There are so many strategic advantages to China’s mass solar adoption.
Let’s say there’s a war, it’s going to be much easier to take out a few coal plants or nuclear plants than masses of solar panels spread out geographically.
They have well defined lifetimes and are easily replaceable.
They’re cleaner, plus good for domestic manufacturing.
The West is not united on the issue. The EU got a hard lesson from Russia, that fossil fuel dependence is a massive problem. So you see actually quite large investments into the green transition. This is building on some good progress earlier. Obviously Trump doing what he does scares the EU, which currently imports way too much LNG from the US to easily replace. There is push back from the fossil fuel industry, but the laws in place and general direction are good. It is too slow however.
The US as the other large Western power went in the other direction. They elected Trump and currently work on blackmailing the world using oil. This year alone, they bombed Iran, moved a massive fleet towards Venezuela and used sanctions to destroy Russian oil exports. So the three largest oil producers, who deliver a lot of oil to China and are not some sort of vassal to the US.
A couple bombs can take out a gigawatt+ generation plant. A couple dozen acres of solar panels will need much, much more, with each individual strike having far less impact and being far easier to repair after. On top of that, solar can be widely distributed and embedded in much smaller footprints, into civilian areas, and so on. Solar also has less infrastructure requirements such as access to water where destroying a dam for example can render one or more power plats inoperable.
There are so many strategic advantages to China’s mass solar adoption.
Let’s say there’s a war, it’s going to be much easier to take out a few coal plants or nuclear plants than masses of solar panels spread out geographically.
They have well defined lifetimes and are easily replaceable.
They’re cleaner, plus good for domestic manufacturing.
The west needs to get our asses into gear.
Australia was perfectly positioned to take inspiration from China and run with it.
Unfortunately our mining companies have way too many fingers in our politics.
The West is not united on the issue. The EU got a hard lesson from Russia, that fossil fuel dependence is a massive problem. So you see actually quite large investments into the green transition. This is building on some good progress earlier. Obviously Trump doing what he does scares the EU, which currently imports way too much LNG from the US to easily replace. There is push back from the fossil fuel industry, but the laws in place and general direction are good. It is too slow however.
The US as the other large Western power went in the other direction. They elected Trump and currently work on blackmailing the world using oil. This year alone, they bombed Iran, moved a massive fleet towards Venezuela and used sanctions to destroy Russian oil exports. So the three largest oil producers, who deliver a lot of oil to China and are not some sort of vassal to the US.
Not just solar, they started building new gen4 reactors 20 years ago.
Guess what forward thinking does for the future?
We seem to want to go only backward though.
Quarterly profits is the only goal? Guess we’ll only think 3 months ahead.
But it costs money to do anything, and using money is the realm of the private sector!
Instead of bombers, you’ll have planes filled with paint to dump on the panels =D
The bombs and planes would cost more than the panels, and it could be countered with plastic wrap.
What about windshield wipers
But on the flip side I feel like it would take far less bombing power to render a field of solar panels inoperable.
A couple bombs can take out a gigawatt+ generation plant. A couple dozen acres of solar panels will need much, much more, with each individual strike having far less impact and being far easier to repair after. On top of that, solar can be widely distributed and embedded in much smaller footprints, into civilian areas, and so on. Solar also has less infrastructure requirements such as access to water where destroying a dam for example can render one or more power plats inoperable.