Right direction. Lets hope they can keep moving that direction. China’s energy consumption is still growing, so let’s hope renewables and nuclear can grow fast enough to still decrease coal usage.
They are not moving into that direction voluntarily. They are because Evergrande went bankrupt and because of accidents. (Not mentioned in the article but I wonder if cheap fossil gas imports from Russia also contribute, as China is now importing significantly more of that.)
As these things go though, economic issues tend to hurt people’s livelihoods too. Kinda not what anyone should want.
One would think that a country whose economy is still rooted in a central planning system would be better at controlling overproduction. In fact, historically, planned economies tended to underproduce.
When you do pure central planning it really has seen underproduction historically. However China has a mix between central planning and a capitalist system, which is more like the Western economies during WW2, then the Soviet Union. Those have generally seen some massive production increases.
Also Evergrande is a sympton and not the problem itself. The issue is that China has built significantly more housing then it really needs. That uses a lot of steel and to produce steel you use coal(there is also a process using hydrogen, ususally made from fossil gas).
As for Russia, China lacks the pipelines to buy Russian gas. Currently they only get it from the gas fields in Russias far east. However Europe was supplied from gas fields further west. There are no pipelines between those systems and Russia has been exporting at nearly capacity for some time.
They’re also doing it because the amount of solar China has built is big enough to be on the verge of displacing much of the coal-fired electric generation. The article mentions this in passing as “weak demand” rather than a full description.
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