Environment & Energy

...under construction. They have more coal power plants than the next 20 nations combined.

Electricity is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy. A Rankine coal plant has roughly a 33% energy efficiency, dependent on ambient temperatures.

Anyone cheering for electrification in China is cheering for additional driving of the ongoing collapse of the planetary atmosphere. In fact they are cheering for coal.

Electrolytic hydrogen which also gets cheering here in reference to China induces a further thermodyamic penalty, as does charging a battery.

My son spent a summer in China and saw more electrical vehicles than anywhere else. However they are dirty vehicles.

China, according to the Electricity Map has a 12 month carbon intensity for its electricity of 485 grams of CO₂/kWh as of this writing.

This is even worse than that of Germany's 343 grams of CO₂/kWh to speak of another coal dependent hell.

France, with a carbon intensity of 31 grams of CO₂ could conceivably "electrify everything" cleanly. China can't and shouldn't unless they can build more than 1000 nuclear plants and do what France did and eliminate coal based power. They are building nuclear plants faster than anyone on Earth, but still not as fast as they are building coal plants.

In China from first concrete to grid connection a nuclear plant is taking about five years and they recently announced they have infrastructure to build 50 at a time. That still puts them 25 years away from clean electricity by eliminating coal. It is, however not enough and thus, in China, for now, "electrify everything" is premature and a recipe for furthering the climate disaster now clearly underway.

Just because the collapse of the United States has made them the world's remaining super power, does not mean we are required to applaud. Super powers, as we know from our own history, if we look in the mirror, easily can make mistakes that the rest of the world can ill afford.