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David Fishman Profile picture
@pretentiouswhat
Jun 20, 2021 • 18 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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
Oct 15
I've just wrapped a 10 days on the North Yunnan loop route, hitting Dali, Lijiang, Diqing/Shangri-la, and Nujiang. Some of the most beautiful places I've seen in China.

Lots of essay content from the trip coming soon, but here's a summary of the route first, 1 tweet per city.🧵 Image
...oh, and I'm writing this partly as a travel report/guide for others who might like to do a similar tour in the future, and partly as a foundation for the essay content that's coming next.

So I'll try to provide both travel details and some background info for each spot... Image
Dali: Dali was the only city on this trip that I'd visited before. It was the last stop on my loop tour but it could have been the first too, as it has many flights from everywhere and high-speed rail from Kunming.

Dali City has just 660k people (versus the greater Dali Prefecture with 3.2m). Like most Chinese cities of its size, it has both a busy, loud, crowded old city section, but also a clean, tidy, comfortable modern city section. The modern city has skyscrapers, shopping malls, a university, some manufacturing industry, AND a flourishing tourism sector based around Erhai Lake with its great views of Cangshan and Jizushan (mountains). It also boasts several train stations, an airport, and good highway connectivity.

Dali is a T4 city in Yicai's city rankings, coming in at #179, which is actually very close to the median (169). If it werent for the lake and the tourism, it would be just another moderately-developed medium-sized city. But it has that lake...

I feel like I'm supposed to be a snob and say I don't like Dali because it's too touristy, but I actually think it's still a good vibe, especially in the evenings when the tourists go back to their hotels and stop clogging up the roads with their rented convertibles. It IS very commercialized, and I don't recommend staying near the ancient city or even on that side of Erhai Lake (the west side), but I'd still love to own a vacation home here someday, halfway up one of the mountains with a view of the lake and the rolling hills.Image
Image
Read 10 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Sep 26
I've already seen many helpful summaries of Xi's announcements at the UN Climate Summit regarding China's new emissions goals, so I won't repeat them here. Go read them!

I will focus my analysis on the power item specifically; namely: 3600 GW of wind and solar by 2035. 🧵
This was described as a 6x escalation over the 2020 numbers. This is basically correct.

China had roughly 535 GW of wind and solar at the end of 2020 so 6x would be 3210. So actually, 3600 GW is 6.7x the 2020 numbers.

China today has roughly 1600 GW of wind and solar.
To get from 1600 to 3600 over 10 years implies average capacity growth of 200 GW per year.

At first blush, this indeed seems very conservative. After all, China added 360 GW of wind and solar in 2024 and should be somewhere in that neighborhood (maybe slightly less) this year.
Read 13 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Sep 22
A fun thing about Chinese rivers I learned from my research last week:

This map shows the ancient courses of the Yellow River (in blue) and the now-disappeared Ji River (in red). The upper blue line the Yellow route during the Western Han. The lower is its modern path. 🧵 Image
Actually, the Western Han route of the Yellow is one of the MANY known routes it has taken over the last 2000 years, as you can see from this image.

From 1128-1855, the Yellow spent 700+ years flowing in an entirely different direction - southeast. During that period, it merged with the Huai River near modern-day Huai'an in Jiangsu, and then traveled northeast again to dump into the ocean. The silt deposits around its estuary pushed the coastline out dozens of kilometers over those 700 years.Image
That lake system you can see at the bottom of the map above didn't exist at the time. That's Hongze Lake 洪泽湖 (literally: "flood marsh lake") which formed because after the Yellow River's course changed in 1855, the Huai River, lacking the volume of water the Yellow had previously provided, silted up itself, lost its exit to the ocean, formed Hongze Lake, and ended up finding a new outlet connecting south to the Yangtze near Yangzhou, turning the Huai River into a Yangtze tributary, rather then a Yellow tributary.

The Huai only regained its outlet to the ocean in the 1950s when the PRC built the North Jiangsu Main Irrigation Canal.Image
Read 13 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Sep 20
Involution 内卷 or 卷 doesn't have to be a hard word, but I keep seeing it misused in China commentary, e.g. this article, which I also have mixed feedback on.

Simply: Involution is the state of intense competition AND the symptoms of that competition.🧵
csis.org/blogs/trustee-…
Quick history lesson:

内卷 (nei juan) is the original word for involution used today to describe a state of intense and fruitless competition. It literally translates as "inward coiling" and was borrowed from the anthropology field.

It began to see its new use in China around 2019-2020, initially as a noun. Students and young people feeling exhausted by intense competition in school, for jobs, and society in general described those environments as having 内卷.
The key point is the competition. So in 2020 you'd see usages like "job market involution" (职场内卷)" society involution" (社会内卷).

But the full word is less common these days vs. the slangier word for involution, which sees the "内” portion dropped in favor of just "卷". Image
Read 13 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Sep 9
China's National Computing+Energy Strategy:

This is the layout for China's national computing strategy. Under the "East Data, West-Computer" 东数西算 slogan, high-priority tasks are handled by local clusters, while lower-priority tasks are outsourced to the energy-rich west.🧵 Image
According to China's renewable consumption quota policy, all new data centers in these hub regions must buy at least 80% of their power from renewable sources.

This should be no problem for the blue hubs, located in renewables-rich regions. Might be trickier for red hubs.
Local municipalities might have their own, even more stringent requirements. Ningxia, for instance, requires new data centers be 100% green.

Good news for wind and solar developers, looking for a new offtake channel now that the FiTs are gone. No relief for coal power.
Read 6 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Sep 5
Oh no...🤦‍♂️

This op-ed on Chinese cleantech overcapacity and competition was in The Wire China a few days ago. Unfortunately it contains many huge errors about Chinese cleantech sectors I can't ignore.

Paywalled. I'll provide screenshots and comment. 🧵
thewirechina.com/2025/08/31/bei…
[Oh, and this will be another long thread. It probably should have been a long-form essay instead, but I already wrote more than half of it before I realized how long it had gotten. Sorry in advance.]

This piece has problems immediately in the second paragraph, starting with:

"China's domestic demand for green tech has also peaked given the massive frontloading of installed capacity during the last few years, fueled by subsidies."

This has two big errors:

1. Chinese demand for green tech has not peaked, as evidenced by the steadily rising annual installed capacity figures for wind and solar. In fact, the installed capacity isn't just rising each year, but even the volume of new installs in a single year has grown every year from 2020-2024. Last year saw 277 GW of solar PV and 80 GW of wind.

Even now in 2025, with the offtake policy reforms starting from 1 June, it looks like solar is going to at least match the capacity growth from last year, while wind is actually going to EXCEED the capacity figures from last year. Domestic demand is strong. As for next year, we'll see what the market reforms bring.

2. Chinese newbuild solar and wind farms have not been subsidised for several years already now (since 2021). Over the past few years (until 1 June 2025) they were built on a feed-in-tariff (FiT) basis, which means they earn a fixed on-grid price from the gridco, independent of what's happening in power markets.

If market prices are high, the FiT may be less than the market rate. If market prices are low, the FiT may be more than the market rate. In a power market context, this is very different from a subsidy (although it could be construed as/look like a subsidy if market prices end up lower than the FiT rate for long periods).Image
Same second paragraph, continued:

"plummeting external and domestic demand have forced Chinese tech companies to compete aggressively to gain market share by cutting prices"

This is wrong on both the domestic and international counts. We already know from the last post domestic demand for wind and solar installs is still rising.

Meanwhile, in the international space, Chinese solar panel exports totaled 236 GW in 2024, rising 13% YoY. Wind turbine exports were 5.2 GW, rising 42% YoY.

In 2025 to date, completed *panel* exports have fallen 5%, but cell and wafer exports are rising dramatically, up 73% and 26% YTD, respectively. Exports to some countries are down, but they have been more than offset by rising exports to other countries and regions. Unfortunately, I don't have a source on YTD wind turbine exports for 2025 so can't comment there.

The point I'm trying to make here is that while there's oversupply relative to demand, it's not reasonable to attribute much - if any - of this supply-demand mismatch to the demand side. Demand is fine. The primary driver of the supply-demand mismatch is coming from the supply side.
Read 15 tweets

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