It’s already here, it’s been here for a decade, renewables are a mature industry. They’ve already effectively destroyed the economics of coal, and natural gas is next.
I was gonna say "then why did China add so much coal last year", because I remembered reading that they added something like 50GW of coal, even as they added more than 150GW renewable.
But as of Jan 1 2024, they also had to introduce a financial incentive just to keep coal plants online, because otherwise the coal plants can't compete on price, just like you said! Some weird economics going on here, but it seems like China is still adding coal just to maximize total power deployed, even if it's uneconomic at the margins.
Yeah even I was not aware that China has from 2023 started installing more solar and wind than its annual energy consumption growth ie they have actually started replacing coal produced electricity. And with all the new solar and battery production capacity coming online in 2024 by 2030 China coal usage should be down dramatically.
