
Leapfrogging to Solar: Emerging Markets Outspend Rich Countries - anguswithgusto
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-23/leapfrogging-to-solar-emerging-markets-outspend-rich-countries-for-the-first-time
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adventured
The headline only works at all because they're pretending that China is an
emerging market. That's incorrect, China has already emerged, and is already
suffering from all the typical post boom hangovers including rapidly slowing
growth and vast amounts of debt. It'd be like pretending that Japan was still
an emerging market in 1992.

Remove China from the emerging market list, and the premise of the story
unravels entirely.

Further, the projections in the story include China in the emerging market
category to 2040. Comeon, that's a joke.

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jusben1369
You're about 10 years ahead of yourself on your China prediction. Also, it's
critical to remember metrics like GDP per capita. China still has a very long
way to go.

This is the classic "disruption" model. The incumbent nations have the $$'s to
invest in infrastructure but in turn become dependent on that way of thinking.
Emerging nations don't have the same legacy so can adopt very modern
solutions. Solutions which also tend to be much cheaper and scale better. The
developing world is further ahead in areas like solar, mobile phone (network),
mobile payments etc. It's exciting to see them actually get some advantage
from their otherwise disadvantageous position.

~~~
Retric
The real issue is US's electricity usage is declining. Replacing a working
coal power plant with a wind farm is very different from building a wind farm
instead of a coal power plant. That said, power plants only last so long, and
existing capacity the trend is very different than this article suggests.

    
    
      US: 
      2010 Coal Power Prod: 1,994,000 GWh
      2012 Coal Power Prod: 1,643,000 GWh
    
      China:
      2010 Coal Power Prod:  3,273,000 GWh
      2012 Coal Power Prod:  3,785,000 GWh
    

PS: 2013 China produced 45.5% of the worlds coal, the US produced just 11.6%.
[http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Existing_U.S._Coa...](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants)

