China Cools on Solar PV and Wind

It has been pointed out to me that China doesn't have many hippies. That's a shame. (I like hippies). The argument goes that, as there are a lack of hippies in this centrally planned bureaucratic dictatorship then their rapid adoption of wind and solar must be solely due to good sound green economic reasons.

Sadly there now appear to be some flaws with this argument.

True, last year the amount of deployed WTG's went up by a stonking 43%. Solar PV deployment actually tripled.

Impressive Eh?

Unfortuantely the Chinese prime minister has decided to ruin the illusion. In a recent, and utterly boring speech he sidelined future wind and solar deployment.

You can read ( The whole speech here ). Just make sure you remember to keep breathing.

Alternatively you can read ( Synopsis here )

It appears that while the installation of WTGs and Solar PV has been truly stupendous, the end result is that the average output of both technologies has fallen off a cliff.

The Chinese do not like failure. It looks bad. In future, the Chinese prime minister announced, progress in renewables will be focussed on hydro. Nuclear and coal will be given a higher priority.

Sadly this was bound to happen. The hopelessly optimistic ideal that you can actually just keep piling on marginal power sources like wind or solar PV, and it will somehow someway, come good, was doomed to failure.

If this is true for China, it is also true for the UK.

Maybe there is a lesson to learn here?