in grids and end-use machines add to the effect. (Saul Griffith)
If I didn’t know better I might think the people pushing for more fossil fuels to supply energy for the plaything money-concentrator machines of the rich, were actually TRYING to put in the most inefficient, money-losing ungenerators possible, while intentionally increasing electricity prices through the shortages and outages (not to mention outrages) they’ll cause by also choosing the slowest-built slowest on-turning inflexible gadgets found anywhere. Especially since coal, gas, and nuke capacity factors will keep falling, in the face of temporally expanding wind and solar dominance, over the course of both day and year, in China and the US, and worldwide.
PLUS…this just in (can you hear the teletype in the background?):
Michael Barnard, one of the most trustworthy (and savagely witty, when it comes to debunking hydrogen proponents’ and other energetic liars’ claims) has pointed out a trend toward longer lifetimes than expected for wind farms. Between simple extensions, (as nukes have been asking for to our children’s peril) and repowering, with an astounding 60-80% of the cost paid for by materials recycling, plus the benefit of huge increases in energy yield per land unit, gives a big boost to the net energy and materials yield of wind power over the lifetime of the site. He cites several examples but misses a big ‘un.
1500–yes, remember that number: one thousand five hundred older wind turbines were replaced at Altamont, (one of?) the first big wind farms in the US, by enough bigger, newer, more powerful and efficient turbines to provide the same amount of power, (allowing use of the same power lines and other infrastructure) but with a much much bigger capacity factor.
It took 82.
What was that number we were trying to remember? Oh yeah…
“Wind Farms Outlast Expectations: Longevity Matches Nuclear” Michael Barnard, CleanTechnica, 7/7/2025
“The US, the most corrupt and insane country in the world”
Unwarranted hyperbole like that is why it’s hard to take you seriously.
It would only be either unwarranted or hyperbolic if it were untrue. It is a country where 250 million adults have allowed a few who have diagnosable narcissistic and anti-social personality disorders (malignant narcissism), attachment disorders, dire addictions, and a shared psychotic disorder, (Folie À Plusieurs or “madness of many”, or Induced Delusional Disorder) among other conditions, to take over, over more than 2 centuries, and done nothing of what it would take to stop them, while the goal—yet another conquest—was made explicit and carried out consciously and systematically over 60 years.
Founded on near-universal, atomized avulsion from land and homes; conquest; genocide; systematic, almost holocaust-level proto-industrial abduction and slavery; and horrific racism, it’s never admitted wrong or dealt with any of those in any meaningful way, has instead split off awareness of and connection to all that, turning it into deep shadow, making it the drivers of the longstanding sabotage and ongoing perversion and destruction of what we ludicrously lie ourselves into believing is “democracy”.
There are other corrupt, evil cultures and countries, of course, but none has anywhere near the size and wealth of the us, thus not nearly the responsibility. What should be sobering and humbling has instead caused rigidly intentional unconsciousness and ignorance, a black hole of denial and frenetic, indulgent distraction.
People all over take me seriously, and thank me for what they see as insight, even wisdom. Where others are so deluded by the lies they’ve been told about climate, renewable energy, EVs, organic permaculture, the country and life, that they refuse to even consider it, it’s that much more important that I say what I have to say.
I started out decades ago being the most kind, understanding conversant on any of the sites where I posted and the real-world places I lived, offering a form of real-time psychotherapy to those who needed it most; that’s all been sandblasted away by the utter failure of that approach in the face of a relentless decades-long torrent of lies in an increasingly evil society in an increasingly desperate world. I understand you don’t see the truth of what I say; I can’t help you with that if you’re not willing to confront the lies you tell yourself.
So no. There are contracts, and there is insanity and corruption, so it’s a slower transition than it could be should be, but wind, (especially offshore wind which is why they’re determined to destroy it) and even PV+storage, and CSP, eat coalngas’s lunch at all peak demand times—summer afternoons in hot places, winter nights in cold places, and the daily duck curve in all places.
So fuelless renewables are used more at peak demand. They’re used more at nadir demand, when all the expensive things that burn stuff are shut off. They’re used more whenever they’re available, which increasingly, is all the time.
As all those increase—onshore wind, offshore wind, solar PV, batteries, pumped hydro storage, geothermal, tidal, and trans-Pecos generation (aka time-shifting across time zones through AC/DC…er…HVDC distributed generation) and as the prices drop even more, and the contracts run out and even the insane corrupt can’t justify renewing them or building more coalngas, or nukes, I hope the realization and reckoning are tempered by a truth and reconciliation process and not too many heads roll, literally.
A few maybe, just as encouragement and to make the point, and serve as a Brutusian reminder, but then let’s get on with recovering, and making Earth sort of OK again. MESOOKA, sister.
Demand for air conditioning during heat domes (disproportionately hot at night, low wind) is increasing. Power from hydro also gets cut back during drought. China’s delightful embrace of electric vehicles adds more total demand from the grid as well (though that’s much easier to time-shift).
Yes. And?
“Rooftop solar and home batteries make a clean grid vastly more affordable: Distributed energy is not an alternative to big power plants, but a complement.”
David Roberts, Volts, May 28, 2021
See the “DER Altered Load Duration Curve” chart
“That much wind, at that capacity factor, with foreseeable advances in wind tech, will produce power cheap enough to absolutely crush all competitors.”
David Roberts, speaking of offshore wind, “Wind energy: turbines are getting taller, bigger, more powerful” Vox, March 8, 2018
The stupid, it…it burns.