This week the US Department of Interior rejected an offer that would have 167 million tons of coal on public lands in Montana for less than a penny a ton.
It was a stark affirmation of what markets think about the Trump administration’s commitment to revive a 19th century economy on behalf of their fossil fuel donors.
In addition, it makes one wonder what planet Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have been living on, to think that blocking the completion of major renewable projects for baldly ideological reasons, while trying to resuscitate the expiring corpse of the coal industry, is somehow a competitive edge with what are obviously the key technologies of the new century.
Venture capitalists in clean tech are starting to say out loud what they’ve suspected for a while: China’s dominance has left key sectors in the West uninvestable.
A group of eight VCs from Western firms agreed to share with Bloomberg the details of a July road trip across China during which they visited factories, spoke with startup investors, and interviewed founders of companies.
They knew China had raced ahead in sectors like batteries and “everything around energy,” but seeing how big the gap was firsthand left them wondering how European and North American competitors can even survive, says Talia Rafaeli, a former investment banker at both Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc who’s now a partner at Kompas VC.
As financial professionals prepare to gather in New York for the city’s annual climate week, they’ll need to address the reality that China — the world’s largest source of carbon emissions — is now the strongest motor guiding the planet to a low-carbon future. While US President Donald Trump axes the green policies of his predecessor and Europe gets caught up in a regulatory stalemate, China is quietly making a number of transition sectors impenetrable to Western startups.
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Al Gore, the chairman of Generation Investment Management and former US vice president, says China’s supremacy in the energy transition is now leading “many nations” to consider closer ties with the country. He describes America’s retreat from transition technologies as a “tragedy.”
China manufactures about 80% of the world’s solar panels, supplies some 60% of the planet’s wind turbines, 70% of its EVs and 75% of batteries, all at a lower financial cost than the West.
In 1957 the Soviet Union put the first man-made satellite — Sputnik — into orbit. The U.S. response was close to panic: The Cold War was at its coldest, and there were widespread fears that the Soviets were taking the lead in science and technology.
In retrospect those fears were overblown. When Communism fell, we learned that the Soviet economy was far less advanced than many had believed. Still, the effects of the “Sputnik moment” were salutary: America poured resources into science and higher education, helping to lay the foundations for enduring leadership.
Today American leadership is once again being challenged by an authoritarian regime. And in terms of economic might, China is a much more serious rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Some readers were skeptical when I pointed out Monday that China’s economy is, in real terms, already substantially larger than ours. The truth is that GDP at purchasing power parity is a very useful measure, but if it seems too technical, how about just looking at electricity generation, which is strongly correlated with economic development? As the chart at the top of this post shows, China now generates well over twice as much electricity as we do.
Yet, rather than having another Sputnik moment, we are now trapped in a reverse Sputnik moment. Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want.
The most obvious example of Trump’s war on a critical sector, and the most consequential for the next decade, is his vendetta against renewable energy. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolled back Biden’s tax incentives for renewable energy. The administration is currently trying to kill a huge, nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as cancel $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. It appears to have succeeded in killing a huge solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes. It has canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more.
While Trump proclaims “Drill, Baby, Drill”, projected growth in U.S. solar and wind power has been stunted, and perhaps even stalled, by the administration’s hostility:
In his rambling speech at the United Nations, Donald Trump insisted that China isn’t making use of wind power: “They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind.” I don’t know where Trump gets his misinformation — maybe the same sources telling him that Portland is in flames. But here’s the reality:
Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, says that solar power is unreliable: “You have to have power when the sun goes behind a cloud and when the sun sets, which it does almost every night.” So the energy secretary of the most technologically advanced nation on earth is unaware of the energy revolution being propelled by dramatic technological progress in batteries. And the revolution is happening now in the U.S., in places like California. Here’s what electricity supply looked like during an average day in California back in June:
Krugman goes on to discuss America’s long term hostility to science, something Carl Sagan warned about decades ago.
With the MAGA movement ascendant, stupidity is now seen as a virtue.
Krugman concludes the “…race is essentially over. Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up.”
My headline might be a bit of hyperbole, in that I am not blind to the major challenges that some observers tell us China has, but when the history of this era is written, there will be a chapter on the disastrous impacts of Presidents being sold as “CEO’s”, like George W Bush, or Donald Trump, who will “run the country like a business” – when what has really happened is the US was driven into the ditch in the early 2000s with a 6 trillion dollar war on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, and the catastrophic deregulation of the financial industry – and is now, once again, being, perhaps fatally, derailed by prioritizing the shortest of short term and narrowest of narrow fossil fuel industry interests.
Change my mind.
I keep thinking of a line from Looper, a great sci-film:
https://youtu.be/AKIo10C8HME?si=gQTY5ZbemN9m_Zu3
Area on the graph covered by batteries looks more impressive than it measures – 0.83% of power generated in June, 0.74% last month. To get rid of gas – 16% in June, 29% last month – would take a hell of a lot more batteries, and solar. But that’s still not enough. The area marked ‘imports’ is nearly all from gas, not surprisingly, as it’s outside the solar sweet spot. The exporting utilities, if they decarbonise too, won’t want California’s surplus. The states west of the Mississippi might send some early power from their noon overproduction, but the powerlines to handle that would cost billions, and only pay that off for a few hours a day, in summer. California imports heavily every month of the year, but most in December – nearly 5 TWh last year, equal to a quarter of the State’s own output. Wind that month was also well below the summer average. If wind, solar and batteries are overbuilt to cover such low times, much of the extra output will be curtailed in summer, or sold, below cost, to low-value production of eg fertiliser. (I’ve been following a guy called Casey Handmer who reckons he can make solar methane cheaper than fracked gas, but talk is cheap. We’ll see…)
It actually takes very little renewable energy and storage to disrupt fossil fuels, and replace inordinate amounts of FF capacity, especially gas. I’ve read this from both David Roberts and Kingsmill Bond, am trying to locate the exact sources. One article cites the effects of the Hornsdale Power Reserve, S. Australian’s former record-setting, now mundane big battery.
“Location matters: The new science of siting clean energy to push more carbon from the grid:
Where solar and wind is built matters when it comes to displacing dirty energy. Clean energy buyers are starting to pay attention. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/location-matters-the-new-science-of-targeting-clean-energy-to-push-more-carbon-from-the-grid
“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 https://www.volts.wtf/p/rooftop-solar-and-home-batteries?s=r
“DER Altered Load Duration Curve” chart
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc24e1c50-51d1-4f51-a8e2-9602d587d57b_1784x1770.png
The joy of the CAISO graph is from that big yellow blob in the middle that represents displaced emissions (and time-shifted hydro, which is also good).
We’re dealing with an S-curve here: The increase in solar capacity is being matched with more grid storage of longer duration than early-generation Li+ (NMC) batteries. Also, while Economics 101 tells us that for-profit companies have little profit motive to endlessly add solar without storage, they can still make money from adding more and more cheap solar but storing it to re-sell at non-solar times.
The [excellent] 1st Energi Media video is yet another reminder that everything Mango Mussolini does is driven by his emotional illness. In this case, an attempt to dominate by tariffs (and wangle concessions by imposing and then partly rescinding them—a ridiculous idea that will tremendously accelerate the us’s freefall and the global move to China pointed out in the video—is compelled by his and Republicans’ addiction to domination and sadism; largely, in his case, through disruption and chaos.
The In Crowd
(Between 1964 and 2008—from Goldwater’s defeat to the shock and revulsion on the right of having a non-white president—the ongoing fascist takeover was incremental and as far as possible, invisible—the SlowCoup. That was intolerable to der Gropenführer; Cheeto Caligula’s disease made it inpossible.) Now we’re torn between the roadblockheads—the struggle by most neoliberals to remain in denial of both the speed and direness of the climate catastrophe and the depth and direness of the far right’s malignancy—and the growing awareness that like the previous head(case) Nazi, Agolf Twittler brought the coup into the open before power had been fully subverted and secured backstage. (Thus the continual reversals by lower courts not yet taken over.)
What the left has been warning about for…ever: inequality as an exponentially self-perpetuating (perpetrating) force. Those hypocritical self-indulgent assholes who have been so so big on individual accomplishment, (see Jared Diamond, Don’t Think of an Elephant) and so set against centralized control (and made it seem like the only way to centralize was through godforbidcommunism, have now captured so much of the money/power commodity that they (centrally) control the country, making it revolve around their maladaptive desires.
The central idea in Wilhelm Reich’s concept of character is that character—the whole-body manifestation of thwarted desires—is a narrowing of possibilities in the conjoined realm of physiology and psychology, or somatics. At its logical end-point, character is an addiction. Someone compelled by childhood to hunker down and try to outlive difficulty—the burdened-enduring type or strategy in Hakomi Therapy (Body-Centered Psychotherapy, Ron Kurtz)—when confronted by difficulty caused by the hunkering, instead of the rational response of changing strategies, doubles down on hunkering, worsening the difficulties and causing redoubling of hunkering. Test to destruction.
So the domination-addicted, money-power concentrating mbillionaires double down, pushing the us from global domination to irrelevance. Spain’s Philip II path. (From the Jaws of Victory: A history of military incompetence from Crassus to Westmoreland, Charles Fair). The path of post-Gracchi Rome. Climate change-beset Mayan civilization. Aztecs and Incas conquered by a hundred or so Spaniards—and oh yeah, thousands of the American empires’ conquered enemies. (Collapse; and Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond). Certainly a karmic comeuppance, but with quintillions of innocent victims. And do those replacing the us deserve it any more?
I think this article misses the reality. The current US administration doesn’t give a shit if the US maintains economic superiority or not. All they care about is inflating their own bank accounts as fast as they can for as long as they can. Trump and his clown show have no intention in competing with China or any other progressive nation. When Trump is done, the US economy will be in shambles, unless the population rises up quickly and dethrones the King. This is a message from Canada, Get The Job Done.
Growth:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chinas-power-paradox-record-renewables-020715546.html
Key takeaway from your posted article Jim, “….. coal additions do not always equal coal emissions — China’s fleet currently runs at only 50 percent capacity.” In other words, the additional coal capacity is not always deployed. It sits idle a large percentage of the time and only brought on line when needed. This is a good thing. As more renewable energy is brought online it is predicted that China’s coal energy utilization will continue drop.
https://www.spglobal.com/content/dam/spglobal/ci/en/images/general/research-analysis/china-coal-plant-2023-for-social-media.jpg
Old coal plants, anywhere in the world, aren’t anywhere as efficient as new ones, especially where power plant managers skimp on maintenance. On top of that, retrofitted scrubbers and dryers (if they’re put in to meet environmental restrictions) are less efficient than those features integrated into the first design of a plant.