While a lot of that generation has been coal in the past, lately China has been almost exclusively focusing on adding renewables and nuclear:
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Yeah. I'm just wondering what's up with hydro declining. I would have hoped to see more, not less of it.
More recent data through November 2025 shows hydro is up again:
Nice. And coal is still falling. Looks like they're on the right track. Thanks for the update!
It’s a climate thing, hydro worldwide decreased because there was just less water passing through dams this year.
That's sad.
China also dismantled hundreds of dams and hydro plants on Red River for ecological reasons since they build so much solar it offsetted it plus way more.
Ok. To me this seems a bit premature, but i have to trust that China knows what it's doing. If they think it's necessary for the ecology of the river and they calculated that they can offset the loss with other renewables, who am i to second-guess them?
It still makes me sad to see hydroelectric dams shut off and dismantled. Hydropower dams are in a lot of ways the ultimate expression of human engineering prowess.
It's too bad some waste water can't be somehow cleaned while also providing power. I'm neither scientist nor engineer, but I'm imagining how spring water is naturally filtered through sand, sediment, and rocks, or activated charcoal. If we had dams built to filter, it could alleviate or solve some problems.
It actually takes energy to clean waste water. Just filtering is not always enough. Chemical and other methods of treatment are often required. The purification process takes time and can't easily be done on flowing water.
Also, in order to produce hydroelectric energy you need water to flow from higher to lower elevation, but most waste water tends to be produced where people live, and most people tend to live at lower altitudes.
Glad I qualified myself as neither scientist nor engineer! Thanks for the brief lesson. I appreciate learning in small bites when busy. 🫡
Glad to hear it! I'm a big advocate of communicating scientific concepts to people in simple, easy to understand ways, and i try my best to do my part just a little each day.
I believe anyone can understand these things, and if they don't it's the fault of the teacher not the student.
And by the way, i wasn't saying that your idea is impossible. It's a good idea. I was just pointing out some practical difficulties. I'm sure someone smart enough can figure out a way to implement something like it.
Lol. It should have been plain in the beginning that at best, the water would need several passes, and I wasn't thinking of bacteria like fecal matter may contain, so of course chlorine may need to be used (I was actually thinking of industrial waste water, but that's what I get for being tired and in a hurry). At any rate, I'm happy it happened because I learned something worth knowing! Maybe others did, too.
Thanks again, comrade! 🫡
Just gotta wait til 2033 when Medog Hydropower Station opens single-handedly adding 300TWh (almost as much as total solar power addition of China this year, which itself was a record).
Hydro is capital intensive up front. In the west where the capital is available basically all viable locations have already been dammed. It also requires the infrastructure to transmit the electricity and the demand for it. That's not to say there is no place for hydro power, I just don't think it fits the conditions of many global south nations right now.
I think it's also worth mentioning that a lot of the areas flooded for hydro reservoirs in the west were just forcefully cleared of inhabitants and the negative environmental impacts were ignored. Formerly colonized nations will go about this differently.
I would say, in a lot of instances, damns can be pretty bad ecologically. The impact to migrating fish is a big issue. If other green energy can replace it I'm all for it.
I like dams. Plus, it's not like we're in a scenario where already 100% of energy comes from renewable sources and we're just discussing which type of renewable is preferable. We're in a scenario where a large portion of energy is still produced by fossil fuels, especially coal. No matter how ecologically damaging a dam is, it's still better than the coal burning power plant equivalent. The ecological damage from a dam is localized and can be repaired or mitigated. The ecological damage from fossil fuels is global and much harder to reverse.