@pretentiouswhat
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China energy analysis & advisory: solar, wind, coal, nuclear, markets. 14yr migrant, currently SH. Rural development enthusiast. @HopkinsNanjing @LantauGroup
Shanghai
Joined January 2012
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Hi! I often tweet long threads about China's energy sector, mostly grid, renewables, and nuclear.
This is a master collection of my favorites, from oldest to newest.
I will add more as they are created and remove oudated ones.
Qinhuangdao photo thread and mini-blog 🧵
Last Friday, I rented a car for a day of sightseeing Qinhuangdao. It was 150 RMB, the same as the cost of a taxi ride back to the (very distant and very small) airport, so I figured it made more sense to rent a car and give myself flexibility for the day.
I booked a Geely Xingyuan - my first time with this EV. I appreciated the tall cab that gave me lots of headroom in what is a pretty compact vehicle (I'm 6'1/185cm). It didn't feel like a small car at all, thanks to that. It's just 70k CNY brand new (10k USD).
The taxi driver on the way in from the airport told me that besides the vacation areas in Beidaihe that are active for 3-4 months out of the year and the industry connected to the port economy, Qinhuangdao has little to offer in terms of economic opportunity besides agriculture, but their soil isn't particularly good either.
He said the population drain is enormous, especially with Beijing and Tianjin so close. Young people leave due to the lack of good jobs, while local property prices are inflated by vacation home buyers from elsewhere. With the population drain, huge chunks of land in rural areas can be leased for incredibly low prices, just 20-30k CNY per mu. No one has any use for the land besides wind farm developers, who have been building like crazy.
Video: 2min drive through the orchards in Suizhong where I picked up the apples.
GDP will teach you more about the people using it to explain countries to you than about the countries themselves.
Good and interesting commentary about conditions in a Guangzhou factory. One point to add is that no semi-skilled/skilled labor in a GZ factory like this is getting just minimum wage. The minimum wage is a legal wage floor, but is fully disconnected from the market scarcity value of that labor in large cities.
If they offered the statutory minimum, employers would simply not be able to fill these jobs. You can check listings for this kind of work on, e.g., Zhaopin or Zhipin to see ordinary assembly or operator jobs are in the RMB 6000-8000/month range for 55-60 hour weeks, with 1-2 days off/week. Typically accommodation in the worker dormitory and subsidized/free meals are included.
Besides dorms and meals, add another ~30% to employer wage costs for mandatory welfare contributions like medical and pension (i.e. 五险一金).
Formal jobs actually priced at the statutory wage floor are pretty rare. Even really low-end service jobs like building security (bao an) or cleaners will be in the 3-4k range for a large city like GZ. I habitually snap pictures of "help wanted" signs everywhere I go and I rarely see anything close to minimum wage advertised.
(Image of various factory job listings in GZ via Zhaopin)
Just came out of an LED panel factory in Guangzhou.
Most notable thing after having toured European manufacturers for over a month last year: Nobody minded us taking pictures. In western factories that's taboo, because nobody wants any information about how they produce circulating.
I asked the production manager why they don't care here. His answer: "You can see how we do it, but each of these machines costs ¥3m (~€400k) and we run dozens of them." The moat is capital. There's also a default assumption that everything gets copied anyway, so nobody builds their business on production secrets.
Another big reason is that showing the line is marketing. About 95% of companies selling LED panels here are trading companies. Middlemen = somebody's taking a cut = you're paying a bad price. Letting you see the factory proves they actually produce, shows the quality of the components, and signals you're getting a fair price.
Same with privacy. In Europe, filming workers beyond their hands is a no-go. Here people glanced up at three people filming them and continued working. Try that in a Bavarian SME.
Some numbers:
> 95% automated: that means machines assemble 95% of components, humans 5%
> Factory runs 24/7 on two 12-hour shifts. In Europe this would be 3x 8h
> 60h weeks, two days off, just not always the weekend
> Guangdong minimum wage is ¥2,680 (€360) per month, so ~€1.40/hour
> Employer cost is ¥4,100 though and employee pays ¥700 in taxes. Those are all pension and social contributions. There's no income tax on salaries below ¥5,000
The owner is called Cha-Ming, so he goes by Charming for foreigners. He definitely enjoys leaning into this name for branding.
The slides I presented at the 16th China Coal Market Conference 2026 in Qinhuangdao last week.
This event is organized by Fenwei 汾渭 (they publish SXcoal) and is targeted mostly at coal miners, traders, and shippers. My presentation was focused on the Chinese power sector.🧵
I closed out with a forward-looking summary:
Over the next 1-2 years, there's still some hope for coal generation demand to rise, thanks to policy reforms on the renewables side blunting capacity growth and rapid power demand growth, but this is not something to be counted on over long run. In the mid-term, coal's growth is fighting against policy mandates over the 15th FYP period and of course a hard cap on emissions in 2030.
Long-term, coal demand in the power sector isn't going to disappear all at once; it's more likely to be a long-term managed decline. And so for them, the post-2030 period will be a question of managing coal supply effectively against a backdrop of gradually but consistently falling demand.
If they fail to sunset extra supply effectively, prices will be too low to support trading activity. But if they prune supply too aggressively, prices will be too high for buyers to accept, potentially even accelerating the transition away from their product.
And that was the presentation, delivered in 20 minutes (it takes me 30 in English, but I tend to speak faster and ramble less when presenting in Chinese).
I don't often go full work-mode on here, but I have to occasionally drop a reminder that I'm not actually a full-time social media poster or travel blogger (hah). My work sometimes means presenting at this kind of event, treating the audience as an economic bloc with motivations and information needs, that sees policy as having moved strongly against them in the last few years and needs to figure out out how to navigate it. They're more than an abstract villain called "coal interests", existing merely as a foil for explaining why decarbonization policy doesn't go the way you hope.
The Lantau Group is at at the forefront of power market analysis, tariff modeling, forecasting, policy advisory, and market design across the APAC region, working with generators, banks, large power buyers, government regulators, and market operators. I head up our Greater China work from the Shanghai office. If you have a related request, you can always reach out via email (contact details are also on our website).
Thanks for reading.
