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David Fishman Profile picture
@pretentiouswhat
Jun 20, 2021 • 18 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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Hi! I often tweet long threads about China's energy sector, mostly grid, renewables, and nuclear.

This is a master collection of my favorites, from oldest to newest.

I will add more as they are created and remove oudated ones.
1. The messy recent history of China's nuclear power industry:

2. A summary of China's regional power grids and dispatch model:

3. A discussion of China's renewable power subsidies and tariff structure:

4. A pretty nerdy and niche summary of how engineers design nuclear power plants to be safe from airplane strikes.

5. An introduction to China's UHV transmission network:

6. China's power shortages in December 2020: Translation of Caixin article + commentary.

7. A short thread about barriers to increased Chinese RE investment in BRI:

(was hoping to expand on this, but my project's funding was yanked and I started doing other things).

8. Everything you wanted to know about nuclear waste:

9. A short thread about the competitiveness of Chinese nuclear exports:

10. Helping out a confused man who didn't know much about nuclear power or China:

(got myself blocked for my efforts)
11. A thead about pumped hydropower storage in China:

12. A history of renewable energy Feed-in-Tariffs in China.

13. Why the Fukushima wastewater release really isn't that big of a deal:

14. Commentary on new RE consumption quotas for Chinese provinces in 2021:

15. A commentary on the Taishan radioactivity release alarmism:

16. Translation/commentary of the subsequent NNSA press release re: Taishan

17. A commentary on Guangdong's new direct power purchase rules for Renewable Energy - important for corporates.

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More from @pretentiouswhat

David Fishman Profile picture
Mar 12
For my own education, I've been trying to make sense of China's industry exposure to the Iran conflict and Hormuz closure. I wanted to share what I have now:

My Level-1 taxonomy includes 5 buckets of products that are one conversion step away from crude oil or natural gas:🧵 Image
Bucket 1: Refinery‑derived, petroleum‑based finished products (both fuels + non‑fuels)

I defined "finished refinery products" as mostly a pricing channel here. This includes the fuels: gasoline, diesel/gasoil, jet fuel/kerosene, fuel oil/bunker, and petroleum coke as well as non-fuels: bitumen/asphalt and base oils/lubes/solvents.

China refines most of its gasoline/diesel/jet fuel domestically, and has substantial policy levers (large strategic crude reserves and commercial inventories, export quotas) to stabilize local availability. The short-/midterm effect is more likely to be moderately higher costs, rather than shortages, as long as the reserves hold out (and they should be good for quite a few months). Anode-grade petcoke for aluminum smelting is a potential niche outlier here, as there is more import exposure, but that's really it.

Meanwhile, markets for non‑fuel refinery outputs like bitumen are slower‑moving and simpler to buffer via demand rescheduling and/or substitution, with moderate risk mainly via general price levels.

This is the least-concern bucket overall IMO.
Bucket 2: Refinery‑derived, petroleum‑based industrial feedstocks (not fuels)

This is where it seems the petroleum side of things gets trickier. The main products here are naphtha, condensate, and reformate. If crude gets expensive and/or scarce, these feedstocks get expensive and/or scarce. The most critical one right now is naphtha.

Natural gas cracking involves heating an appropriate feedstock (usually naphtha, LPG, or ethane) until it thermally breaks down into the desired olefins (propylene, ethylene) which are themselves feedstocks for a huge range of things, most notably plastics. Asia's cracker system is heavily reliant on naphtha as a feedstock and the current disruption to naphtha supply out of the Persian Gulf has already prompted declarations of force majeure at crackers across the region. Like all of Asia, China is currently facing considerable physical supply risk AND price risk for naphtha.

China is not as fragile of a market as ASEAN, but it’s not immune either. Roughly half of China’s naphtha consumption is imported (15-17 million mt last year), and about 40% of those imports are Middle East–sourced. That implies ~20% of total naphtha supply is structurally exposed to a prolonged Hormuz disruption, forcing either expensive replacements or reduced cracker runs (demand destruction).
Read 7 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Feb 10
China’s coal economics are shifting from "generate electricity → get paid" to a messy stack of flexibility revenues, grid services, and capacity payments.

The age of simple coal baseload cash cows is already over. But that doesn't mean it's easy to kick out coal. 🧵
In a increasingly variable renewables-heavy system, only the coal plants that can ramp, cycle, and stay available on demand will survive. And the plants China's building these days are *tricked out*.

I'm talking lower minimum stable load (20-30%), faster ramping capability (in MW/minute), reduced hot/warm/cold start times, reduced start-up fuel burn, world-class fuel efficiency (<250g of coal/kWh), better thermal cycle stress management, modern DCS for better turbine/governor control and AGC tracking for ancillary revenues, ultra-supercritical heat rates...the works.

Older subcritical coal plants weren’t built for this new world. Those that can retrofit affordably will. But many can’t retrofit cheaply. They’ll be pushed out as the system prioritizes flexible, fast-response assets.
Ironically, building a new coal plant in 2026 gives you a competitive edge.

You'll enjoy higher efficiency, lower minimum load, better ramping, better grid-service revenue...printing a license to outlive the older fleet.

Unless there's an outright ban, building will continue.
Read 5 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Feb 9
Some wonky add-on thoughts about this China green electricity/decarbonization of aluminum FT story:

1. Electrolytic aluminum smelting is one of the most energy-intensive processes in the world.

There's a joke that aluminum is "solidified electricity", and it's kinda true. 🧵
2. For this reason, globally, about half of all primary aluminum is produced using captive onsite power plants, and roughly two‑thirds of that captive capacity is subcritical coal.

This is the core reason aluminum has such a stubborn emissions profile.

nature.com/articles/s4155…Image
3. China has imposed a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) on electrolytic aluminum since 2024. This is a minimum renewable power consumption quota.

Here's my thread on RPS from last year as a refresher if you forgot.

Read 11 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jan 12
On China's Clean Energy "Morality":

There's an emerging "acceptable" way to talk about China's cleantech push: that it's less driven by altruistic intentions on climate change, and more driven by self-interest like economics, energy security, and pollution control. 🧵
mea culpa: I contributed to this narrative in the past to make it more palatable in media interviews. It's an easy one for China-skeptical editors and readers to accept: that this "good behavior" on climate issues is driven by self-interest that happens to be socially beneficial.

So many times, to so many people, I said things like: "what does it matter what the motivation is, as long as it works?" I wanted to emphasize the positive outcomes and so I embraced a convenient narrative that helped me get there.

Of course this works, but it's only half-true. Which uncharitably means it's also half-false. Here's why...
1. Motives are multi-dimensional

Chinese policymakers DO care about combatting climate change. If they didn't, there would be no 2025 peaking coal target or 2030 peaking emissions goal. There would be no impetus to pursue thermal batteries, next-gen nuclear, advanced geothermal, or expensive and complex hydropower facilities. Coal is abundant and domestic. If they ONLY cared about economics and national security, the policy could just be "forever coal".

Chinese policymakers aren't yet willing to trade energy abundance or affordability to move faster on emissions. But that's different from not caring.
Read 7 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jan 3
Did Li Keqiang really say 600 million Chinese people earn <1000 CNY a month?

No, not quite. That comment is widely misunderstood, as explained in this paywalled article from The Economist.

If you don't subscribe, I'll summarize in a thread.🧵
economist.com/finance-and-ec…
So where did this number come from?

In May 2020, then-Premier Li Keqiang famously said:

"...人均年收入是3万元人民币，但是有6亿人每个月的收入也就1000元, 1000元在一个中等城市可能租房都困难..."

"Our average annual income is 30,000 CNY, but China has 600m people with a monthly income of just 1000 yuan. You can't even rent in a mid-sized city for that much".

That's the phrase that was widely misunderstood, with Li's unfortunate framing adding to the confusion. It got a lot of attention both within and outside of China.
china.huanqiu.com/article/3yQjRY…
The main issue is: Li was citing NBS data for per-capita disposable income, not wages. It's a simple average of the disposable income by population for the bottom two quintiles (40%) in 2020, including rural elderly, children, and not-working dependents, i.e., many people outside the formal labor system - or who don't work at all. They are all part of households but their contribution to disposable income is 0 (or close to it).

The NBS clarified Li's comments two weeks later - that it's a statistical average, not a count for wage earners.

The Economist article included this example:
"Imagine a country of ten people, where the bottom four earn $1, $2, $3 and $4 a day, respectively. Their income per person is $2.50. But only two of them live on less than this amount."

The situation for China's bottom quintile is even more exaggerated than this. There are 100s of millions of children and elderly (especially rural) with zero or near-zero formal income. The minimum rural pension is just ~200 CNY/month.Image
Read 8 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Dec 29, 2025
China’s New Play for Mid-Duration Energy Storage: Carnot Batteries

On December 25, State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC), announced its prototype “Chunuo” thermal storage system had passed expert review and met its performance targets.

What is it and why does it matter? 🧵 Image from Sina Caijing
A Carnot battery, also called a pumped thermal energy storage (PTES), is an energy storage system that converts electricity to heat and cold, then converts it back to power when needed.

Instead of using chemical reactions like lithium-ion batteries, it relies on thermodynamics. Image from Wikipedia
For a quick primer on the science: here's the basic principle of thermal energy storage technology (sorry in advance if this short description doesn't capture all the nuances):

During the charging phase, electricity is used to run a heat pump that compresses a working fluid. This compression makes the fluid very hot and that heat is transferred via heat exchangers into a “hot tank” filled with a thermal storage medium like molten salts.

After giving up its heat, the still-compressed, now-ambient temperature working fluid is fed through an expander, which makes it very cold. That cold is then transferred via heat exchanger to a "cold tank" filled with a mixture that retains cold well, like alcohol-water (a "eutectic mixture", for the nerds).

When the grid needs power, the system reverses the process: the working fluid re-absorbs heat from the hot tank, expands through a turbine, and converts thermal energy to electricity, dumping any remaining heat into the cold tank.

In recent years, it has become popular to call this thermal battery concept a Carnot battery, named after Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, the French "father of thermodynamics". He laid out Carnot's Theorem - which deals with the maximum efficiency of heat engines - as early as 1824 (when he was just 28). Carnot's Theorem is today understood as a direct implication of the second law of thermodynamics which was only fully described ~30 years after Carnot.

Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, the bigger the temperature difference between the hot and cold tanks, the more energy you can extract.Image from ScienceDirect article Liang et al (2022): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032122003823
Read 12 tweets

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