This planet-scale map of the global electricity network is incredible.

The UK is actually world leading in wind electricity generation (especially offshore). So it's not all bad.

Is your building listed or something? In most cases it doesn't require planning permission even in a conservation area, and some councils are actively installing them on council houses.

It's a big town. You might want to specify which of the 33 boroughs this stupid policy exists in. There's no problem with solar where I live.

The rest of the world is, in fact, doing it as well.

Nuclear still have to deal with nuclear waste.

> gigantic waste of space

Good thing China isn’t running out of space

Take too long time and cost. I honestly perplexed by the fethism towards Nuclear Power Plants. Have you seen the delay and bloating cost of Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Vogtle?

Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.

There's two big parts of the earth that are uninhabitable because of nuclear.

Anyway, they are going with nuclear too.

I don't think the characterisation of this as waste of space is correct. There's a growing body of research suggesting that solar panels are compatible with grazing animals and farming, and the wind farms don't really stop usage of the space unless you are planning to go ballooning.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Power-Play-The-Economics-...:

“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”

I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.

And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.

Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.

They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.

> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear

If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.

They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.

This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]

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

> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?

Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.

Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.

If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.

> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?

No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.

If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.

> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?

Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.

Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.

Why can't you do both? Why does it always have to be either or?

> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?

But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.

For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.

PRC Solar is cheaper (LCOE) than nuclear, more distributed, faster to build. Western PRC with good solar is mostly empty/depopulated (2/3 of PRC with 80% of solar/wind potential has like 5% of population, it's empty). Easy to install, lots of transferrable skills from general construction (vs nuclear workforce). Real estate crack down = lots of lower skilled blue collar installing solar as jobs program. Serendipitous synergy. PRC installed renewable capacity exceeds energy required to manufacture same equipment on GW basis, functionally makes production of entire sector carbon neutral/sink, as in will displace more fossil than used in production and sink after. Obviously manufacture works off grid mix, including coal, but broad point is every panel going to save more emissions vs embodied carbon payback through life cycle. There's also plans for recycling / recover materials for circular economy.

> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these

Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.

Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.

These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.

Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.

I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.

China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.

Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.

Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.

At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.

If it was 2.5-3x cheaper, sure. But alas.

Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.

The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.

Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.

That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind is the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the next part.

In 2025, > 90% of new energy capacity built in the US is from renewable [0]. So the US isn't building that much solar not because they're not building solar, but that the US has been generating and consuming so much energy per capita that there isn't that much incentive to increase energy capacity dramatically.

[0]: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/us-new-win...

> That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining for the minerals required to build these, nor the land use concerns.

This is Big Oil propaganda. The impact from this is massively less than the horrific damage caused by every part of the fossil fuel industry.

I recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben. There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs. This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year. The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.

Its crazy that in 1999 "home solar" was a fancy, new millennium idea, and now we're still barely any closer.

Honestly, I think building regulations should mandate solar energy for homes.

Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".

Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.

Yes let us wait for an optimal aesthetic solution for another 50 years while we choke on our own fumes. Plenty of time to rearrange the deck chairs.

Sure, everything has downsides. Even breathing. But none of the alternatives have downsides that are as big as taking carbon from the soil and pumping it in an already stressed ecosystem.

No it doesn't make sense. Every photon that hits the Earth is eventually either absorbed as heat, reflected back into space or both (eg. partially absorbed and partially re-emitted as lower energy photons.) There is no net global increase in heat from a wind turbine or solar panel. (There might be slight local shifts.)

The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.

[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/

I would suspect they are floating on pontoons.

My local beaches on the Yorkshire coast have some of the biggest wind farms in the world.

We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.

Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.