I wonder if this is more of a cultural thing, meaning Western cultures being more aligned to short-term gains instead of long-term gains. I mean, look at the Dujiangyan irrigation system that was build 2500 years ago and is still maintained until today. This isn't something the Western world would even consider.

So in this case the pair is something like oversupply/abundance. Same thing, but one word for when it favours the speaker and one when it doesn't. I think he just means the Chinese are willing to build whatever if it makes commercial sense.

It very much was overcapacity as a way to keep the construction and manufacturing employed even when most profitable opportunities have been realized. Of course, the long cost of that is involution and lack of nicer jobs as capital is malinvested into diminishing returns. The ironic thing is that idea of overcapacity itself is acknowledged by the CCP in their calls to end price wars and involution

I do think there’s is a very interesting dynamic in this meta argument; over the past 5 years or so, the “debunkers” have taken issue with “whistleblowers” arguments towards first zero covid, then local government debt, and now overcapacity and lack of consumer demand and “debunked” these as all being not an issue, only for the central government to turn around and end Zero Covid, rein in LGFV lending, and now the current crackdown on “disorderly competition” and mass dispersal of consumption vouchers. English Pro-China commentators don't appear to be well aligned with the actual views in China!

That reason is that Texas wants to avoid federal regulation [1] - regulation that would have prevented the large ass blackout a few years ago in the winter. But hey, 702 deaths [2], a small price to pay for freedom of regulations!

> Everyone seems to know that this is both costly and necessary, but not much seems to be happening. Maybe these things simply take time?

They take money and political willpower. Both are in short supply - electricity rates here in Europe are already high (and rates in the US very low), so utilities try to avoid pissing off consumers even more, and political willpower for billions of dollars of investment isn't there either as thanks to decades of austerity and trickle-down ideology there is no tax base to pay for it any more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

And we need capable governments and EU institutions to fix that instead of doing stupid stuff like organizing conferences on quantum computing.

On one hand, Spain and Portugal recently suffered a complete blackout. On the other hand, instead of cascading the blackout France shrugged it off.

The last time there was a country-wide blackout in France was back in the seventies. I'm not saying our grid infrastructure is perfect, but here we're not worried about losing electricity for an entire week whenever there's a winter storm.

For all the complaints and kudos, in general the major events seem similar, at least in number.

Fossil fuel barons and vested interests have sabotaged the energy transition at every opportunity possible. They've spent billions on it, just look at today's UN conference on plastic waste falling apart.

And then there is the NIMBYs who are seemingly allergic to electricity pylons. These folks don't deserve one tenth of the attention that they receive. Treating housing as an investment/retirement fund was a mistake.

Hopefully this grows into a wake up call, I'm looking forward to watching the terminal decline of the oil industry in the 2030s.

We all suffer the results.

The problem with supplying power back to the grid with solar is that it's utterly random in terms of supply and output. The only thing you can count on is that the frequency is rock solid. In aggregate it's (mostly) fine but the system operator still has to build out stuff behind the scenes and also manage the cacophony that this chaotic mess creates.

If every rooftop PV is putting out more than an area needs during the day the wholesale price of power can swing negative. This is how virtual power plants make their money. It's almost impossible to disconnect all those PV panels automatically. Plus you still need a grid forming base load generator on the grid because all those PV panels are grid following. Plus that grid forming generator needs to have enough a big enough inertial mass to keep frequency consistent during transient supply and load spikes. It's a nightmare for systems operators.

If you want to not pay the utility disconnect from the grid and do your own storage and load management. It's going to cost a lot more than a monthly utility bill for 0KWh. If you want to use the grid as a backup during long stretches of overcast or winter then you have to pay the bill.

That being said, monopolies on poles and wires are abhorrent. Even regulated you're putting a drag on the economy just to enrich a middleman. Generation? Go ahead and give it to the market. Retail? Give that to the market. Transmission lines? Arbitrage is A-OK in my book. But government should own the poles and wires of the consumer distribution network where there's a monopoly.

I find it endlessly fascinating that the US tech industry keeps developing new ways to consume absurd amounts of energy (even within the context of a government that still nominally has an Energy Star initiative) but still somehow thinks that power generation is someone else's problem and barely even takes a stake in it.

Google did some stuff a while back, locating data centres with power generation in mind, but do any of the main AI providers (putting aside xAI, which has its blurred-edge connection to Tesla) actually have holdings in power generation?