China is running circles around the rest of the world in the push for electrification. Sure, it's not a free market, but their government policies are making it an economic powerhouse. The world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up / if the rest of the world doesn't keep up.
The US is installing roughly 3 times as much solar at the utility level, each quarter[1]. We aren't building quite as many of these megafarms as China, but the US's solar numbers are actually pretty dramatic[2].
(Or by another metric: China has about twice as much solar production capacity as the US, but a much smaller fraction per-capita[3].)
The point wasn't that the US is winning in terms of net solar capacity, but that the US's own growth is independently admirable. China has and will continue to win in terms of absolute capacity, in a large part because they're still urbanizing, industrializing, and increasing their overall demand for power.
(By contrast, US electricity use has been almost stagnant for 2 decades[1]. This informs the country's relationship with newer generation techniques.)
I'm not sure what the value of a per-capita measure is, or why it's worth making a distinction at "utility" (I'm assuming this means consumer) level.
Wouldn't the most relevant measure, at least as far as emissions go, be the ratio of energy coming from renewables / solar vs. total energy consumption? Or something similar?
Yeah there are lots of ways to normalize that might be better, but per capita isn’t uninteresting per se:
US uses roughly 2.5-3x the energy per capita compared to china fwiw [1]. The energy use per capita can be influenced by all sorts of things, including climate - for instance, SGP will always be in the top few spots on this sort of list due to the space conditioning needs. Could also be due to lots of heavy industry. Could also be due to lots of inefficient homes or high consumer demand. So it can also be interesting to look at energy use per person plotted against GDP per capita, where as expected higher energy use per capita typically also means higher GDP per capita [2]. US has significantly higher GDP per capita.
Anyways, at the end of the day, in this kind of head-to-head energy technology race, the only thing I care about really at the end of the day is decarbonization. The US has been falling each year (not fast enough though, and much of it does not actually come from renewable adoption but instead other changes like natural gas replacing coal over the last decade and changes in mfg capacity etc) while China is still rapidly increasing. Both countries need to be doing more, way more (well really the whole world).
Quite right. This mistake also seems to occur when comparing California and Texas. Texas has a ton of renewable sources, but its extremely energy intensive economy consumes disproportionately more. So it seems to make more sense to normalize by load than by person.
> world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up
It can’t. Besides demography, Xi has wiped out his political competition. The history of what comes after a long-serving dictator who purged his generation’s political braintrust is unidirectional.
> USSR didn't terminally stagnate until 20, 25 years after Stalin died, though. They still looked pretty capable under Kruschev
True, and Kruschev is 20 years Stalin’s junior. I’m inclined to regard him as a fluke; the wheels of power replaced him with the far-less competent Brezhnev after ten years, at which point the Soviets’ fate was sealed.
It’s an open question: if the ISSR could have both beaten the U.S. and remained intact following Stalin’s death. I don’t think they could have. Insisting on not just parity, but supremacy, may have doomed them.
The ability for Beijing is Taiwan. They really shouldn’t obsess over it. But Xi has done so, and likely can’t retreat. Which means his successor is similarly damned, and with him, his nation.
Biden's chips sanctions are also hurting them. They only just figured out how to make 7nm chips. They'll struggle to assemble the compute to keep up in AI. Now, if only we didn't insist on publishing all our trade secrets in the geopolitically naive pursuit of open source, which spits on the reality of the security competition we are currently engaged in, we'd be even more ahead.
Trump is anti green energy. What good is a damn dictator if they can’t do infrastructure and energy well, atleast modi is killing that part of his mandate.
And if you have a "free market" the big utility companies are going to eat each other over time until you end up with de-facto regional monopolies which are then systematically run into the ground, extracting all inherent value, until it's no longer functional and has to be taken over by the government to ensure people can still take hot showers and use their computers. You can't make this shit up.
