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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
Mar 31
When they teach about the rise of China in textbooks someday, I hope there's at least a section about how USA institutions psy-opped themselves into utter helplessness by meticulously sourcing all their primary insights from copium vendors. This could be a thesis.
No need to actually write the thesis yourself though; DeepSeek's got it covered.

"Institutionalized Copium Networks" I'm gonna borrow that one for the future. Image
This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. These are exactly the narratives that people, want, need to believe are meaningful, so they can make themselves believe Everything is Fine.

Freedom and lack of corruption is the USA's secret sauce? Oh buddy... Image
Read 4 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Mar 26
I found the thesis of this article peculiar and the intention flawed.

The authors are so alarmed over the potential for China's policies on climate being mislabeled as virtuous that they felt the need to pen an article to refute this view...why? 🧵

foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/20/chi…
It’s not even a stretch or oversimplification to characterize the thesis as: “China not good; actually, China bad”.

This makes for tedious reading, as it is an article focused exclusively on the litigation of China’s morality re: climate issues.

There is no attempt to rationalize or contextualize...no effort to examine the nature of, or motivation behind the “sins”, or a consideration what precedent is set by treating fossil-fuel driven energy expansion as such an explicitly moral issue.
I have discussed the main arguments and counter-arguments on China's carbon emissions at length previously, most recently in this article from January. I don't want to re-up has the entire thing (go read it on LI or Substack) but to summarize briefly...

Read 12 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Mar 9
One thing I haven't seen discusssed yet is how new wind and solar capacity additions in China in 2025 are almost definitely going DROP vs last year.

If you're used to always seeing number go up, time to reset expectations in advance. Here's why.🧵

The key driver is the new renewables compensation scheme from last month.

Previously, new wind and solar projects had policy assurances their generation would be bought by the grid at a fixed rate (the provincial coal-fired benchmark price). The new policy removed that. Image
Before, if you built a new wind/solar farm, you'd automatically get a guaranteed on-grid rate for your power that had nothing to do with generation costs.

Guaranteeing the coal benchmark rate was a kind of feed-in-tariff, although we were officially in the subsidy-free era.
Read 20 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Mar 6
China Power Sector 2024 Fundamentals Summary/Teaser:

Capacity:

Total installed capacity hit ~3350 GW, pumped up by high volumes of new solar (+277 GW in 2024) and wind (+80 GW).

Coal capacity rose by about 35 GW, hydro by about 14 GW, gas by 10 GW, and nuclear by about 3 GW. Image
Generation:

Generation rose by roughly 600 TWh YoY, crossing the 10 petawatt hour threshold.

The large new additions of solar capacity translated to 44% YoY generation growth. Wind's performance was less impressive, rising just 13% YoY. Hydropower recovered 10% versus its poor performance in 2023, but was still down versus a "normal" year (e.g., hydropower's operating hours in 2024 were still 9% lower than in 2021).

Thermal power generation ticked up 1.7% YoY, thanks to subpar hydropower performance and the suspicious disappearance of solar and wind generation at the end of the year (especially November). It *should* have been possible to keep thermal power generation flat last year, considering the massive growth in renewables capacity and the weak power consumption growth at the end of the year, but it didn't happen. Disappointed I am.

I haven't been able to confirm this, but my suspicion is grid operators found themselves overcontracted for power in the last few months of the year because of the weak consumption growth and high renewables growth, and so chose to break their renewables offtake contracts (and pay the associated penalties) in favor of the thermal power contracts (which were perhaps more expensive to break). Just a guess though.Image
That being said, YoY growth in wind, water and solar generation ended up being around 500 TWh (for context, that's the total power consumption of Germany in 2023).

This covered ~83% of the consumption growth in 2024. The rest was met by thermal power.

So, even though coal generation rose in absolute terms, its overall contribution to the generation mix declined again, to roughly 55%.Image
Read 6 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jan 30
First, I'd like to say a big thanks to Chris for having me on the pod - it was a great conversation and we only got through about half of the things we'd like to discuss, so maybe they'll be a continuation someday.

That being said, I'd like to supplement a few points here. 😁
I think there are more motivations underlying China's electricity-heavy growth, rather than just concern over vulnerabilities in the Straits of Malacca, although when it comes to the energy security driver, this is certainly a part of the equation...

I'll highlight a few.
For instance, a point I regret not mentioning and emphasizing more in the conversation is: replacing fossil fuels as a primary fuel in favor of electrification is often just more cost-effective. Simply put, substituting for electricity is good business.
Read 17 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Jan 12
Green hydrogen is China's next overnight game-changer greentech segment.

I slept on it for a long time, because the applications for hydrogen-to-power are very underwhelming, but turns out the real big deal is things like green methanol and ammonia. 🧵
maersk.com/news/articles/…
We don't have to speculate too hard about how much economic sense these technologies make, if major multinationals are already making such huge bets.

A fleet of methanol-burning vessels means long-term, stable demand for the output of these projects.

fuelcellsworks.com/2024/11/11/gre…
I spend most of my time deep in the weeds on individual solar projects, or on the pennies of difference between power tariffs in different provinces. So I don't begrudge articles like this SCMP one, for taking a narrow view on Chinese overcapacity.

scmp.com/business/china…
Read 16 tweets

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