And at the rate that they building wind, solar and nuclear, they'll be moving away from coal soon

Wind farms are great for marine life.

A city in southern China is planning an offshore wind farm bigger than all of the power plants in Norway combined. By comparison, the entire state of Texas only has 32 gigawatts of total windpower. The entire global offshore wind capacity is around 55 gigawatts. This single wind farm would almost double global offshore wind power by itself. It would also be the single greatest "power plant" in existence once completed

Chaozhou, in Guangdong province, intends to start work on the 43.3-gigawatt project before 2025, according to a copy of the city’s five-year plan posted on industry publication bjx.com. The wind farm will be built between 75 and 185 kilometers (47 and 115 miles) off the city’s coast on the Taiwan Strait.

The area has unique topographical features that mean wind will be strong enough to run the turbines 3,800 to 4,300 hours a year, or 43% to 49% of the time, an unusually high utilization rate. The plan didn’t say how much the project would cost.

China set a record by adding 16.9 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity last year, and the country now has the largest fleet of offshore wind turbines in the world. Utilities and local governments continue to pursue ambitious renewable build-out plans as costs fall relative to expensive coal and natural gas, and as President Xi Jinping keeps the nation on course to zero out emissions by 2060.

Earlier this year, a city in neighboring Fujian province proposed a 1 trillion yuan ($138 billion) project that would include 50 gigawatts of offshore wind.

And how is that bad? Would you rather that they dig up coal and use it? Or simply dump this waste into landfill or into the ocean? This stuff is for industrial use, it's meant to be processed and used in factories, alongside other feedstock that's so toxic that you can't touch it with your bare hands. It's just a nice method of recycling already processed and dirty material.

Do you even know what industrial feedstock even means?

Do you even know what industrial feedstock even means?

Turning this sludge into industrial feedstock isn't quite the same as spreading it across a field.

Hong Kong, a densely populated city where over a thousand tonnes of sewage sludge is generated per day, should develop carbon-neutral processes to turn the waste into valuable products as part of its decarbonisation strategy, according to an academic.

Ren has secured three grants from the government to conduct research on converting used medical face masks, poultry litter and sewage sludge into energy and valuable products.

To tackle the problems and lower costs, Ren said his team aims to develop processes that can incorporate multiple feedstocks and produce multiple products, such as using face masks as one of the feedstocks and upgrading the primary product into bio-oil, a clean-burning fuel.

Sludge, the mud-like by-product of sewage treatment, can be used as feedstock to make methanol, a motor fuel and industrial chemical, said Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s industrial and systems engineering professor Ren Jingzheng, the recipient of the 2022 Apec Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education (Aspire).

The carbon emission per kilogram of methanol produced from sludge is 2.1kg, a quarter less than the 2.9kg emitted if coal is the feedstock, Ren and his research team estimated. “In mainland China, methanol is mostly produced from coal,” Ren said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. “Our process of producing it from sludge could lead to less carbon dioxide emission, but the cost will be high. We are still working on ways to reduce it.”

If all of the around 1,200 tonnes of sludge generated in the city every day is converted to 400 tonnes of methanol, this could generate 400 tonnes of methanol worth US$160,000 a day at current market prices. The process could also reduce 120,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emission from energy consumption, compared to methanol produced from coal, Ren’s team said. It amounts to 6.7 per cent of Hong Kong’s total emissions from industrial processes and product use, and 0.4 per cent of the city’s total carbon emissions.