Less outrage, more shades of Diem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngo_Dinh_Diem , who persecuted Buddhists.

Zelenskyy’s approval rating, likewise, is starting to go down the tubes.

https://english.nv.ua/nation/ukrainian-president-s-rating-dropped-to-54-razumkov-center-poll-50430342.html

Iirc my math was for 3x overbuilding on solar and using massive battery banks, although the 4 cents per kwh figure assumes 1.5x overbuilding and enough batteries to capture all of a summer day’s generation.

Fission and solar are actually enemies because the extreme intermittency of solar overloads the grid in the summer, and provides no energy at night. Coal and natgas have fast generation spoolup, whereas nuclear takes too long, hence solar forces nuclear off the grid.

Ultimately, solar is here. At present prices, in China, at least, panels with battery can compete with natgas and coal for total generation.

With further reduction in battery prices (40 USD is the marginal cost of batteries), and multi-junction carbon or carbon silicon, we probably can get solar + batt to completely replace all existing fossil fuels, as well as limit fission and fusion to baseload or strategically crucial power supplies.

Sounds like they got kicked out and decided to write a kvetch column. Beijing seems more interested in using social media to present a view to the world, instead of a hostile Western press.

Solar + batt in China is currently cheaper than coal and natgas.

Solar is a 100% mature technology that promises to provide further cost savings over existing technologies, and has reasonable odds of reaching the 1 cent per kWh point, where solar is competitive with fusion.

Fission can’t scale to that point; the main point of fission is that it can produce reactors for warships and submarines, as well as uranium for fission, boosted fission, and thermonuclear weapons.

Nukes generate waste, have small meltdown odds (thus medium or larger meltdown odds the more you deploy them), and also the technology chain can be modified for uranium enrichment.

Solar and wind are also popular because their generation can be decentralized, but this is less of a concern for MLs who favor planning.

Hey ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆, thanks for bringing up organic solar cells.

I’m 100% for a total solar / wind transition, i.e, the energy consumption of the world is completely swapped to low-cost solar panels / wind turbines, backed by low-cost lithium or sodium batteries (preferably solid state).

However, the problem right now is that the Chinese have sufficient production capacity for 4% replacement (given lifespans of 25 years before a panel drops to 80% output) of 60% of planetary energy demand, and we are stuck at the 10 cents per watt module level (which translates to 20 cents per installed unit of capacity in China itself, not including UHV lines, but installed prices skyrocket overseas).

This means that Swanson’s Law effectively breaks down as China can no longer expand production to further lower prices, and China’s currency is about 45% (188% PPP GDP vs nominal GDP) undervalued.

The problem is then that with solar being stuck as it is, we need newer solar technologies to continue the price decline (the American EIA projects frackgas, in the United States, to drop to a price of 1.6 cents per kWh LCOE, from a current 3.8 cent price).

The technology that most people in the West favor is perovskites, usually lead-based perovskites, since China doesn’t have a supply chain built up for it, and lead-based perovskites can be extremely cheap.

But the problem with perovskites is that, ummm, it’s lead-based, degrades rapidly, and you are almost guaranteed that perovskite panels will begin leeching lead into groundwater, especially since a solarized world will have massive panel deployments (you can’t guarantee that none of them will crack, same as how mass-deployed nuclear is unsafe for the same reasons).

Organic solar cells, purportedly “4th generation” solar cells, offer an alternative, although currently efficiencies are far lower than perovskites, and this is not just a factor of technology development, but a fundamental limitation of the technology (band-gap is at the wrong point for Sol’s insolation).

Hopefully, organic solar cells, given their exceptional cost advantage (they’re essentially plastics), can mature and eventually prevent the dominance of perovskites.

Not going through the WSJ comments, but it’s obvious how the problems with China’s approach will be dealt with should push come to shove after you’ve gone through the article.

China is a Communist state running a capitalist simulacra. The highest stage of capitalism is imperialism, and the highest stage of simulated capitalism is simulated imperialism.

If the trade barriers come up, for a lot of goods, China can effectively just increase military spending (currently at 1.3% of GDP official, or 1.7% according to SIPRI, compare 3%, 3.3%, and 6.8%, depending on who you trust, in the United States) to absorb excess capacity.

The problem with a lot of our concerns (genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the mutual slaughter in Ukraine) is that the Chinese, in both cases, can get off their asses and intervene more aggressively. But they don’t, because they have trade ties with the West and still need to grow their economy. If a new Iron Curtain were to form, however, there’d be nothing stopping them from taking a harsh anti-Western position geopolitically.

Simulated imperialism essentially comes down to the anti-Western bloc having sufficient power to say: stop, this is stupid, or stop, this is obscene, and the West actually has to sit down and listen because it no longer has monopoly control of the world’s hard and financial power.

A second factor is capital goods (commodities used for production) exports. If China is cut off from the West through direct trade, there are a bunch of non-aligned countries that can import low-cost Chinese capital goods, then export the results to Western consumers at lower prices than if the West were to sell the capital goods themselves.

Where these two things essentially combine is in greentech: this isn’t often mentioned in Western media, but the cost of Chinese battery storage is down to 5.6 cents per watt, or an effective cost of 2-3 cents per kWh generated. Chinese solar installed costs, at the largest scales, is currently about 20 cents per watt, which translates to half a cent or 1 cent per kWh of raw electricity.

Or, in other words, batt + solar is cheaper than frackgas or coal for new power generation. This essentially comes down to a neoconservative excuse to force countries off American frackgas or Western nuclear and make them buy solar + batt.

You have to produce in China to keep costs down, but you can’t sell effectively in China due to state-mandated hypercompetition driving everyone to zero profit.

Turns out Communists are better at capitalism than capitalists are.