China leading the way in renewable energy

Maybe part of the reason China is expanding their green energy production are real pollution fears. The big bosses in Beijing are probably not happy about their children growing up in that killer smog.

SS109 wrote: Maybe part of the reason China is expanding their green energy production are real pollution fears. The big bosses in Beijing are probably not happy about their children growing up in that killer smog.

Yeah, they don't want their children taking sick days and reducing factory productivity.

I do have one question regarding the 500 gigawatt figure. Is any/most of that hydroelectric production? We could increase our figures quite a bit if we didn't care about damming up our rivers to protect a few species of fish here and there. I also wonder about the environmental manner in which China has decided to build all of these windmills and PV panels. Not to mention, again, that the cost of manufacturing in China is so much less that a company can build and ship for far less than we can even contemplate building.

One must also consider the proximity to potential markets. The United States is already significantly developed. We made a similar investment into our infrastructure for electricity once upon a time. The potential markets in China, India and other areas that are only now starting to develop a rural infrastructure make the location of the manufacturing plants in China a much more sound investment as they will be developing their infrastructure for some time yet to come. They are not replacing old infrastructure with new, they are putting in place infrastructure for the very first time in many, if not most, instances.

The amount of undeveloped land available for wind/solar farms is also much greater in China. I can't see the peasants there being able to tell their government NIMBY the way the people here, particularly the environmental lobby, has done and continues to do. Sans the environmental movement of the 1970's, we would have a lot more nuclear power plants, fewer coal or natural gas fired ones, and be emitting far fewer GHG's overall.

Now, I agree with most everyone that we need to address the lack of maintenance and the lack of expansion of our national infrastructure, but the reality of the situation is that the money that should have been spent by the federal government addressing these needs went instead to social welfare spending over the last 45 years. Nearly the entirety of our national tax revenue is being spent on social welfare spending currently. We would have to virtually eliminate every function and department of the federal government to have even a hope of balancing our current federal budget as it now stands.

We aren't going to get companies to build manufacturing plants here for a relatively small national market. We would have a fairly difficult time convincing them to build them here in sufficient numbers even if we pledged to replace every coal fired plant with a wind or solar farm. Know why? Because once the demand here was satisfied, a number of the plants would have to be closed down because the companies can't afford to manufacture here and ship all around the world. There would be no export market for the plant to supply. We are no longer a nation which has a surplus of capacity for what needs to be built. We are replacing what we already have when it wears out, not building from scratch, which is actually more time consuming and more costly. We don't have the money to get a new car every year anymore, we are holding onto the one we have until it dies and has to be replaced. We are not in a situation where most people don't own a car and are looking to purchase for the first time either, as is the case in China and other developing countries/economies. The plants will be built closest to the largest markets because that will return the greatest amount of profits. Get used to it, because the paradigm isn't going to change anytime in the near future.