A Decade Of Wind, Solar, & Nuclear In China Shows Clear Scalability Winners
2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging
In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years.
My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly.
In March of this year I was giving the WWEA USA+Canada wind energy update as part of WWEA’s regular round-the-world presentation by industry analysts in the different geographies. My report was unsurprising. In 2020’s update, the focus had been on what the impact of COVID-19 would be on wind deployments around the world. My update focused on the much greater focus on the force majeure portions of wind construction contracts, and I expected that Canada and the USA would miss expectations substantially. The story was much the same in other geographies. And that was true for Canada, the USA and most of the rest of the geographies.
But China surprised the world in 2020, deploying not only 72 GW of wind energy, vastly more than expected, but also 48 GW of solar capacity. The wind deployment was a Chinese and global record for a single country, and the solar deployment was over 50% more than the previous year. Meanwhile, exactly zero nuclear reactors were commissioned in 2020.
And so, I return to my analysis of Chinese low-carbon energy deployment, looking at installed capacity and annual added extra generation.
Grid-connections of nameplate capacity of wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020 chart by author
I’ve aggregated this added additional capacity from multiple sources, including the World Nuclear Association, the Global Wind Energy Council, and the International Energy Agency’s photovoltaic material. In three of the 11 years from 2010 to 2020, China attached no nuclear generation to the grid at all. It’s adding more this year, but the year is not complete.
The solar and wind programs had been started in the mid-2000s, and wind energy initially saw much greater deployments. Having paid much more attention to wind energy than solar for the past decade, I was surprised that solar capacity deployments exceeded wind energy in 2017 and 2018, undoubtedly part of why solar was on track to double China’s 2020 target for the technology, while wind energy was only expected to reach 125% of targets. Nuclear was lagging targets substantially, and there was no expectation of achieving them. In 2019, the clear indication was that China would make substantially higher targets for wind and solar, and downgrade their expectations for nuclear, which has been borne out.
But nameplate capacity doesn’t matter as much as actual generation. As stated in the mea culpa, wind energy in China has underperformed. This was assessed in a Letter in the journal Environmental Research by European and North American researchers in 2018.
“Our findings underscore that the larger gap between actual performance and technical potential in China compared to the United States is significantly driven by delays in grid connection (14% of the gap) and curtailment due to constraints in grid management (10% of the gap), two challenges of China’s wind power expansion covered extensively in the literature. However, our findings show that China’s underperformance is also driven by suboptimal turbine model selection (31% of the gap), wind farm siting (23% of the gap), and turbine hub heights (6% of the gap)—factors that have received less attention in the literature and, crucially, are locked-in for the lifetime of wind farms.”
Some of the capacity factor issues are locked in, and some aren’t, but overall wind energy in China’s capacity is well below that of the US fleet still. I’ve adjusted capacity factors for wind energy to be 21% at the beginning of the decade, and up to 26% for 2020 deployments, still well below US experience. Solar, on the other hand, is less susceptible to some of the challenges of that impede wind energy’s generation, and the Chinese experienced median of 20% is used throughout the decade. China’s nuclear fleet has had much better ability to connect to the grid, and as the reactors are new, they aren’t being taken offline for substantial maintenance yet. The average capacity factor for the fleet of 91.1% for the decade is used.
Generation in TWh added each year by wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020
And this tells the tale. Even adjusted for the poor capacity factor’s wind experienced and the above global average capacity factor for nuclear, in no year did the nuclear fleet add more actual generation than wind energy. The story is more mixed in the solar vs nuclear story, but only once in the past five years was more annual generation in TWh added by the nuclear program than by solar. And as a reminder, the Chinese wind and solar deployment programs started well over a decade after the nuclear program which saw its first grid connections in 1994.
What is also interesting to see is that the reversal in wind and solar deployments in China in the past two years. 2019 and 2020 saw double or more than double the actual generation in TWh added by wind than solar. To be clear, some of this is uptick is due to an expected and subsequently announced elimination of federal subsidies for utility-scale solar, commercial solar and onshore wind projects in 2021.
“The new rule, effective from Aug. 1, follows a drastic fall in manufacturing costs for solar and wind devices amid booming renewable capacity in China.”
This appears to have driven Chinese 2020 wind energy deployments to ensure that they would receive the compensation, just as US deployments have seen significant surges and lulls due to changes in the production tax credit. As a result, there is speculation that the announced wind generation capacity is not as fully completed as announced. However, that should not change the expected capacity factors for the coming years, and so I’ve left the 120 TWh projected delivery from the wind farms deployed in 2020 as is.
It’s worth noting that as of today, 7 of the 10 largest wind turbine manufacturers, and 9 of the 10 largest solar component manufacturers are Chinese companies. China remains, as I pointed out a couple of years ago, the only scaled manufacturer of many of the technologies necessary for decarbonization. Further, it’s expanding its market share in those technologies rapidly.
My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.
Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.
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Hyundai Motors is recalling 145,235 EVs and other “electrified” vehicles in the US, citing concerns about a loss of driving power, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Friday.
The NHTSA announced this morning that the recall affects selected IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 6 EVs, as well as certain luxury Genesis models, including the GV60, GV70, and G80 electrified variants, from the 2022-2025 model years, Reuters reported.
It looks like the issue stems from “the integrated charging control units in these vehicles, which may become damaged and fail to charge the 12-volt battery. This malfunction could lead to a complete loss of drive power, posing safety risks for drivers,” the NHTSA stated.
If you’re an owner of one of these Hyundai models dating 2022-2025, stay tuned. Hyundai has not yet provided a timeline as to when affected vehicles will be repaired.
To make that happen, the company’s dealers will inspect and replace the charging unit and its fuse if necessary, NHTSA said. Free of charge, of course.
Importantly, no crashes, injuries, fatalities, or fires due to this issue have been reported in the US, Hyundai reported.
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Tesla announced that ‘Actually Smart Summon,’ its autonomous driving feature that enables moving its vehicles without anyone inside over short distances, is now being launched in Europe and the Middle East.
The automaker’s Full Self-Driving suite of features has been limited in those markets due to regulations and Tesla’s focus on making them work in North America first.
Actually Smart Summon is the vision-only version of Tesla’s “smart summon” feature, which was released years ago on Tesla vehicles with ultrasonic sensors.
When Tesla transitioned away from ultrasonic sensors, Smart Summon was one of the missing features that Tesla had yet to adapt to the vision-only (cameras and neural nets) system.
CEO Elon Musk said that it would be coming in 2022, but it finally came only a few months ago, in 2024.
However, that’s only in North America where Tesla focuses its Full Self-Driving (FSD) development, the feature package that includes Actually Smart Summon, also referred to as ‘ASS’.
Most of Tesla’s other markets, including Europe, don’t have the same capabilities under the Full Self-Driving package. That’s partly due to regulations, but Tesla also focuses on making the features work on North American roads first.
Now, Tesla has announced that its Actually Smart Summon feature is launching in Europe and the Middle East:
The feature can only be used on private roads, like parking lots and driveways. Most people have used it to bring their vehicles parked in a large parking lot to them as they exit a store or restaurant. However, the vehicle moves quite slowly under the feature and the owner needs to keep an eye on it at all time and be ready to cancel the summon as Tesla doesn’t take any responsibility for accidents caused by using Actually Smart Summon., like all other FSD features.
Therefore, most people I know who have the feature, myself included, tried once or try to see or impress some friends who have never seen a car move without anyone inside and then stopped using it.
The feature’s main useful use-case is for people with extremely tight parking spots. It enables them to exit the vehicle before it is in its final parking spot and then move the car in and out remotely.
However, that has been the case for years with the regular Smart Summon, as you generally don’t need the vehicle to handle complex parking lots. You mostly need it to move a few feet forward or backward.
But a recent update has broken this feature for some people. We recently reported on a very unfortunate situation that resulted in a Tesla owner having to get out of his car through his trunk.
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US Automakers are planning to ask Mr. Trump to retain President Biden’s EPA exhaust rules, in the face of signs that Mr. Trump might try to reverse them. If the rules are reversed, it would cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of deaths per year.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of what big auto did the last time a reality TV show came to the White House – signaling that they have perhaps learned their lesson this time ’round.
First, some history.
In the middle of the 20th century, the effects of human activity on the atmosphere became readily apparent. Certain cities – with Los Angeles among the forefront – were choked by smog, and it was soon found out that vehicle pollution was the primary reason for this smog.
Since Los Angeles was one of the most smog-choked cities, California led the way on clean air regulation, creating the California Air Resources Board in 1967 (under then-Governor Ronald Reagan).
The federal government gave California special dispensation to set stricter regulations than the rest of the country, in recognition that it had a unique smog problem in its primary metropolis. California has retained this dispensation, in the form of a “waiver,” since then. And other states can follow California’s rules, but only if they copy all of the rules exactly.
Thus, there have been two separate sets of clean air regulation in this country since then – the federal rules, and then the “CARB states” which follow California’s rules.
In 2012 that finally changed, when President Obama’s EPA negotiated with California to finally harmonize these standards and also implement higher fuel efficiency nationwide. This would have been a huge boon for both industry and consumers, saving money and giving regulatory certainty to the auto industry.
But then, in 2016, the candidate who got the 2nd most votes in the presidential election was headed for the White House. And automakers responded by immediately lobbying to torpedo these standards, even before inauguration.
Now, you might think that asking a profoundly ignorant individual, who ended up staffing the EPA with bought-and-sold science deniers (huh, that would never happen again would it?), to change rules which had already been set through years of negotiation and lobbying was not a great idea. And you’d be right.
Not long after automakers had the dumb idea to ask an idiot to fix something that wasn’t broken, that idiot went and broke things further, fracturing the agreement between California and the federal government and ensuring less regulatory certainty for automakers.
After realizing their blunder (which they could have avoided by, y’know, thinking at all about it beforehand), big auto relented and asked the government to please not implement the rollbacks automakers had asked for. Some companies even forged their own agreement with California.
But it was too late, and we are now back in the era of disparate regulatory regimes – something which John Bozzella, head of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (formerly called Global Automakers), keeps complaining about these days, despite having lobbied for exactly this in the first place.
The US EPA and California are still not fully harmonized, but both released recent new standards which do have somewhat similar targets. If a manufacturer builds towards one set of rules, they’ll probably not be too far off from meeting the other.
So in the end, we did get better emissions regulations and California has continued to push forward with clean air regulations, thus signaling a failure on the part of Mr. Trump to cause the long term harm to Americans that he and his oil industry solicitors so desperately seem to desire.
The most recent EPA standards, finalized in March (after being softened at the auto industry’s request), do not mandate any particular powertrain, but rather require steep emissions cuts – and EVs are the easiest way to achieve lower emissions.
Notably, Tesla lobbied in favor of making this last set of standards stronger, and they also lobbied against ruining the Obama/CA standards in 2016 – being one of very few automakers who were on the correct side of that discussion.
Despite that the President Biden EPA’s rules do not mandate any particular powertrain, Mr. Trump, in his usual ignorance, has said that he will end the nonexistent EV mandate. And now that he has received more votes than his opponent for the first time (after three tries, and despite committing treason in 2021 for which there is a clear legal remedy), it looks like the upcoming EPA might be directed to end these emissions cuts and fuel/health cost savings for Americans.
But in this instance, it sounds like the automakers might actually do the right thing for once, and ask the government not to do any rollbacks, and instead let them continue on with the plans without disruption from a convicted felon who seems determined to cede a US EV manufacturing boom back to China.
Detroit’s Big Three automakers – GM, Ford and Stellantis – are all reportedly trying to figure out how to ensure that these rules stay in place. The mentality is that constantly changing regulations are not beneficial for companies – particularly in the auto realm, where models take on the order of 7 years to plan and execute. Long-term planning is important for the hundreds of billions in manufacturing investment that EVs have attracted in the US during Biden’s EV push.
These attitudes are notable, given that this is not what automakers did in 2016/2017. That time, they compulsively pushed for fewer regulations, and now they are asking for regulations to remain in place.
It’s further notable that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose company lobbied strongly in favor of emissions cuts and makes more use of the federal EV tax credit than any other company, is now allied with the very entity that’s looking to harm EVs. It seems that we have entered opposite world.
So it remains to be seen where we will go from here – on the one hand, doctors, nurses, scientists, environmental groups, many businesses, people who recognize that they have lungs which they would like to continue using, and so on, generally support the strongest regulation possible. Now, automakers have been added to the pile asking for strong regulations.
On the other hand, a former reality TV host – tagged along with by the CEO of the company that has sold more electric cars than any other – seem determined to kill electric cars, despite the harm that would cause to Americans’ pocketbooks and health insurance premiums. And that famously vindictive character may be even more spurred towards this harmful course of action after failing in his efforts the first time.
Who ya got?
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