{"id":2130,"date":"2015-03-07T14:44:33","date_gmt":"2015-03-07T14:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/up\/wordpress\/2015\/03\/07\/chinas-wind-farms-can-now-produce-more-energy-than-all-of-americas-nuclear-plants\/"},"modified":"2022-10-29T18:40:07","modified_gmt":"2022-10-29T17:40:07","slug":"chinas-wind-farms-can-now-produce-more-energy-than-all-of-americas-nuclear-plants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/chinas-wind-farms-can-now-produce-more-energy-than-all-of-americas-nuclear-plants\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s wind farms can now produce more energy than all of America\u2019s nuclear plants"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

China is building more than a third of the world\u2019s nuclear reactors currently under construction, and has plans to triple its nuclear power capacity by 2020. That has some observers worried about the country\u2019sopaque and politicized nuclear safety regulations.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But amid all the hype over nuclear power, China has been expanding its wind power capacity at an even faster clip. Last year, China\u2019s wind farms reached a capacity of 115,000 megawatts, compared with just 20,000 megawatts from its nuclear sector. (To be sure, capacity is different than the actual amount of energy created.)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working at full pace, China\u2019s wind farms could now produce more energy than all of the nuclear power plants in the US.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the government\u2019s ambitious goals to keep developing its nuclear energy capacity, for the foreseeable future, nuclear is unlikely to match wind in China.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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After the 2011 disaster in Fukushima, Japan, the Chinese government put the brakes on building nuclear power stations in the west of the country, as this is an area prone to earthquakes. Meanwhile, the north of China famously struggles with a lack of water, something nuclear power stations require plenty of to keep reactors cool, and the east coast, where there is plenty of water, is home to China\u2019s most developed cities, which are increasingly turning to NIMBY-ism.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beijing says it plans to increase China\u2019s wind power capacity to 200,000 megawatts by 2020, but its own figures see nuclear rising to just 58,000 megawatts in the same time frame.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s encouraging to think that wind power may be a leap-frog technology in China, skipping\u00a0over the potentially messy and dangerous issues related to nuclear power. But wishing nuclear away could be unwise, and\u00a0most\u00a0of China\u2019s massive\u2014and growing\u2014energy needs are still\u00a0met by burning coal. If barriers to nuclear persist, the energy gap will likely be plugged by more fossil-fuel power plants,\u00a0which would render the cleanliness of China\u2019s wind farms academic.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

China is building more than a third of the world\u2019s nuclear reactors currently under construction,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hereandthere","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3617,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130\/revisions\/3617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}