I really wish that articles like this would give more context for all the numbers that inevitably get thrown around.
> China Huaneng Group Corp.’s 845-megawatt power plant
What percent of the city's electricity is that?
> Beijing plans to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million metric tons
How much less soot will actually be in the air? Will the city feel noticeably cleaner?
> China planned to close more than 2,000 smaller coal mines from 2013 to the end of this year
How many coal mines does China have?
> The level of PM2.5, the small particles that pose the greatest risk to human health, averaged 85.9 micrograms per cubic meter last year in the capital, compared with the national standard of 35.
What is considered a safe level? What is considered acceptable in Europe/the US?
I know that researching all that would take longer than just throwing up the facts from the press release. But without that context, it's hard to know whether this is really a big deal or just a normal retirement of older power plants for newer, cleaner alternatives.
"I really wish that articles like this would give more context for all the numbers that inevitably get thrown around.
> China Huaneng Group Corp.’s 845-megawatt power plant
What percent of the city's electricity is that?"
Humanity uses about 17 terawatts of generated power (electricity plus transportation plus …), about 15 from fossil fuels, of which coal generates more GHG that all but the dirtiest oil and the leakiest NG facilities. That plant is probably used about 80% of the time, so it represents about 675/17,000,000 of humanity's power use and something like twice that much of our GHG generation.
We think we can generate about 500GT CO2e of GHG net before reaching 3°C warming (but that involves a lot of guesses), which is a level that seems civilization-destablizing to many observers (wild, but necessary guesses). Coal creates about 1kg per kWh, so convert from 675MW … 60sec60min24h365d675,000kW = 21,286,800,000,000 kg/yr, or ~21GT/yr, or 4% of that budget.
Coal has an energy density of about (depending on type) 24 MJ/kg, which is a shade under 7 kWh per kg, so your final number is off by a factor of 7 or so [EDIT: I think? Or you're saying that coal creates 1 kg CO2 per kWh? Ok... Yeah, I think that's right!]
The 500GT budget is total. That plant is using roughly 4% of our let's-not-wildly-destabilize-civilization GHG budget every year. We've got about 30 years to radically restructure our energy use. More here (among many places): http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
Are you sure this is right? There must exist more than 25 coal plants in the world? Do we expect to hit this budget w/in a year? Is this coal plant much bigger than most others?
There are a lot more than 25 coal plants in the world, and we must stop using them very very soon. Here's an EPA-citing source claiming 1 Gt coal -> 1.8 Gt CO2e, and 3.5 Gt used by China in 2011, the latter amounting to ~6.5 Gt CO2e, and ~20% of world emissions that year. [1] If Chinese coal use is now about the same, and if we have 650 Gt left before some particular nasty tipping point is reached, then China's coal is currently using that budget at a rate of 1% a year. There's a lot of uncertainty in the rate measurements, and significant uncertainty in the tipping points, but there is no uncertainty that world will be like nothing humanity has ever seen at 500ppm CO2, and we have no reason to think that, say, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh can adjust smoothly to regular high temperatures of 54° with sporadic heat waves at 57°, or that America and the US can smoothly adjust to most of the farmland that currently feeds them becoming unusable and most of the fisheries collapsing.
Finally, note that we're not going to get to near carbon-neutrality in 30 years by dropping radically next year, continuing at a flat 1/30th of our budget for 30 years, and then dropping to 0. Any plausible route will accelerate GHG reductions something like linearly.
Ok, thanks for the info, now I have a better sense of proportion. So that means that 25 years brings it to 1% globally. I see how breaking the cap might not be totally inevitable but it doesn't seem very evitable either. I think we could see a major food price increase in our lifetimes.
China has very dirty coal compared to the US. We also have much better environmental tech installed for our plans, while in China they don't bother since enforcement of environmental laws are weak.
There's a nice quote from Randall Munroe on context with numbers that I think applies perfectly here.
> A good rule of thumb might be, “If I added a zero to this number, would the sentence containing it mean something different to me?” If the answer is “no,” maybe the number has no business being in the sentence in the first place.
8,450-megawatt power plant. 130 million metric tons. 850.9 micrograms per cubic meter. Etc... They're still just groups of symbols to me.
Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not relevant to others. The kind of thinking you're proposing is how we end up with stupid car analogies and comparisons of hard drive size to libraries of congress.
845MW is a typical coal power plant unit size for a large plant. A plant can contain multiple units; the biggest coal fired plant is in Taiwan, with 10 units totaling about 5GW. Most big power plant units today are in the 500MW - 1GW size. Smaller, and you need too many with a lot of duplicate equipment; bigger, and the turbines become too massive.
It took the US about 10 years after the Clean Air Act to clean up air pollution in major industrial cities. London once had air quality problems comparable to Beijing. Pittsburgh and Cleveland were almost as bad. China has the advantage that the technology is known and most of their cars already have good emission controls. The current situation in China coal plants seems to be that most of them have electrostatic precipitators to remove the big particles, but not bag houses (giant buildings full of filters) to remove the small particles. Then there's NOx and SO2 removal. The pollution control facilities for a big coal plant are bigger than the power production facilities.
Here's an overview from Power Magazine on the subject.[1]
This is from Bloomberg Business's Energy section not USA Today, this article is written for people who are familiar with the energy market and the units of megawatts and million metric tons of coal.
You would be complaining if every article written for a technical audience had to take a paragraph and explain how many songs or movies X TB could hold.
85 is the average, it routinely goes above 300 and is above 170 right now; in winter we can get to 600, 700, even 800; going outside is painful in thst case. If the 2.5PM rating gets over 100 in the states, it is a huge scandal.
Coal is used for heating in winter, all heating plants are owned by the city. That is why the air gets immediately cleaner when the heating goes off (last week or so). It's complicated.
Worth noting that the AQI scale you are citing (100, 150, etc.) and the ug/m3 used in the article are different numbers. AQI of 85 is not so bad. 85 ug/m3 isn't good.
>Beijing plans to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million metric tons
China uses over 50% of all world coal production (and produces nearly half itself, on top of importing an amount roughly equal to 40% of American production).
Of the ~7800 million metric tons produced, China used about ~4000 million metric tons of coal between power and steel industry.
Unsure of source quality (but then again, original article is based on numbers from unnamed/anonymous PRC Party Official, so this source is probably just as good/bad): http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/
To answer one of your questions, the US EPA's standard is 12 ug/m^3 averaged annually, and at most 35 in any 24-hour period[1]; the EU's is 25 annually.[2]
The US embassy in Beijing runs their own particulate pollution monitor, as the Chinese government's are somewhat suspect. A few years ago, the level became so high that it ran off the end of the scale. The programmer had put in a descriptor of "Crazy Bad" for that level as a joke, and that ended up being posted to the official Twitter feed.
> it's hard to know whether this is really a big deal or just a normal retirement of older power plants for newer, cleaner alternatives.
Why isn't retirement of older power plants for newer, cleaner alternatives a big deal? If it's a lot of power plants and they're a lot cleaner, that's an impact.
That's exactly the problem, though. If you don't already know something about the power industry, there's no way to tell from the article whether this is "a lot" (enough to be an intentional trend) or just one or two aging out.
As of last year about 12,000 mines - they are trying to close smaller mines which are often illegal and have high death rates. However, they are still expanding capacity [2] - so the closure of mines isn't a good proxy to production of coal.
Putting the 13 million metric tons cut into context - China produced 3 billion and change from 2010-2014 [2]. So, while it might be important for Beijing and may signal a change of stance (?), from a China usage perspective it isn't a big difference, by itself.
To frame this a little bit, think of news articles as a git repository. You don't necessarily want to wait until you have every piece of code finished to push it. There is benefit to getting some information out, even if it isn't all the information. As you said, research takes time. Already since the story was published it has an update:
(Updates to add coal’s contributions to the U.S.’s electricity mix in 10th paragraph.)
Harder to research facts and connections can get added over time, like commits in a repository to make the story more complete. It's the difference between operating a business news wire and a magazine.
You've got a strong argument to say "the reporter should do a little bit more work to put these numbers in context" but the reporter has an equally strong argument for "This is a news wire, not a journal. I just report today's news as succinctly as possible, it's the readers responsibility to read further and put this stuff in context if that's really important". As a side note though, I like the Economist because they tend to do what you're talking about - put things in context.
I have to agree with you on context, especially for technical and energy-issues stories. And yes, journalists are exceptionally lacking and poor in this regard.
That said, there are tools out there which help. There's an immense wealth of information available online -- we can look up the population of Beijing (20 million, via Wikipedia), the International Energy Agency and other sources have various energy statistics.
A favorite tool of mine is gnu 'units', a commandline calculator that many people associate with simple transformations from feet to meters. But that misses out on its key capabilities -- it's really an advanced units-aware calculator with a large number of built-in values. I just found earlier today that this includes paper sizes:
$ units 'A4paper'
Definition: 210 mm 297 mm = 0.06237 m^2
It's also extensible -- I've added 'hiroshima' as an energy unit. Given the context of the current discussion, that in tons of coal equivalent:
$ units '1 hiroshima' 'toncoal'
* 1942.6672
/ 0.0005147562
Getting back to your question, how does one 845 MW plan compare with Beijing's energy usage?
You have: 845MW / 20 million
You want: watt
* 42.25
/ 0.023668639
... I presume China's power supply exceeds 42 watts per capita (though I happen to know from context that third-world nations are at roughly this level). Wikipedia again tells us that the national average is 458 watts/person, which probably includes less-developed rural areas. So it's likely that the shuttered power plant is at best 1/10 Beijing's power supply, quite possibly less than that.
You're completely missing the point. He's saying that for everyone's sake, contextualizing the numbers improves the quality of everyone's understanding and helps determine the actual significance of the news. You and I both would benefit, not just him.
If any country has a chance at implementing nuclear power on a widespread scale, I think it's China. In America, the primary reason we don't use nuclear power is driven primarily by the negative perception and fear of the word "nuclear" (with a bit of help from the fossil fuel lobbies). One of the advantages of the one-party state is if the party wants something done, that thing will get done, no ifs, ands, or buts. China's rail network is an excellent example of this (and that's another thing we've failed to implement stateside due to political gridlock). Should China decide that nuclear is the way to go, then it will be done.
I've been wondering about applying nuclear in non-traditional locations. I wonder if CSX could get a compact breeder for trains. Same thing for super tankers. No more diesel. Just clean, safe, semi-renewable nuclear.
If you can't get political approval to build a nuclear reactor in a building, you're definitely not getting approval to put it on a train. Trains crash a hell of a lot more frequently than buildings.
We've learned a lot from and since Chernobyl. Chernobyl came about because the people running the plant made a string of willfully stupid decisions to try out a safety feature for the plant. This isn't to say that democracy isn't superior to single-party rule, but that no one would invest in building a modern nuclear reactor and play fast and loose with safety procedures.
Well, the city itself is pretty significant on its own. Approx 20 million, ranked as 3rd largest in the world (of course depending on how you enumerate the area/region/or suburbs, subregions, etc.)
It's still pretty significant.
I think the poster below who points to Australia might be referring to the idea that the City of Beijing has approx the same population as the entire country of Australia.
That comparison seems slightly disingenuous, only for the fact that Australia's size vs population is very disparate. The majority of the area isn't even populated at all -- as in, not even rural sustenance farmers live there. [0] Localized air particulate pollution is very much a matter of local energy generation density, which is going to be closely related to local population density.
I think borgia is referring to our coal exports to China being lucrative, and their removal would hurt.
We have a lot of coal. Here in Victoria, we have a ridiculous amount of low-grade coal that's not good for exporting. One power company CEO once said in a radio interview that if you want to convince him of a new technique to use less coal for whatever reason, don't frame your argument around fuel price - the coal is effectively free.
The biggest challenge China is facing is its management structure. It's a "一刀切" (decisions and executions are basically boolean-value-like things). The lack of effective and elastic delegate mechanism makes the organization look like an elephant that can not dance. It's easy to find examples from the time zone management (all regions in China are using the same time zone) to recent campaign of youth soccer. I know what I said here is off topic, but it might add some context for this topic.
The article mixes a few things. CO2 emissions are climate change relevant, but for pollution in Beijing there are other emissions from these coal power plants responsible. Modern coal power plant have much lower emissions in general, but not for CO2. Probably the coal power plants are so old, that it is not effective to modernize them with modern filtering systems, higher efficiency, etc.
Many of those plants are decades old, and poorly managed. But they're also ran by state owned companies which means there's no market incentive towards efficiency and a huge amount of politics regarding what you do.
I worked almost 10 years ago for a European company doing district heating in China. In a smaller city in the north of China, they were able to replace the 19 existing coal plants with a single one.
China probably has more shale-gas than the USA, but has been slow to develop it. Cheap shale gas in the US has cut US coal pollution in half. Shale gas development is extremely expensive. This one area where China's hybrid state-private enterprise system is not as nimble as the United States.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes; my point is that the last coal-fired powerstation in London was closed a lot more recently than people might think.
Not that it's even remotely comparable. DC's air quality in 2012 was still unimaginably better than Beijing's. (I say this having experienced both.) But still, these things can move slowly.
Yup, although that's not nearly as "in" the city as Battersea.
Every time someone mentions wind turbines "spoiling the view", I show them a photo taken looking along Portobello beach. In the far distance a few white single-pixel turbines are visible. In the medium distance is Cockenzie, which is on the seaside and visible from miles around.
The coal in China was killing around 300,000 people per year directly.
The deadly particles in London are now mostly invisible. If you live in London you'll die 20 years earlier. Great city, but I'm glad I'm not there any more. I used to hate having a nose full of black coming out of the northern line. London is rated as having the worst air pollution in Europe. They say about 50,000 people die per year in the UK because of bad air quality.
How polluted are the rest of the big cities in England, e.g. Manchester?
20 years seems way too much, I doubt people in a clean country get to die e.g. in the their 90s on average, while Londoners perish in their 70s.
I saw an EU study a few months ago claiming the most polluted monitored place in the 28 EU states is the town of Pernik in Bulgaria and Sofia is the most polluted capital ( it's in Bulgaria as well).
While China's pollution is among the worst you can get, the country does have the advantage of being run like a corporation, and when they decide to clean it up, they will do it very quickly. I guess, I hope, that within 30 years, many parts of China that are currently "horribly polluted" will be as clean, or cleaner, than cities in "the already developed places" such as Europe or N. America which themselves had horrible pollution at one time.
> the country does have the advantage of being run like a corporation
This thinking has been used to "justify" many totalitarian regimes and is almost universally wrong (trans on time, etc). It turns out that establishing property rights, workers rights, class mobility, democratic institutions where people can rightfully petition their government, etc gets results. For example, in the West we had things like the EPA and other agencies so we didn't have this problem. Why does your ultra-efficient Chinese "corporation" not have these things yet? They're literally decades late and this small token act (Just shutting down plants literally in the city limits) looks more like the corrupt face-saving moves that define the Chinese communist party.
Not to mention, that a lot of top-down decrees in China look good on paper, but end up being implemented by corrupt local governments. Yes, its impressive the CCP can say "Built a city here by next year," but its done with massive building code violations, cheap concrete, and scary safety and pollution violations. A lot of these cities are falling apart only a few years after being built or are just one moderate earthquake away from disaster.
The government isn't really that efficient or centralized. The top bosses in Beijing say X, and that gets filtered down and translated through 10-20 Confucian layers of beaurcracy, at the bottom, the emperor is far away, as they say. And corruption...if everyone breaks the law, you are at a disadvantage if you don't also, and will simply go out business. China will have to improve their governance significantly if eg have any chance of cleanup the air. Xi jinping is treating corruption and pollution as two sides of the same coin at least.
LA in the 70s is nowhere near as bad as hebei/Beijing is today. Maybe London in the early 50s....it's hard to say.
They send their families to Europe and the US, becoming "naked officials." I doubt many of them spend much time in Beijing these days; they all have retreats where the air is clean, as well as very good air filters when they are Beijing (official use was used as an advertising point until the CCP shut that down).
Personally I think the pollution in China is one of the biggest finger-pointing games in history.
The main reason for the pollution in China, and Asia in general, is, above all things, consumer demand. In other words, it's us as a world population, taking up consumerism so fast, from wasting energy at home to rampant manufacturing of useless consumer products (for the whole world, which demands them!) at under-market prices, to meat production, to added to a a local increase in car-centric culture in China built on an unsustainable fuel source. While all this was fine for the USA to some degree, which, mind you, is driven on 39% coal and 67% fossil fuels, this model of energy production simply does not scale and that's why it's failing in Asia. Every time you take a car over public transit in Beijing, every time you leave an electronic device or light on, you are contributing to the pollution problem. Which is, unfortunately, pretty much everyone nowadays.
As much finger pointing happens at the Chinese government, in my opinion the true solution lies with scientists and engineers, not politicians. We need to completely re-visit even the most basic aspects of how we design cities, how we achieve mobility, how we live, work, and everything else, from the ground up. This is the first time the world has had 7 billion people, so history will not teach us how to cope with high population densities. Some kind of game-changing, modernized thinking on the most basic levels of civilization needs to happen.
This isn't to say the government is completely absolved of fault. However, their job isn't to "fix" the pollution issue -- what do you expect them to do? Cut everyone's electricity? Force everyone to use only Tesla cars overnight? Cut all manufacturing exports to USA? Doing any of these would fix a good chunk of the pollution issue, but will cause quite a lot of upheaval and unrest. Rather, their job and focus should be in empowering those scientists and entrepreneurs with funding, space, tools, and freedom to come up with fixes that are sustainable in both environmental and business senses of the word.
Well engineers and scientists already have solutions that are sadly not already put in place in China.
A district heating company from the EU I worked for in China replaced 19 coal plants with a single one in a smaller city in the north of China. So good engineering and management already exist for that, but the government owns all the existing plants and you can't replace them without their "OK".
Same goes for cars. Chinese manufactured cars are not the most energy efficient, but mostly, there's lot of very old poorly made cars. Not the same very old as you'd get in other countries. Pretty horrible crap.
The type of oil used there for cars is also decided by government standards. The current one is "not great".
Why would it be in a corporation's best interest to reduce pollution levels below that of the west, or any further than nevessary?
I agree that the top down control structure means that change can come fast, but I don't see how it means the change would go beyond the minimum.
Environmental cleanup is something desired more for people's quality of life, so it seems that long-term improvement would be more likely with democratic pressure than too-down command and control.
It's a country that does not have free elections or free media. The "people" are not in control. The self-appointed people's representatives are, exercising power through state-owned businesses as well as direct legislation.
Good afternoon NSA plant (yes, this is just as ridiculous as your assertion).
Does the USA have free elections, and free media? I thought most people didn't vote and they only had two choices. Lawyer man number one who went to Harvard, or lawyer man number two who went to Harvard. I thought the corporations owned most of the media in the USA? The USA ranks very low on freedom of the press rankings. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I'd be very interested if you knew how their society worked, or if you had visited the country? If you don't then you are ignorant. But, I'd love to hear your opinion anyway (assuming you aren't locked up without a fair trial), since that is the American way. A country with 45% illiterate people sure does have a lot of loud opinions.
This is so utterly, laughably wrong, it almost seems pointless to respond. No one outside of China sincerely believes China is a democracy[1].
And implying that US media is anywhere near as restricted as China's media is utter nonsense[2]. You might as well be trying to tell us the sky is made of marshmallows.
Come on. Use common sense. Ask people around you whether they consider their government as a democracy. And Wikipedia can range from inaccurate to outright wrong about China. Use it as an academic reference and only believe what you actually see when it comes to the real-word stuff.
It's normal for China to have problems, including problems with elections. But denying the existence of problems is hardly a good way to fix it.
Yep, lawyers is USA is a real problem. Seriously, I don't get why somebody in USA believe that they have a choice to elect a president. Just think: if elections would be free how many candidates would they really get? Every second person would like to be a president! :D They elect somebody who scream aloud and has a lots of connections, but they will never elect somebody who is smart and have good political skills. So there is no freedom of choice, just a stupid illusion like Santa or something.
I don't think that we have fair elections on this planet at all. Sorry, but communists are the same shit - they do not give you real choice, I'm from ex-communist country, I know that for sure. How they can agree to lose power?
This seems very uncharacteristic of China. The residents of Beijing have been told by the government for years that if you don't absolutely need to be outside, then don't go outside. This is the first I've heard of China putting anything before growth.
Unrelated, but this gives me hope that they might crack down on counterfeiting soon.
Weak citizens dying of air pollution quickly and being replaced by healthy strong new recruits from the hundreds of millions living in the China villages.
Very similar the recipe for big cities in Europe before the industrial revolution. There was no canalization, food had to be brought on horse cars without refrigerators from vast areas, making it decay. A dozen people per room, resulting in fast spreading of viruses and bacteria.
Every year they also tell us how they are getting rid of coal, or how they got rid of it already wishing the city. Every single year, it is the same story, actually.
Who cares about counterfeiting, I just want clean air.
> China Huaneng Group Corp.’s 845-megawatt power plant
What percent of the city's electricity is that?
> Beijing plans to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million metric tons
How much less soot will actually be in the air? Will the city feel noticeably cleaner?
> China planned to close more than 2,000 smaller coal mines from 2013 to the end of this year
How many coal mines does China have?
> The level of PM2.5, the small particles that pose the greatest risk to human health, averaged 85.9 micrograms per cubic meter last year in the capital, compared with the national standard of 35.
What is considered a safe level? What is considered acceptable in Europe/the US?
I know that researching all that would take longer than just throwing up the facts from the press release. But without that context, it's hard to know whether this is really a big deal or just a normal retirement of older power plants for newer, cleaner alternatives.