astonishing blogpost from Shengyu Liu (刘胜与, also known as interestingLSY/intlsy), kernel engineer at DeepSeek. The first part is his personal struggle with the fact that his work is about to render his beloved craft obsolete. The second is…
well. let's just say we agree.
What will drive Chinese power consumption *growth* in the coming 5 years?
According to State Grid ERI:
21.4% computing infrastructure
8.6% EV charging
11% hydrogen electrolysis
Total: 41% "new industries"
The other 59% is traditional industry, households etc.
🧵
South Australia Liberal Party, who set the state’s first target of 100 pct “net” renewables, and then backflipped to nuclear, has changed its mind again https://t.co/nvH5CqNTxu
12 charges against Telegram CEO Pavel Durov include "providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration" and six counts of "complicity" with alleged criminal activity by Telegram users
FR & EN https://t.co/sDvjUiZJvT
CHART OF THE DAY: The annual @EnergyInstitute 'Statistical Review of World Energy' is out.
Among other things, it shows that global coal consumption hit an all-time high in 2023, boosted by China and India.
Does anyone remember the #COP26 slogan of "consign coal to history"?
Anyone interested in the German Greens and their transformation into one of the most extreme pro-war and Western-supremacist parties in Europe should read this article by Jürgen Kurz, one of the historical founders of the party: https://t.co/FnMYObfXtR
Kurz has been living in China for now 20 years and he is married to a woman from Xinjiang (!). The article is a criticism of the Green party's approach to China but from it you can extrapolate and explain the party's general ideology.
First of all, as Kurz explains, the top people making up the party are stunningly inexperienced and incompetent. As he explains in the piece, Annalena Baerbock, the Green Foreign Minister, went to China for the first time in her life (!!!) in 2023, 2 years into her mandate. How do you even become Foreign Minister if you've never travelled to China, probably Germany's most consequential relationship? As such she has zero knowledge of the country, or more precisely, as Kurz writes, her knowledge is "based on reports from a handful of journalists who have searched for stories there that correspond to Western biases on distant China. The problem is that the image we in the West have about China borders on denial of reality!"
Secondly, they are supremacists to their core. Kurz beautifully describes the hypocrisy behind Baerbock's "feminist foreign policy":
"Feminist foreign policy does not rely on posturing ('Germany must take international leadership responsibility'), but on helping where it is appropriate and necessary. It's about making a positive contribution to bring the global community together to collectively address and solve the problems on this planet.
These problems are primarily: The dramatic changes in the global climate and the protection of all habitats, global distribution justice, the fight against causes of migration, and the securing of peaceful coexistence of all people and their cultures.
Feminist foreign policy does not rely on loud power fantasies to enforce supposedly correct behavior and to lecture other countries like a governess. It seeks commonalities and tries to help where it is necessary. It's not about imposing one's ideology, but primarily about improving living conditions for people, especially women and children.
Our party has significantly shaped the political agenda of the past 43 years towards sustainable development in Europe. The Chinese have watched and learned a lot from it and applied it. That was good.
Instead of criticizing China for this, we should look positively at it. Who, if not the Chinese themselves, should implement the transition to a solar economy in China? Condemning China for applying technologies developed by us there is hypocritical [...]
Today, China is the world's leading protagonist of new energies, fighting on all fronts for the transformation of the energy economy and the preservation of the environment, and is even one of the few countries to have included environmental preservation in its constitution. (Article 26: The state shall protect and improve living environments and the ecological environment, and prevent and control pollution and other public hazards. The state shall organize and encourage afforestation and protect forests.)
From a green perspective, a born, reliable partner in the fight against climate change, with whom we can be sure that he will not follow a completely different course after the next election and with whom our economy could cooperatively work on the transformation of global cycles towards sustainable economic practices. It would be more helpful to the global climate to cooperate with China in this transformation, rather than ideologically defining China as an adversary."
That's a key point. You either want to prioritize climate, or supremacy and the Greens systematically prioritize the latter over the former. As Kurz points out, from a climate standpoint it should be applauded that China takes the problem seriously and developed a world-leading green industry. Yet the Greens, and Baerbock first and foremost, criticize it because it challenges German "leadership" and have adopted one of Europe's most confrontational approaches to China, define the country first and foremost as an "adversary"...
Why? Well, Kurz hints at this throughout the piece, this supremacy stems from "a moral sense of superiority": "The moral tone ('we are good') is not only counterproductive, it is also wrong and throws us back into the old Crusadism. I firmly believe that our original ideas as GREENS could do a lot of good if we approached this task with the due respect. Playing the role of a guardian of an imaginary international order and upholding Western principles is anything but a coherent green foreign policy."
There's something very interesting here. The Greens, or at least the current generation of it, are probably Green because they belong to that type of people very common in the West - and particularly in protestant countries like Germany - who are driven by an very strong sense of moral superiority. The way to express this in the current cultural and political system in Germany is to be Green, the most "moral" stand one can take: "we know better and lecture the rest of Germany on how they should behave".
But when translated internationally, this moralism takes the form of supremacy: "the more different from us a culture or a civilization is, the more morally wrong they are, and as such the more we should lecture and seek to transform them."
As such their ideology isn't so much "Green", Green is just a way to express this sense of moral superiority in Germany. When translated internationally it takes an entirely different shape more appropriate to the international stage.
So to summarize we're dealing with extremely parochial folks who really don't know the world beyond Germany or the West, and who represent a section of German Protestant society that is most marked by a deep sense of moral superiority, which makes them moralists' moralists, the modern incarnation of holy crusaders. This explains why when one looks at them as Greens they seem completely incoherent: it's because, fundamentally, they aren't.
This morning Clare Savage, chair of @aergovau announced a Draft 'Default Market Offer', which would lead to electricity prices falling slightly.
Is this because:
A - Renewables are making the power cheaper?
B - Coal/gas prices are falling?
C - Chris Bowen asked her to? 1/
Nuclear shit storm in Norway 😮
Principal of Norwegian University of Science and Technology (@NTNU) resigns after trying to undermine freedom of speech!
In November @RystadEnergy released a report about nuclear energy in Norway. The report concluded that nuclear won’t have any impact in Norway before 2050.
The same day researchers at NTNU @JonasNoeland and Martin Nødland Hjelmland released a peer-reviewed paper with the opposite conclusion.
In response the principal at NTNU, Anne Borg tried to silence both researchers with a public opinion piece criticizing Jonas and Martin.
After journalists got access to text messages between Anne Borg and The Confederation of Norwegian Enterprises (@NHO_no), it has come to light that the principal were forced by industry to throw her own employees under the bus.
Together with @NorskIndustri and @FornybarNorge, NHO paid Rystad Energy to publish the report criticizing nuclear in Norway.
After several independent researchers, organizations, politicians and academics have criticized Anne Borgs obvious unprecedented and unacceptable connections with industry, she has now resigned as principal at NTNU.
Long live scientific freedom of speech, and goodbye to corrupt anti-nuclear activists 👏🏼
Germany’s residential grid operators will be empowered to restrict the flow of power to heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers from 2024 in order to preserve the stability of the grid.
Welcome to your Net Zero future. #CostOfNetZero
👉https://t.co/PNkLkIb092
Really interesting reading this paper by Robin Batterham, former Chief Scientist of Australia, and Chair of Net Zero Australia.
The likes of @simonahac have tried to claim he also thinks renewables are cheap. But Robin is refreshingly frank. 1/
https://t.co/WI2ZkOzs09
Around 8.25 million lightning pulses were detected above the Australian region during the last 7 days. This animation shows how the storms unfolded across the country using data from Weatherzone's Total Lightning Network.
More info: https://t.co/MLbAZHga6l
Grids used to be designed so that no power plant was more than 10% of peak load. If one plant went off-line suddenly, the grid was still strong, since it had a reserve margin (extra plants available) of 20%.
Solar acts like a megaplant that all goes offline at the same time.
@DavidOsmond8@OpenNem Dave when you wrote 'rescaling' are you saying we build solar on top of solar and wind on top of wind? Or is more land needed in your assumption to scale this generation?
@WallStreetSilv@SRSroccoReport No change in copper production is required for the transition to sustainable energy.
Lithium refinement needs to increase dramatically, but lithium ore itself is extremely common throughout Earth.