Comment on AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over

• wewbull@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Yes, but do you think that rate is good enough given they are still growing coal at a massive rate?

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  • skisnow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yes. As others in this thread have explained, they’re approaching peak coal and that line is not one that you can extrapolate upwards as a straight line into the future.

    I also think it’s not reasonable to compare a developing/emerging economy with hugely increasing total energy requirements, with ones that already got their polluting growth phase out of the way in the 19th-20th centuries, especially when a very significant part of that coal is burned in the service of making consumer products for the latter. It’d be much more reasonable to compare them to India, which oh look, they are doing much better than in both current percentage and growth rate. Whilst it’s true that Africa is doing better in those graphs, they’re also not having nearly as much success in production or growth terms.

    So overall, yeah it could be better on paper, but it’s very much treating perfect as the enemy of good and preaching at a country who built as much TWh solar&wind capacity just in the last 12 months of your graph alone, as the USA has over its entire lifetime.

    (I was about to draw a few more conclusions from those graphs but noticed they’ve left out a bunch of other energy sources for no obvious reason, possibly mischief, so I can’t compare - the graphs imply that these regions are replacing coal with solar&wind, but without the data for total consumption including gas, nuclear, hydro etc we don’t actually know what the true situation is.)

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