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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
Jul 26
New essay: China is Not Pulling Up the Ladder

A critique of the idea that industrialization depends on other countries voluntarily giving up productive sectors, and that the interests of a few countries are the same as the entire Global South.🧵

feelingthestones.com/p/china-is-not…
The debate over what China Shock 2.0 means for the industrial sectors of developed nations like Germany has been raging for a while. However, the narrative thread that China's manufacturing dominance represents a barrier to the industrialization of developing countries is more recent.

According to this narrative, China isn't vacating low-end manufacturing segments when it's "supposed to". Its critics say this constitutes "pulling up the ladder", denying other developing nations the opportunity to take over these segments and enjoy the resulting economic bounties.

This idea has been particularly prominent on my corner of Twitter in recent weeks, thanks to this Foreign Affairs article and the authors' accompanying working paper published via PIIE. It has seemingly since become something of a cause célèbre among the DC and Brussels think-tank circuit.

foreignaffairs.com/china/china-pu…
As tidy and alluring as this narrative is, it is mostly erroneous, as it is built upon both a flawed understanding of how industrial development happens and how productivity has historically diffused across borders.

It relies on inappropriate metrics for determining when a country "ought" to do certain things, and over-indexes on the power of exchange rates to explain Chinese productivity.

Its proponents typically advocate for remedies that might offer small upsides to a handful of developing nations, while explicitly harming the development prospects of far more, misrepresenting the interests of the few as the needs of the many.

A recurring feature of this debate is that arguments originally developed to explain the concerns of advanced industrial economies are now being repackaged as arguments on behalf of the entire Global South. But whether those interests actually align is not really demonstrated, and there is little discussion of both those inside and outside of China who will be hurt by the proposed "fixes".
Read 7 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jul 12
My last post about Zigui County and the Three Gorges Dam:

Many Chinese county seats are centuries old.

Zigui's isn't.

The entire county seat was transplanted to make way for the Three Gorges reservoir. Today, the old town is underwater.

How is the new one doing?🧵 Image
Zigui County's Maoping Town (茅坪镇) is carved directly into the cliffs over the reservoir. It's one of the more aggressively vertical urban spaces I've visited, reminiscent of the mid-levels of HK (or Chongqing I suppose).

It's clear that this community exists because it was willed into existence by the needs of the resettlement. Many of the streets running parallel to the river have you driving between a cliff face on one side, and the 5th floor of a high-rise on the other side.

The most vertical parts of the town in the middle are residential with only a few smaller streetside shops. There are flatter areas at the top of the town, and at the bottom, closer to the reservoir's level. This is where most of the commercial activity seemed to be.Image
Image
There's a food street running parallel to the main street at the bottom. I walked its length as the vendors were setting up. Mostly stuff I'd seen before, a few items I only knew from seeing them in Yichang the day before.

Quite a few stares. Not many foreign tourists here.
Read 21 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jul 5
A practical guide about how to choose a good restaurant using Dazhong Dianping (大众点评), which is China's main restaurant directory/review/coupon platform, based on my 10+ years of experience using it almost daily...

But first, some general background information: Thread.🧵 Image
Part 1: Background Facts

Dazhong Dianping started out in 2003 as an app focused on local restaurant reviews, predating Yelp by roughly a year. The founder said he was inspired by Zagat ratings.

From 2003-2009, its business was merchant listings and peer reviews. Then, in 2010, competitor Meituan entered the scene, originally as a straight Groupon clone, then adding a merchant directory. From 2010-2014, Dianping added coupons and flash deals, while Meituan added merchant listings and reviews. They competed directly with each other by offering huge discounts and subsidies to consumers, via basically identical app products.

In 2015, they merged in a 15B USD deal, somehow avoiding antitrust oversight that I'm sure would make that merger very difficult today. But 2015 was the era in which Kuaidi & Didi and Qunar & Ctrip were allowed to merge, despite each merger creating near-monopolies for their respective segments. A different time...

Together they became Meituan-Dianping (later, just "Meituan"), operating two parallel but basically identical apps. Of course, Meituan today has become China's #3 consumer internet platform company, after Tencent and Alibaba, operating Meituan delivery, Xiaoxiang supermarkets, rideshare bikes, portable phone banks rentals, lifestyle booking platform aggregation, etc.

To date, both Dianping and Meituan's respsective app platforms have survived the merger, with a huge suite of offerings besides just listings and reviews. My experience has been that Dianping has more merchant listings and reviews in bigger cities, while Meituan has much more robust coverage of smaller cities and towns. But they are quite similar. You can use it to find restaurants, bars, hospitals, hair salons, massages, KTVs...anything. Today I'll just talk about F&B.

Dianping is one of my daily use apps - in fact it occupies one of the 5 spaces on my hotbar, together with email, wechat, chrome, and the camera.Image
Part 2: Comments About Restaurant Review Platforms in China

A lot of people believe you can pay your way to a high ranking in these apps, or that bad ratings are the result of refusing to pay extortion money to the app. I think this is often exaggerated. Bad ratings are most often the sign of a mediocre restaurant, while good ratings most often indicate a good restaurant. My impression is that this has gotten more reliable since ~ 2018/19 especially.

Historically, Dianping has been ok with restaurants encouraging customers to leave reviews, asking customers to save and "check-in" at the location, etc. At the same time, they disallow buying reviews (e.g. in exchange for discounts), using review farms, having employees pose as customers, etc. The platforms used to be a weak at enforcing this, but recently they've gotten more sophisticated and stricter.

I don't doubt it's still common, but I think Dianping is getting really good at sniffing it out and penalizing violators. It makes sense...they are highly incentivized to make sure their platform is a reliable indicator for quality. I've even seen individual restaurant listings deactivated with a note that says they were caught gaming reviews.

The accusations of platform extortion are trickier, and also harder to prove or disprove. Some restaurant owners will tell you that they feel they HAVE to buy marketing services from Dianping or Meituan just to maintain a normal algorithmic appearance in the directory listings, and that they will be buried if they don't. But it hasn't been conclusively demonstrated anywhere.

In 2021, Meituan was fined by Chinese regulators for pressuring restaurants into exclusivity agreements for its takeout delivery business (not the directory and review app) so that adds to the suspicion that they would do such a thing here too. But in this age of heightened regulator scrutiny over Chinese IT platforms, I actually doubt it.

Anyway, that's enough background info...

Meituan vs. Dianping landing pages:Image
Image
Read 13 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jul 3
I am pleased to introduce the Chinese Invisible Cities Index (CICI) - some Friday fun. 😏

These aren't the smallest or poorest cities. These are the cities with the least aura vs. their population.

They make you say: "wait, I've never heard of it and it has HOW many people?"🧵
My methodology for the CICI was as follows:

Start with a normalized value for their registered hukou population (户籍人口), not current inhabitants (常住人口). That's considering the entire prefecture population, not just the metro downtown, because anyone or any part of a prefecture can contribute to reputation creation.

After that, subtract for anything that gives the prefecture city aura, name-recognition, any kind of notability at all. That includes things like:

- being a provincial capital
- having famous tourist attractions (esp. 5A)
- having a national brand headquarters
- having historical or cultural significance
- famous cuisine/dishes
- any memes associated with the city
- being the site of a major disaster or scandal (negative reputation is still reputation)
- having anything else that people think of when you mention it

The highest scores after subtracting become the leaders on my CICI. This methodology allows me to find not just the small and obscure cities, but specifically *cities that are far less famous than their population suggests they should be.* The data part of this was AI-assisted.

I haven't been to most of the places on this top 15 list - because I'd typically travel to places that have notable economic or touristic activity - which by definition perform worse in the CICI. 🤔

And look, I know almost every city has a bit of *something*, or else there wouldn't be be a city there at all. It's all relative, and subjective, and for fun, so if you want to disagree with the list, just be nice about it.

All that being said, here my top 15:
#15 Dazhou (达州), Sichuan
Tier: A-
Population: ~6.4m

A clean example of a low-aura city. Has a *bit* of stuff going on (natural gas, Han ruins, a canyon) but nothing at a national presence level. Population not enormous, but very little happening to associate with the name. Image
Read 22 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jun 30
China's 15th Five Year Plan on Energy - Summary and Commentary Thread

On 25 June, the NDRC and NEA issued the 15th Five Year Plan (FYP) on Construction of a New Energy System. This is the key energy-related supplement to the main FYP released (in draft) back in March. 🧵 Image
(LinkedIn repost btw)

The 15th Energy FYP lays out China’s energy objectives for 2026-2030, with emphasis on how the energy system will be structured around growth in end-user electrification, flexibility assets, and higher shares of clean energy before the 2030 carbon peak. Image
A few comments on the installed capacity numbers:

It looks like a big deal to add 1500 GW of capacity, but it's less stunning when you remember that most of it will be solar. In fact, the total wind + solar capacity growth needed to meet the targeted rise in wind + solar generation share is fairly modest, assuming annual power generation growth remains in the ~5% range annually.

It's notable to see hydropower projected to rise another 20-40 GW before 2030. There are no large-scale hydropower facilities under construction right now that will be complete before 2030, so this implies 10+ medium-small hydropower stations, which is remarkable considering the already high saturation level.

The planned expansion in flexibility assets is the most notable item here though. New-type battery storage is set for 4x growth (this will be mostly batteries but also a bit of CAES and thermal/gravity/other oddities) and pumped hydro is set to 3x (there are a stunning number of pumped hydro stations under construction across the country right now). Finally, VPPs are expected to grow from a negligible/pilot level of deployment in 2025 to 50 GW of flexible dispatchability by 2030, which looks like a big opportunity, but a very complicated one, for some bold developers and asset operators.

Finally, West-East transmission capacity set to grow by 80 GW...that means UHV lines - probably roughly 10 more of them, based on their average carrying capacity. I don't have a recent update to my UHV line database, unfortunately.
Read 9 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jun 15
Had an educational conversation with a farmer last week in the Shanghai suburbs. He approached me while I was relaxing next to one of the canals and asked me if I had ridden my bicycle there (I had). We then started chatting about agriculture in SH.

"Where are you from?"🧵 Image
"I'm from Anhui."
"Of course, Anhui. Maybe of the people working fields in the suburbs in Shanghai are from Anhui. I noticed before all of the strawberry greenhouses have Anhui people."

"It's not just strawberries. Almost all the agricultural work in Shanghai is done by outsiders. There are many of us from Anhui. Also some Henan, but mostly Anhui."

"So do you rent the land?"
"A big boss rents the land from the Shanghai people, then they divide it into smaller plots and rent it out to us."

"Where is the big boss from?"
"Also Anhui."

"Okay, so the big boss comes in, negotiates many land lease agreements with the Shanghai people here who don't want to farm the land anymore, and then makes a business renting that last back out to you. Do you live here all year round?"
"No, we go back between planting seasons."

"Do you still have fields back in your hometown?"
"We do, but most of them are rented out to big companies, to do large-scale farming."

"So you rent our your fields back home to big companies to do large-scale farming, and then you come here to the Shanghai suburbs to do small-scale farming?"
"Yes, that's right"

"Why?"
"Because the large-scale farming requires knowledge of modern machinery that we don't have. You have to learn how to fly drones, understand new technology. People like me, more than 50 years old with low education level, we can't learn those things fast enough, so the large-scale agricultural companies don't hire us. We can only come to Shanghai for this kind of small-scale farming."

"I heard something before...I don't know it it's true. Someone told me people like you people from other provinces farming for Shanghai residents like to maintain their own, secret vegetables?"
"Haha, that's true. We keep our own vegetable fields here, and don't put pesticides on them, for our own consumption."

"That's funny. Shanghai has these farming areas in the suburbs to ensure its vegetable supply, but except the elderly Shanghai locals, there's no one willing to work in the fields, so they have to bring farmers from Anhui. But those farmers prepare their own organic vegetables in Shanghai fields...for themselves."
"haha, it's ironic isn't it?"
Read 6 tweets

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