Yes acorn, China is an interesting case study to observe.
It will be interesting to see how fossil fuel industry apologists here will react, once China actually starts reducing its coal dependency. There will go the argument that "... it does not matter what we do here, as long as China does not move away from fossil fuels". I guess they will pivot from China to India in their argument until India too switches to clean, cheap renewable energy...
....and then, eventually there will be even more wailing and gnashing of teeth about compensation needed for investors holding worthless shares in coal mines and job losses in the coal mining industry.
I actually found the following section from your Reuters article most interesting:
However, about 4% of the electricity generated by wind farms and 2% by solar stations did not connect to China’s grid last year, thanks to its insufficient power carrying capacity, data from the National Energy Administration (NEA) shows.
To push local grid firms to prioritise purchase of clean sources, the agency set quotas early this month for each province’s minimum consumption of renewable electricity in 2020. So China appears to have the same problem as Australia in that its grid currently cannot fully absorb all of its renewable energy generated electricity. Here we were arguing whether gas peaker or storage was the better solution to excess renewable energy generation, while I read the above as suggesting that in China they put the onus on the grid operators to consume "minimum amounts" of renewable energy.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that what this means is that any local grid operator in China will have to ensure that their grid is capable of "consuming" a certain amount of renewable energy. They will also understand that given overall energy policy targets set by the central government, these "minimums of renewable energy consumption" are only ever going in one direction - i .e. UP!
So any grid operator in China not only has to consume a minimum amount of renewable energy, but must also plan for ever increasing consumption of renewable energy in the future.
I guess this would result in vastly different capital allocation between increasing gas peaker power stations vs storage and other grid stabilising infrastructure in China when compared to Australia.
So in 10 to 20 years from now. Which country will have the better grid infrastructure for the coming 30 to 50 years? And what will the implications be for competitiveness of various industries?
Let's assume hydrogen remains a distant pipe-dream due to inherent conversion inefficiencies and future scarcity of capital.
