Last year, China generated 834 terawatt-hours of solar power.

Which is more than the G7 countries generated, and more than the US and EU combined. In fact the only country group that generates more solar power than China is the OECD, all 38 countries of it.

Data: @ember-energy.org

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lsbbsg6ohk2j

  • Mihies@programming.dev
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    11 hours ago

    Yep, solar is awesome when you have coal and gas power plants, not so much when you have nuclear ones.

    • FishFace@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Solar and nuclear work just fine together. Nuclear is expensive (and most cost effective if kept running all the time, rather than switched on and off) but it reduces the cost of solar (lower proportion of solar means you don’t need as much storage) and hedges against bad weather.

      • Mihies@programming.dev
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        2 hours ago

        You can’t just switch it off and on. It runs at more or less full power all the time. So tell me, at what power is that taking into consideration that sun doesn’t shine during night + mornings and evenings when days are short or cloudy?

          • Mihies@programming.dev
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            31 minutes ago

            The question is simple. If you have installed solar power of 40% your country peak use, how much nuclear power you need - assuming simplified you have only these two power sources.

          • Mihies@programming.dev
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            6 hours ago

            Yes, of course I’ve meant it in a positive way - a way to replace coal and gas. But solar is not just positive, they are problematic when you couple them with nuclear for the simple reasons that solar is not reliable and you can’t throttle nuclear - they are like big ships, they require a lot of time to steer. Furthermore solar energy low price causes problems for nuclear higher prices. Which wouldn’t be a problem if solar was reliable and continuous (long winter nights much?). But it’s not, but you still need a reliable energy source. And so on. The pro solar panel crowd don’t understand many of these implications and go with simple “idiotic” and downvotes.