Worry not, you can't change the US but you can leave for a developed country.

That's simply not true. People are compensated generously for land that is seized. I have friends that have had it happen, and you get a lot more money than if you were to sell the property - so it's a bit like winning the lottery. The amount of room for appeal is dictated by the nature of the seizure and the government "level". (ie if it's a national interest project you have little recourse, but if it's the city government then it's likely different)

They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.

> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear

If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.

They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.

> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these

Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.

Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.

These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.

Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.

I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.

I don't think the characterisation of this as waste of space is correct. There's a growing body of research suggesting that solar panels are compatible with grazing animals and farming, and the wind farms don't really stop usage of the space unless you are planning to go ballooning.

> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?

Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.

Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.

If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.

> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?

No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.

If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.

> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?

Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.

Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Power-Play-The-Economics-...:

“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”

I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.

And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.

Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.

Take too long time and cost. I honestly perplexed by the fethism towards Nuclear Power Plants. Have you seen the delay and bloating cost of Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Vogtle?

Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.

PRC Solar is cheaper (LCOE) than nuclear, more distributed, faster to build. Western PRC with good solar is mostly empty/depopulated (2/3 of PRC with 80% of solar/wind potential has like 5% of population, it's empty). Easy to install, lots of transferrable skills from general construction (vs nuclear workforce). Real estate crack down = lots of lower skilled blue collar installing solar as jobs program. Serendipitous synergy. PRC installed renewable capacity exceeds energy required to manufacture same equipment on GW basis, functionally makes production of entire sector carbon neutral/sink, as in will displace more fossil than used in production and sink after. Obviously manufacture works off grid mix, including coal, but broad point is every panel going to save more emissions vs embodied carbon payback through life cycle. There's also plans for recycling / recover materials for circular economy.

This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?

But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.

For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.

If it was 2.5-3x cheaper, sure. But alas.

Nuclear still have to deal with nuclear waste.

> gigantic waste of space

Good thing China isn’t running out of space

The problem is that it is extremely expensive and takes a very long time to build.

The supply chain for nuclear power, including fuel from mining to waste storage, is not tiny either.

Only if you have a fetish for wasting money.

There's two big parts of the earth that are uninhabitable because of nuclear.

Anyway, they are going with nuclear too.

Why can't you do both? Why does it always have to be either or?

I mean if there's one thing China isn't short of, it is _space_. Monaco, say, might struggle to do this, but China is fine.

How renewable is uranium?

China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.

Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.

Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.

At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.

Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".

Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.

Bring back those big beautiful chimeys, burning their beautiful coal and blanketing us in the warm glorious embrace of soot and fly ash.

In this particular case I believe the mountain is largely karst (limestone) and the panels substantially reduced erosion -- particularly of soil -- leading to an increase in fauna that thrive in the shade.

As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.

Still much better and lower impact than whatever the fuck we'd been doing for the past 200 years

Yes let us wait for an optimal aesthetic solution for another 50 years while we choke on our own fumes. Plenty of time to rearrange the deck chairs.

By showing only your provided data it seems. But when looking at the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources it looks totally different!

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=line&facet=n...

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.

Fossil fuels have destroyed far more places than renewable energy's land coverage ever will.

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.

I'm sure there will still be places where people with your particular phobia will be able to go to the beach and not see a scary wind turbine.

> 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

I didn't know they were so big that you can't fit in the sea anymore. /s