An interesting article on china and energy. Nuclear has a lead time (optimistically ) of 3 years, so their prediction of 60-90 GWe won't be too far off. It actually looks like they are planning more wind than nuclear. I'm really curious where they expect the 500 GWe odd of energy they don't mention to come from. All coal? That'll be pretty dirty.
I was probably a little overconfident in my initial bet. I do expect the ratio of energy consumption growth to population growth to trend downwards though.
It actually looks like they are planning more wind than nuclear.
Wrong. (Well, a little bit right, but wrong in all the ways that matter.) According to the article you linked, they're planning to build about 60-90 GW of nuclear capacity (let's say 80 GW to simplify the arithmetic) and 100 GW of wind. But what we really care about is how much energy they get from those sources per year, and to find that, we have to multiply the peak power generation capacities by the capacity factor for each source.
Nuclear power has a capacity factor of at least 93% for t...
I would like to propose this as a thread for people to write in their predictions for the next year and the next decade, when practical with probabilities attached. I'll probably make some in the comments.