Too lazy to read. Is it one of those device that converts solar power into potential energy of water?
Yeah, looks like that’s how it works. They store up potential energy when the panels work, and then release it as needed. This solves the storage problem associated with solar.
a 1kwh LifePo4 battery costs almost 220$, so batteries are still expensive as heck. water dams or hydrogen production are good ways of storing solar energy
And with batteries you only have a couple thousand charge cycles. With hydro-electric I feel like it’s limitless.
It still needs to be maintained, but it’s still gotta be way more cost effective in the long run.
Agreed. And I can imagine the turbines needs updates as well.
Yup, all sorts of stuff has to be maintained and repaired.
It consists of several projects with the depicted producing 3 GW.
The math is a bit weird: currently they have 3GW for 700 thousand households and 100GW should somehow serve 100 millions. Anyway great news, hopefully it inspires more countries to do similar projects
Not 100% sure how this works, but dam and river usually means environmental consequences.
You know what else means environmental consequences, continuing to burn fossil fuels like no tomorrow the way western countries are doing.
Dams are usually bad too.
Not even remotely comparable.
Impressive. Thanks for sharing this! China has done some technological incredible feats.
China is the main reason I’m not a complete doomer when it comes to transitioning off fossil fuels. They’re showing that it’s possible to do at scale and rapidly.
China seems to be able to easily start and complete megaprojects without much bureaucracy. It is a trait I wish the west would inspire to. Of course there are also traits that are not as appealing and should be avoided.
Regarding fossil fuels, I am beyond surprised how both superpowers are not placing significant funding into fusion. ITER in theory (and almost certainty in practice) has shown that you can generate a 1< Q factor for energy projection.
Imagine a Manhattan project for fusion instead of nuclear weapons. A project to this scale would very likely be able to fully transistion the world into clean, reliable, and cheap energy that doesn’t require batteries, sunlight, or natural terrain to exploit.
The amount of lives you would save from free energy is also incredible! Place a few reactors in Africa and you have a way to desalinate ocean water, as well as provide free energy for food generation.
Actually, China’s been investing into fusion research pretty actively. They recently achieved the longest sustained reaction lasting 403 seconds. If sustainable fusion can be achieved that would definitely be a game changer in terms of energy production.
It looks like China is taking a fairly broad spectrum approach towards its energy transition where they invest in renewables, fission, and active research into novel stuff like fusion and space based energy delivery.
That’s awesome! Space energy delivery is something out of science fiction. I’ll look into it!
this was the project I was thinking of https://www.powermag.com/china-group-announces-successful-test-of-space-based-solar-power/
And their one child policy.
