China Fossil Fuel Energy Expansion : Huge!

Eco nutjobs will be quick to say that china is moving ahead of us in "clean energy" and it's true, or kind of true. They are building a lot of wind and solar items, but they are not for themselves to use, they are exporting them to idiots over here.

The Chinese use very little clean energy as it is not a good alternative to fossil fuels, like coal and oil as this article points out. But the eco's scream we have to do more to stay in the game or the rest of the world will pass us by. Good.


China's Soaring "Clean" Energy Sector
Source: Steven F. Hayward, "Energy Fact of the Week: China's Soaring 'Clean' Energy Sector?" Enterprise Blog, July 27, 2011.

Much is being made of China's world-leading investment in "clean, green" energy, especially wind and solar power, though much of this is being done to create another export industry to the nations obsessed with climate change, says Steven Hayward, the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

When measured in percentage terms, China's growth in renewable energy from 2000 through 2010 certainly sounds impressive -- up 1,545 percent! But when measured in terms of absolute energy output the numbers game being played here becomes apparent.

When viewed in terms of additional total energy output by source, measured in the common unit of million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE), we see that energy from nonhydro renewable sources (mainly wind and solar) grew by only 11.4 MTOE from 2000 to 2010, while new energy supply from coal grew 976.4 MTOE.

That's 85 times as much new energy that came from coal than from nonhydro renewables.
New hydro power did much better than wind and solar power (up 112.8 MTOE), but much of that increase came from the massive Three Gorges dam that the global environmental community deplores. But in the absence of Three Gorges, China might well have built an additional 50 to 100 coal-fired plants.