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China Earth Power Science

China Cancels Over 100 Coal-Fired Power Plants (reuters.com) 278

In an effort to improve air quality, the Chinese government has canceled over 100 coal-fired power plants in 11 provinces -- totaling a combined installed capacity of more than 100 gigawatts. Reuters reports: In a document issued on Jan. 14, financial media group Caixin reported, the National Energy Administration (NEA) suspended the coal projects, some of which were already under construction. The projects worth some 430 billion yuan ($62 billion) were to have been spread across provinces and autonomous regions including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi and other northwestern areas. Putting the power projects on hold is a major step towards the government's effort to produce power from renewable sources such as solar and wind, and wean the country off coal, which accounts for the majority of the nation's power supply. To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie. "This shows the government is keeping its promise in curbing supplies of coal power," Yu said. Some of the projects will still go ahead, but not until 2025 and will likely replace outdated technology, he said.
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China Cancels Over 100 Coal-Fired Power Plants

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  • Pleasant surprise (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, 2017 @05:19AM (#53694975)

    I never believed China would be up to this. Great!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's nice to see a positive comment on Slashdot. For a change.

    • I agree, props where props is due. Go China.
    • by Maritz ( 1829006 )
      China actually have fairly intelligent leadership. They're still laughing their asses off at how Brexit reinforces their governance model.
      • I think their pretty happy with the US's issues with TPP too. Personally, I have some huge issues with TPP of course...but it is a policy to restrict China trade-wise and even rumors of the US abandoning it has allowed China to do various maneuvering.
        • I think their pretty happy with the US's issues with TPP too. Personally, I have some huge issues with TPP of course...but it is a policy to restrict China trade-wise and even rumors of the US abandoning it has allowed China to do various maneuvering.

          And if someone gets a little too frisky with China, and pulls some really dumb move, China owns something like a third of the total foreign held US debt. (don't hold me to that exact amount, suffice to say it is a Yuge amount)

          Although China needs the US as badly as the US needs China, if we try to bluster our way into something stupid, just calling the debt will make for a rather unpleasant time as the world economy topples.

          • by fnj ( 64210 )

            And if someone gets a little too frisky with China, and pulls some really dumb move, China owns something like a third of the total foreign held US debt.

            And what the fuck are you afraid they are going to do? Threaten not to collect their repayment? Stamp their feet? Think, man. Debt is furnishing cash money in exchange for a paper promise. We've ALREADY been paid; they are left hoping we don't go tits up and they lose all their investment.

            Now, if you wanted to observe that we have also sold off all our real

          • US debt holders (Score:5, Informative)

            by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Thursday January 19, 2017 @09:29AM (#53695905)

            China owns something like a third of the total foreign held US debt

            The amount of US debt China owns [cnn.com] is less than 10% of the total amount outstanding. Currently around $1.3 Trillion which is a big number but only a single digit percentage of the total debt. Most of the US debt is actually held by Americans. Of the $12.9 trillion chunk of debt owned by Americans, $5.3 trillion is held by government trust funds such as Social Security, $5.1 trillion is held by individuals, pension funds and state and local governments and the remaining $2.5 trillion is held by the Federal Reserve. Basically most of the debt is IOUs to the American people.

            Interestingly Japan owns almost as much US debt as China does at $1.1 Trillion. But Japan isn't so scary so people gloss over that fact.

            Although China needs the US as badly as the US needs China, if we try to bluster our way into something stupid, just calling the debt will make for a rather unpleasant time as the world economy topples.

            China has no ability whatsoever to "call" the US debt. Treasury bonds don't work like that. China bought those treasuries to keep their currency exchange rate under control. Furthermore even if China wanted to get rid of their US denominated debt, they have absolutely no one else they can sell it to. There simply are no buyers for that much US debt at anywhere close to face value. If they hold a fire sale they absolutely screw their own economy in the process.

        • I think their pretty happy

          Well, and what about MY pretty happ? That's what I want to know.

          Or...perhaps you can't spell "they're"? Never mind....

    • by dbIII ( 701233 )

      I never believed China would be up to this. Great!

      They are also into recycling.
      This announcement was made before. That way they can get double the credit for each single cancellation.

      That sort of political trick is used just about everywhere though.

    • I think there's more at work here than simply China wanting to mitigate climate change. A long with signalling that Beijing intends to champion free trade, it's my view that China is basically saying "America is about to abrogate its role as a world leader, so we're going to step into the breach." I'm not criticizing China's stances on global warming and international trade, quite the opposite in fact, but I'm not too sure I like the idea of the autocrats in Beijing replacing Washington DC as the focal poin

  • First world skeptics ready with hard data to prove how miniscule this effort is compared to what developing countries need to do.
  • by Eunuchswear ( 210685 ) on Thursday January 19, 2017 @05:46AM (#53695027) Journal

    To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie.

    France has nowhere near 130 GW of installed renewable power generation.

    Currently we're running near peak demand at 92 GW due to the horrible cold, we've got about 55 GW of nukes running flat out (5 reactors are off line for maintenance) and about 15 GW of fossils, 13 GW of hydro, 2.6 GW of solar and 2.6 GW of wind.

    How many of the other figures in this article are bullshit?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020, equal to France's total renewable power generation capacity, said Frank Yu, principal consultant at Wood Mackenzie.

      France has nowhere near 130 GW of installed renewable power generation.

      Currently we're running near peak demand at 92 GW due to the horrible cold, we've got about 55 GW of nukes running flat out (5 reactors are off line for maintenance) and about 15 GW of fossils, 13 GW of hydro, 2.6 GW of solar and 2.6 GW of wind.

      How many of the other figures in this article are bullshit?

      Indeed. Total generation capacity is 110GW. http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
      You could maybe argue nuclear is renewable, making renewables 90GW, but 130 is an outright lie.

  • While some my scoff and call this a worthless effort, I disagree! Could they do more? Of course... but so could everyone else! Changing energy generation for a large country is a monumental undertaking and you will always have the greedy who would rather stab their own child in the eye than lose a single dollar but this shows a large counter-investment is going into renewable power sources. It's depressing that there is so much resistance to this change but it's slow, steady and unstoppable. Even the i

    • I see it this way; the first step on a difficult path. Now that they've started, future reduction steps will be far easier since it's now "implemented policy". And I think those here in the USA that oppose this would feel far different if forced to live through the pollution levels in Beijing.
  • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer@noSPAm.earthlink.net> on Thursday January 19, 2017 @06:05AM (#53695069)

    Interesting that the article makes no mention of China's plans to build more nuclear power plants.
    Found this with a quick Google search:
    http://dailycaller.com/2016/09... [dailycaller.com]

    China intends to bring 58 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity into operation by 2020, up from the current capacity of roughly 27 gigawatts, according to World Nuclear News. China plans to follow this by getting about 10 percent of its electricity from 150 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030, according to the World Nuclear Association.

    Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?

    There is a bias in all news. The bias is in not only what they choose to report but what they choose to leave out. I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve, that way at least I know what they likely chose to report and leave out.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday January 19, 2017 @07:35AM (#53695333) Homepage Journal

      Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?

      They didn't mention it because it's not true and the parts that are true are misleading. The World Nuclear Association is basically the propaganda arm of the nuclear industry, so you wouldn't really expect anything else.

      China had big plans for nuclear. Post Fukushima, it has massively scaled them back. They were talking about 240GW at one point, around 15% of their projected energy use. Yes, 15% was the highest goal, not exactly massive. Anyway, it's all been abandoned and reduced now, with approvals frozen and the reality of over-budget over-time current builds setting in.

      Any way you look at it, China is moving away from both coal and nuclear towards renewables. Beyond the current short term plans for nuclear it looks like it will decline as a percentage of total energy generated.

      I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve

      Like people who take the World Nuclear Association's word for it... I appreciate what you are trying to do, but you are doing it wrong.

    • "There is a bias in all news. "

      There is even more of a bias in what gets posted by a certain editor.

      China has an industrial economy and high population density, so reducing carbon by moving the baseload from coal to nuclear is an obvious path. They are also installing what solar and wind they can manage given the nature of their economy and, since these sources are factory-built with low upfront cost, the solar and wind are what we are seeing go online first. That is the source of all those breathless stori

      • by dbIII ( 701233 )

        When the construction dust clears, we will see a nuclear China with about 20% renewables.

        The peaks are a lot higher than base load.
        You don't use nukes for peak capacity. If you have nukes you use them every second you can.
        Based on those two bits of information that you should already have known but somehow failed to consider, how does that estimate look now?
        There no point dumbing things down to a Star Trek view of energy since we do not have perfect batteries, the problem has to be considered in terms of m

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        When the construction dust clears, we will see a nuclear China with about 20% renewables.

        Um... You do realize that China's plan before Fukushima was to reach about 15% nuclear, and those plans have been massively scaled back from 240GW to about 80GW maximum since 2011? All new approvals have been on hold since 2014.

        Nuclear in China will be about 5% of total capacity by 2050, assuming it doesn't get scaled back even more.

        • Wrong again. China has big plans for nuclear, including development of full-burnup technology in parallel with building current-generation plants. The primary impetus is their massive air pollution problem.
          http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... [world-nuclear.org]
          The only effect that Fukushima had on the Chinese reactor program was a round of system-wide special safety checks.

    • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

      Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?

      Because no one wants to read about nuclear power plants being built anymore.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?

      There is a bias in all news.

      This is true, but a story not being about what you want to be about is not necessarily bias.

    • by Maritz ( 1829006 )
      Nuclear is better than coal, so I have no idea what point you're trying to make. Replacing coal with nuclear is something we need to be doing. Yester-fucking-day. Who gives a fuck if they're building more nuclear plants? That's a good thing.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Trump will build the 100 plants in the US.

    • by dbIII ( 701233 )
      Yes just like Reagan, Bush and Bush did - oh wait, all words no action on nukes.
      • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

        oh wait, all words no action on nukes

        Because nuclear power is far too costly and takes far too long to construct. Even assuming there is never another Chernobyl or Fukishima, nuclear power cannot be justified based on cost alone.

  • Now that Chinese companies have the lead in Solar panel manufacturing it makes sense for the Chinese to support their home industry rather than building coal plants and importing turbines from GE

  • by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Thursday January 19, 2017 @11:10AM (#53696505)

    It's winter! Why is China covered with smog in winter and not summer? Warm and fuzzy environmental types would like to blame Big Business and Government, but is there another explanation?

    The primary reason is that high sulfur coal is used to heat homes in winter. "Homes and small businesses that burn coal in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei contribute up to half of the air pollution in the region every winter, said Zhao Yingmin, chief engineer at the Ministry of Environmental Protection." http://english.caixin.com/2016... [caixin.com] - but note that burning coal is generally outlawed in cities. The bulk of home consumption is in rural areas, and in the North where it is cold.

    "In rural areas coal is still permitted to be used by Chinese households, commonly burned raw in unvented stoves. This fills houses with high levels of toxic metals leading to bad Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). In addition, people eat food cooked over coal fires which contains toxic substances." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Linfen, a city in northern China's Shanxi province has suffered greatly from unbreathable air. Citizens were told by the local environmental minister that "70 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions comes from citizens' coal use." There is skepticism, yet it is clear that industrial pollution is not entirely responsible. http://www.sixthtone.com/news/... [sixthtone.com]

    The seasonal differences in air pollution cannot be explained by the rather constant industrial use of coal. Large scale power plants are able to mitigate the offensive emissions somewhat. The difference that we see right now is due to millions of individual homes producing the worst kind of pollution.

  • Coal will still be there as expected, much to the chagrin of environmental activists.

    • still wondering about the over 70+ coal plants they're building in foreign countries, as part of infrastructure for their outsourcing of manufacturing. if they're cancelling plants at home to outsource pollution that would be funny

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