Juan Cole Informed Comment
Al Jazeera reports that China is attempting to accelerate its already impressive green energy revolution in the face of the disruption of petroleum and natural gas supplies caused by the Netanyahu-Trump war on Iran.
It reports that about half of the country’s taxis are already electric, and Beijing is aiming for 80% of its heavy trucks to be battery electric within five years. (Meeting this goal requires the implementation of newly developed Chinese truck battery technology.) Moreover, China has reduced its petroleum imports by about half during the Hormuz crisis, depending on massive state and refinery reserves instead. Al Jazeera estimates that China may permanently cut its imports by 2 million barrels a day, depending on electrified transport instead.
China was importing 11.5 million barrels a day last year. If it drops to 9.5 million barrels a day in just one year because of a switch to green transportation, that development would be unprecedented in modern world history.
For comparison, Germany now has about 2 million battery-electric vehicles on the road and they probably allow the country to avoid about 30,000 barrels per day of petroleum imports.
Energy analysts had been expecting that 2025 would be the year of Chinese peak oil; that is, it will never again import as much petroleum as it did last year. But this switch is not the sort of gradual fall-off that had been envisioned.
China’s determination to protect itself from the volatility of oil and fossil gas is apparent in the Five Year Plan it just issued through the end of 2030.
Reuters reports that China plans to increase its electricity generation from wind and solar over the next half-decade by 50%. It is aiming for 3.5 terawatts of installed renewable generating capacity by that time, according to Technology.org. Beijing wants 2.8 terawatts of that to be wind and solar.
Against China’s 3.5 TW of renewable electricity by the end of 2030, the US is only expected to have 0.7 terawatts of green electricity by then, which means that China will be increasingly less exposed to energy shocks like the current Iran War, saving money and remaining in business, whereas the US faces cyclical high gasoline and diesel and fossil gas prices, slowing economic growth and harming consumers.
By the end of 2030 China will get more of its electricity from renewables than from coal, continuing a remarkable and rapid transition away from thermal power.
China in its plan also seeks to reduce dependence on fossil gas imports, and so wants to use renewables for heat and air conditioning instead, seeking 150 million tons of coal equivalent in wind and solar for these purposes.
Another place the plan hopes to save on fossil gas imports is peaking capacity. Solar-generated electricity declines in the late afternoon and into the evening, when demand typically spikes. Or sometimes the wind falls off during the day. At the moment, the shortfall is covered by gas peaker plants. But California has been reducing its gas use by depending on megabatteries for peaking or covering drops in solar or wind generation. China plans 300 gigawatts of renewable peaking capacity. This measure is clearly aimed at reducing imports of fossil gas, which fluctuates wildly in price with geopolitical crises. Coal plants typically cannot be used for peaking because it takes too long to ramp them up and take them back offline.
Photo of wind farm, Pingtan Island, Pingtan County, Fuzhou, China, by Xuedi Liu on Unsplash
Chinese technology is getting crazy good. Beijing applies for more patents annually than does the US now. Reuters reports on some high concept projects in the Five Year Plan. Beijing plans enormous offshore floating wind farms in the deep sea (i.e. the turbines won’t be anchored to the ocean floor).
And, remember all those reports about how noisy and annoying it is to live next to a data center? The Chinese plan to build data centers underwater, beneath the offshore wind farms!
California is seeking a mere 25 gigawatts of such deep-water offshore wind energy by 2045, despite the Trump administration’s opposition. Since Washington is enslaved to Big Oil, China will run rings around us on this technology.
China is wisely taking advantage of the Hormuz energy crisis to move rapidly away from fossil fuels, thereby gaining much more energy security. Trump is setting policies in the US that tie us even more tightly to volatile fossil fuels, which are woefully undependable and much more expensive than renewables. Moreover, using coal, fossil gas and petroleum is destroying the plan by provoking rapid global heating.
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