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Posted by mrtksn 6 hours ago

Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China's Wind and Solar Buildout(e360.yale.edu)
214 points | 142 commentspage 2
MarceliusK 2 hours ago|
On the one hand, the geometry is beautiful and almost serene; on the other, it's a reminder that decarbonization at this scale is still an industrial transformation of landscapes
xerp2914 4 hours ago||
Meanwhile POTUS has his head stuck in the sand [0]:

> “All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”

One of the most factually BS statements ever.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattrandolph/2026/01/12/china-d...

neogodless 33 minutes ago|
And that's despite the breathtaking scale of BS from a single source!
triceratops 1 minute ago||
Enough biomass to power half the country sustainably.
master_crab 4 hours ago||
One of the solar farms is in a tidal flat. Are those solar panels meant to be waterproof? I’d imagine they may not last as long from sea salt exposure too.
ZeroGravitas 2 hours ago|||
China has has Megawatt-scale floating PV at sea too.
vages 4 hours ago||
I would suspect they are floating on pontoons.
Y-bar 3 hours ago||
You can see the pillars they are built on in for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-13/china-s-s...

(direct link to image: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iy93Jvbye2e...)

Solar panels are meant to be water proof, after all they are meant to survive rain storms and melting snow and coastal weather.

otikik 5 hours ago||
Wow, pictures look great, well done Mr Weimin Chu
expedition32 2 hours ago||
If the US ever blocks Chinese ports the lights will be kept on. Although I'm sure that situation will end with a mushroom cloud.
carefulfungi 1 hour ago|
Or massive industrial hacking that destroys enough transportation, farming, and supply chain integration that there is mass starvation when food delivery and production stalls - and it all comes crumbling down.
hotz 2 hours ago||
Depressing to look at.
Steve16384 2 hours ago||
Not as depressing as if it was coal power stations and coalmines blighting the landscape.
MaxHoppersGhost 10 minutes ago||
China is building more coal plants right now than the entire world combined so don’t worry they have those too.
btbuildem 1 hour ago|||
You mean in context of a complete regression in the West, right?
goodpoint 2 hours ago||
No, they are beautiful.
fuzzfactor 3 hours ago||
When you're not trying to act like the "richest" country in the world, the sensibility of asource of energy is a complete no-brainer.

Even though associated costs exist, a free source is the lowest of its kind you can find.

soundworlds 4 hours ago||
Beautiful!
globular-toast 3 hours ago||
> Heidu Mountain Scenic Area

Not so scenic any more... I get it, electricity good, but man are we destroying places just to get this stuff. In the UK I reckon within my lifetime it won't be possible to go to the sea any more. I mean, the sea how it used to be, without wind turbines in it. Fossil fuels gave us too much. If only we could figure out how to want less.

danw1979 3 hours ago||
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.

globular-toast 2 hours ago||
Every generation thinks they're building a safer future for their kids, including the boomers. If you want to talk about safety then you need to take sustainability seriously.
carefulfungi 1 hour ago||
In the US, "Boomers" made the environmental movement mainstream, created the EPA, started cleanup of superfund sites, and passed the clean water and clean air acts. There are waterways where I live that are swimmable for the first time in generations because of the Boomers. It's not an either/or proposition.
jshier 31 minutes ago||
Boomers didn't create the EPA, that was the Greatest and Silent generations. Boomers were no more than 25 in 1970 and hardly in power. Some of them may have been in the activists pushing for change but they didn't actually pass the legislation.
zipy124 3 hours ago|||
Fossil fuels have destroyed far more places than renewable energy's land coverage ever will.
Y-bar 3 hours ago||
Less scenic, sure. But still beautiful.

I would rather they not have to be built in the first place. Yet, this is unfortunately the price we must pay today for not reducing our carbon emissions yesterday.

Had we taken a serious effort to do something in, say the mid nineties when the scientific community reached a large consensus regarding the major contributors of climate change it had been less urgent to do something now thirty years later and we would have had a much longer time for the academies and industry to research and improve performance of non-fossil energy production and do the same for energy using applications.

It's not the renewables which are to blame, because if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way we do then these places will either soon be destroyed, or nobody can appreciate them due to civilisational collapse.

Lucasoato 5 hours ago|
Why aren't we doing it in the rest of the world as well?
estimator7292 9 minutes ago||
Basically everyone is except the USA
ben_w 4 hours ago||
The rest of the world is, in fact, doing it as well.
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