[ExI] China and solar power

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2025 at 12:33 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
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> >…I asked GPT the following question: "Is coal produce electricity cheaper than solar or wind produced power?"  And this is what GPT said:
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> "In short: Generally, no —…  AI
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> But in longer, generally, the question compares two things which are not strictly comparable because they don’t do the same thing.  The biggest difference is the coal plant output can be adjusted as needed.

That's not the case.  Coal plants make baseload power and can't load
follow.  Shutting one down and restarting it is a major task.  One of
the problems is leaks from thermal cycling. Natural gas generation can
be cycled because they were derived from aircraft engines.

Baseload is coal and nuclear, though some recent nuclear plants have
can be modulated to 40 percent.

Batteries are the fastest to respond.
Hydro is almost as fast
Running turbines are fast, startup time is in the 10 min range
Solar and wind are when you can get it.

I never worked in power, but I have read a lot about i.

Keith


 The solar farm gives you power according to how much sun is shining
that day.  The wind farm is even less predictable.
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> To meet the reliability and availability specifications, the solar farm and way more so the wind farm need power storage, which generally isn’t calculated in directly, nor is the risk cost associated with catastrophes such as the Moss Landing fire in January.  We still don’t know the cost of cleaning up that catastrophe, but it won’t be cheap.  The storage capacity Moss Landing once provided now is mostly gone, and no one wants a battery plant nearby, for reasons we saw.
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> When the ballot proposals were put in place to compel PG&E to buy 30% renewables now, 50% by 2030, 100% by 2045, they told us how wind power is so price competitive etc, without ever mentioning the intermittent and unpredictability.  The power company explained that, but since it was voter-facing literature, it had to be written on a fifth grade level, and since it was California voters, fifth graders can’t read.  So it had to be written on a third grade level.
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> Some concepts, such as power distribution, just don’t simplify down very effectively.
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> I already knew the proposition had the simplest-slogan advantage.  Whichever politician has the fewest words and least intellectual content has an advantage.  Victorious examples: I Like Ike.  Or Nixon: Now more than ever.  MAGA worked twice, once against I’m With Her and once against We’re Not Going Back (an odd choice for an incumbent.)  The power proposition had: Renewable Energy for California.  It didn’t say it was cheap energy.  The price of power went from 19 cents to 41 cents on my last bill, and it is still going up.
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