• naturalgasbad@lemmy.caOP
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    10 months ago

    China’s peaking isn’t on a minute-to-minute scale, but on a day-to-day scale. China is worried about two scenarios:

    1. the US deciding to enter a hot war with China

    2. a heat wave or cold snap (like they’ve been getting recently) that forces rolling blackouts

    And has one key consideration for it:

    1. China lacks substantial domestic O&G reserves.

    These are critical geopolitical concerns that China needs to address.

    Plus, Chinese coal plants are literally state-of-the-art. Whereas the US has one ultra-supercritical plant, China has at least a hundred. China has excess construction capacity, so demolishing a 30-yo plant for a new one is entirely practical. We also know that China’s coal power plant capacity factors have been dropping like a rock, so SOMETHING is happening that’s reducing their utilization significantly.

    • faintwhenfree@lemmus.org
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      10 months ago

      I mean i get your argument, but super-critical plants can only serve baseload, they need 48 hours to prime and can generally not operate below 50% capacity, they do yield very high efficiency though.

      But I’m not sure where this discussion is going.