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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
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
David Fishman Profile picture
Dec 27, 2025
The only thing OP should regret is misleading his followers with his clunky charts and sloppy, unsophisticated analysis.

He has sadly ignored more tactful efforts to correct these issues, so enough is enough. Time to be blunt...

Let's break it down in a long thread.🧵
1. The Premise is Flawed

If we must go about assigning a silly label like "green superpower" (which IMO is really just vanity contest clickbait pretending to be analysis) then it's too narrow to define "green superpower" by what percentage of a country's power comes from renewables. This is immediately obvious when we look at the list of countries that lead the world in % of power from renewable energy today - see any superpowers in there? It's lovely to be blessed with abundant hydropower or geothermal resources, but that hardly drives global change.

China, at around 36% renewables (and rising of course) both installs more than the rest of the world combined, and exports the technology to green the power sectors of developing nations globally. If we must have this conversation, then it should acknowledge absolute volume and international impact, where China is clearly dominant...Image
2. Erroneous Analysis and Data

OP's post says "Two-thirds of electricity in China is from thermal plants...that's coal".

This is incorrect on several accounts. First, "thermal" in the monthly NBS pressers includes coal, gas, and renewables like biomass. Coal is the lion's share, but no, it's not ALL coal. So that's already a problem.

Next, the NBS monthly datasets do not report full power generation (全口径) across the whole economy, only generators "at-scale" (规模以上) which excludes small wind and solar (like rooftop solar, which is half the solar). Thus, it's impossible to calculate from this data series what percentage of power generation is coal without many assumptions. You must estimate, or wait for the quarterly data dumps or the annual statistics yearbook.

I'm not the first person to point this issue out. But OP has either ignored or dismissed everyone else who's pointed it out so far, so it must be repeated. His conduct on this point so far is a poor reflection on his integrity.

In the 2024 annual statistic yearbook published by China Electricity Council (CEC), coal comprised 54.8% of generation at the end of 2024, with gas-fired power adding another 2.6%. These numbers have been falling steadily for a decade and will fall again this year. So...the numbers don't lie, unless you're looking at the wrong numbers. 🧐Image
Image
Read 12 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Nov 18, 2025
This post going viral reminded me of an interesting bit I read recently about "rising superstars" in China among the ranks of young cadres.

To be considered a high-flyer superstar, you need to be advancing through China's political ranks at a VERY advanced pace. Let's look. 🧵
The best way to measure "rapid advancement" is not necessarily by the title they currently hold, but the rank within the state civil service system vs. their age.

For instance, this is Mr. Wang Bo, currently one of 7 vice-mayors of Longyan City, Fujian. He is just 38 years old. Image
Wang is the most junior of Longyan's 7 vice-mayors, undoubtedly, but to be in this position at all (a vice mayor of a regular prefecture-level city) means he will have achieved 副厅级, or "Deputy-Bureau Director Level" in China's civil service ranks.

That is an insanely rapid career progression for someone of his age, indicating a combination of oustanding talent AND oustanding personal connections/savvy choice of political patron. You can't advance this rapidly without both.
Read 9 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Nov 9, 2025
My newest essay on Feeling the Stones comes from Linfen, Shanxi, which was infamously declared "the most polluted city in the world" by the World Bank in 2006.

But I had a different reason for visiting: I wanted to assess life in China's "most median city".🧵

(link at end) Image
If you've followed me for a while, you'll know that for 3+ years now, I've protested the over-sampling of opinions from China's 1st-tier cities and pursued this idea of capturing China's "median zeitgest" from smaller cities.

This 2022 trip started it:
Later in 2022, I also established this second "founding principle" for the writing on my newsletter: I want to do my best to capture the perspectives of "median people" too, rather than the cultural, academic, or financial elites we normally hear from.

Read 13 tweets

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