Sustainability by Numbers

Both wind and solar have deployed faster than nuclear ever did globally. And that's in Wh terms, you specify capacity but I guess you'd be annoyed if I replied that renewables beat that capacity easily, like China deploying 80GW of wind just last year. Here's an article looking at per capita increases show that France and Sweden did really well but renewables are accelerating past their records: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear-rates The growth of renewables in France (!) over the last five years matches the best periods of nuclear rollout in Japan and the USA.

I'd also love to see some high quality, well researched information on this. For instance I recently saw this exchange: https://x.com/i/bookmarks?post_id=1881090543956222293 I'm generally a proponent of renewables, but I think it's also important to take seriously quantitative arguments against them. But without good sources, it's impossible to work out who's right. This is useful to suggest solar will win in the end: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy?yScale=log But much less clear how well wind, especially offshore, can compete. This is also decent but doesn't get much into cost: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-wind-power-bri…

It's worth noting that California is one of the wealthiest regions in the world, yet it faces extremely high electricity bills to achieve its goals. On the other hand, nuclear power is criticized while France, which relies heavily on nuclear energy, enjoys some of the lowest electricity rates in Europe. Claiming that nuclear power is an irrelevant option in 2024 for decarbonizing by 2050 is simply false. The timeline for nuclear construction is well-documented and realistic. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time How can you apply California's model to poorer countries when even California hasn't fully decarbonized? France, on the other hand, achieved significant decarbonization decades ago. It's ironic that people like you see the fight against climate change as an opportunity to attack nuclear power. Be honest about your intentions.

> So fusion has a real shot here assuming the economics work out. They don't yet work out, and there's no evidence that they will. I would love it if they do, but I don't think past performance is evidence of future performance. We might run into a fundamental limitation at any moment, and that would be that. Japan's median build time for fission is under 5 years[0]. If regulatory environments and engineering specialisms could be made to work, there's no reason (other than Greenpeace) that we couldn't massively curb CO2 production from power generation pretty soon; far sooner than we could do discovery and then build for fusion. [0] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/111356564/which-countries-ar…

This is a good one from the head of research at Our World in Data: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ev-fossil-cars-climate Also a followup about air pollution, but this doesn't include production: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electric-vehicles-air-pollut…

I totally agree with you. For this reason, I don't follow mainstream outlets about climate change. The most balanced source I have found so far is this substack by Hannah Ritchie. Here is one of those balanced article - https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/15c-warming-temporary

> Here a summary of the regional effects in, er, all parts of the world Have you read the summary? (Or even the IEA link I posted?) Because the shock in every single one of those countries was because of fossil fuel prices/shortages or climate change, not renewables. > In fact, blades currently cannot be recycled, whereas the largest part by mass, the base, could be but routinely is not. Hence the bad faith arguments and misinformation. Suddenly there’s all this care about lack of recyclability when it comes to clean energy, but not a care in the world about the pollution put into the air by fossil fuels. Or the coal ash from coal plants. Or electronic waste. Or municipal waste. Of course there are no such concerns since this isn’t a serious argument. It’s put forth by people who already have their conclusions (renewables bad) and are looking for any reason to believe this. Wind and solar produce a fraction of the amount of waste that fossil fuel sources produce per unit of energy created, and produce a minuscule amount of waste in absolute terms. As for wind turbine blades, they are inert composites. Bury them and move on, they are about as best case scenario for garbage as we can get. > which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets. A) Don’t move the goal posts. We aren’t talking about 100% intermittent renewables. And B) did you read the paper you posted or simple find the first one that confirms your biases? I’ll quote: “The LFSCOE…

That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.” https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants#:~:text=Th… By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year. IE adding ~20GW in December has 1/12th impact in 2023, but it’s now online for the next ~25 years. Which is why some predictions have China using less coal in 2024 despite bringing new power plants online in 2023. China alone represents 30% of the world’s electricity production/consumption so it has real impact, but they just don’t have the natural gas supplies which the US has used to ween itself off coal.

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions. Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article. In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN: Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/ Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/ There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write…

> Vaclav Smil's excellent analysis on this is worth reading: https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/glob... While a good read, I'm not sure how anyone can take this seriously. He says " Efficiency gains from the electrification of industrial processes would vary widely, and not all of them could be electrified. And there will be negligible gains for space heating , with 100% efficiency for electric resistance heating compared to as much as 93-99% for modern gas furnaces (Lennox 2023)." Heat pumps have a COP of 1.5 - 4, which are eventually going to replace all heating/cooling. He does not consider efficiency from heat pumps at all. Two thirds of fossil fuel energy is wasted: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/US%20Energy… Electrification is efficient and the transition won't need as much: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-effic…

There is important lesson to learn from here. Everybody who claims that there is not enough some mineral for something must consider the following. First in every moment in time there are certain number of mineral resources - these are known deposits that are not all necessarily accessible economically, but some of them are - these are reserves. If the demand for something increases then also the price will increase, making more of the resources available as usable reserves at the new price point. At the same time it increases the incentives to find even more new resources. More over, if there is certain amount of mineral already in circulation then it may suddenly become economically viable to recycle it, limiting the demand for new resources. What is important to observe instead is if the increase in production can follow the increase in demand and if the resources grow at such speed that the growth can continue. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles

Someone did the homework on the time that it takes (Japan does it in 5 years): https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time One observation is that Small Modular Reactors could take much less time: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/111356564/modular-reactors-c… Edited to add: China estimates 10 new reactors at 27 billion in total: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/china-…

I asked you where you were getting the 18 cents/kWh hour from. Which you did not answer. And then you accuse me of referencing unsourced statistics and lying. Hmm... The 6.5 years figure is from here: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time "Current european nuclear" is completely atypical and unrepresentative. The numbers are too low to be statistically significant anyhow, but on top of that they were all FOAK builds, all of a single (base) design that has been deemed too difficult to build by its manufacturer and thus discontinued, and mostly built in countries with little recent nuclear experience. The HPC build, for example, was very explicitly intended to build up the UK nuclear industry, which was a significant part of the cost.

This is several orders of magnitude more than ChatGPT https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt

> Chinese coal usage in absolute terms has recently started to decrease That's not what the data I had linked above seems to indicate (2023 to 2024 it went from 5.7 to 5.8 TWh) And it keeps building coal power plants: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants, though the article is also optimistic that China is at/about to reach peak coal. And it's also funding coal power plants abroad, thought the scale doesn't seem that big compared to their domestic production: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Continues-to-…

Not really. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalin…

Probably not as much as you think: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ai-energy-demand You are better off worrying about your car use and your home heating/cooling efficiency, all of which are significantly worse for energy use.

Not sure about that. If you accelerate a 2t vehicle to 60mph and then decelerate it back to 0mph then they would stress the tyres in the same way, no matter if you do EV & regen, EV no-regen or ICE, right? (I am keeping the weight constant). Prompted by your comment I had a look at vehicle weights and two facts stood out - ALL new cars are getting heavier EVERY YEAR because we keep adding more stuff (average car weight, and average SUV weight trend upwards from 2016 to 2023) - The average electric car is heavier than a petrol equivalent but is lighter than an SUV Weight certainly a problem, but the focus on EVs for weight is generally blown out of proportion. https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-13588773/New-cars-400… https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/weighty-issue-of-electric-ca…

China ist still adding coal plants but their capacity factor is falling. In fact Chinas emissions have probably already peaked. https://www.economist.com/china/2025/05/29/chinas-carbon-emissions-may… https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-chinas-co2-… https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

> Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment — https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for > What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? — https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt

I will preface this by saying that I care a lot about climate change and carbon usage and AI usage is not a big issue, it is in fact a distraction from where we should be focusing our efforts. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt

Some links: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-abou… (discussion on lobste.rs - https://lobste.rs/s/bxixuu/cheat_sheet_for_why_using_chatgpt_is_not) (discussion on HN, 320 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42745847)

Running them less though: >In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They’re now running around 50% (https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants)

I have trouble believing you are being honest. Piling under wind turbines?! I have yet to see a dead bird under a wind turbine myself (but I acknowledge they do kill some). Published estimated averages are 4 to 18 birds per turbine per year [1]. Compare that to buildings (where we also don't pile up either) which kill man estimated 1 billion birds a year [2] [1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-deaths [2] https://abcbirds.org/news/bird-building-collisions-study-2024/

> it is not possible in theory to replace all traditional cars with electric cars with the current battery technology. There isn't enough materials on the planet This is not true [1]. And that estimate assumes battery chemistries don't change (or vary), which is also obviously nonsense. [1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles

"Torched climate change progress" is a wildly overblown take: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ai-energy-demand

I wonder what this means for the calculations outlined here: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalin…

China's coal plants are running at steadily reduced capacity (while their renewables capacity is growing exponentially). > In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They’re now running around 50%. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/141628065/chinas-coal-plants…

My understanding on China's coal plants is that it's not the number of them, it's whether they're running that counts. Coal-fired generation is currently cheaper than storage for backing up wind and solar generation and their plants are typically running about 50% of the time right now, expected to run less often as storage and more renewables come online. So China’s coal use could fall despite it adding more capacity. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants