US vs China: Who Is Winning the Global Power Plant Race?

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]Do you want to know one of the highest paying jobs in the United States today for somebody who does not have a college degree? Experience building power plants. This is paying huge salaries now. And the reason for that is the mad rush to build new power plants. Why are the new power plants needed? Number one and number two countries, United States and China are both in the race for artificial intelligence and AI requires a lot of power. In fact, some of us who are using AI will see that there are times when when you ask the AI engine for results takes a lot longer. Why?

[00:00:37]Because the load is just too much for it to handle. Not only that, the iteration count is quite high. I've told you this in the past also. We find a lot of challenges when AI decides to do things in a certain way and we want it done in a different way. Making the AI engine to see things our way takes a lot of time.

[00:00:56]So AI requires a lot of power, requires a lot of new power plants and China and United States have taken two different routes to achieving that goal. We're going to examine the two and try and come up with who seems to be having the upper hand. You can decide who's winning this race. And as always, a small slide deck to share the thoughts with you, the technology, and I request all of you to like this video and to share, follow, subscribe as the case may be. Here we go. US versus China. Who is winning the power plant race? The US is focusing on rapidly expanding natural gas-based power generation with around 252 gawatt capacity in development emphasizing speed and scalability. China on the other hand is trying to build nuclear power plants to get its power generation under control to meet the needs of the future applications that would be driving using artificial intelligence methods. And for that they want to try and use nuclear power. They are building 39 nuclear reactors. And I'm going to give you a chart that shows you worldwide which country is building how many nuclear power reactors. India is also figuring prominently in that. So while the United States is focusing on quick deployment, China is planning for the long term by having something that takes longer to build but can also last longer. So these are the two different approaches these two countries are taking. The fundamental difference is one has short-term efficiency while the other one has long-term capacity. So the other reason also is you can do what you want with the stuff you have in hand.

[00:02:47]America has a lot of natural gas and China has a lot of uranium that they can repurpose to build nuclear power plant.

[00:02:55]That's one way to look at it. But here are the cost battles. Gas crushes nuclear power plant generation when it comes to costing. Natural gas plants are 5 to 10 times cheaper to build compared to nuclear power plants, making them far more attractive for immediate expansion.

[00:03:16]A single nuclear plant can take between 6 to 14 billion more investment than a comparable gas facility. More the difference, the delta is that much.

[00:03:27]Lower capital costs means faster return of investment and less financial risk for investors and governments. This cost advantage is a major reason why United States has decided to go the LNG route.

[00:03:40]Let's take a quick look at how power is generated using a liqufied natural gas.

[00:03:47]Now I've dealt with this in the past. If you have already seen this you can skip the next 2 three minutes and continue on with this video. The gas turbine in the braen cycle. There are many processes.

[00:03:58]We just taking a look at typical process. Okay. So what happens is air goes in and natural gas comes in the other way. The two are mixed and fired in a combustion chamber. You get a lot of hot air. That hot air is piped towards a turbine that has veins and blades that starts spinning. That spin in turn is given to a generator where magnetism converts into electricity.

[00:04:25]I've talked about this also. So that is one side. Now you have a lot of hot air.

[00:04:29]What do you do with it? Well, what happens is you have the heat recovery steam generator where you are putting a chamber in which cold water is driven from top and hot air is coming from the bottom. These two combine to form steam.

[00:04:45]That steam in turn again generates uh electricity by being driven through a turbine. So you have two sets of uh same activity. First the LG hot air and then hot steam and that hot steam can still be used to do other things. I mean that's uh used on depending on what is the plant specific purpose and similar things are done back in a rankine cycle.

[00:05:11]What happens is the steam that comes out it condense back to water and pump back to the HRSG to keep doing the same thing again and again meaning you can recycle the same water to some extent not all of it and both these methods combined will give you about 60% efficiency that is uh in terms of how much energy you are putting in in uh liqufied natural gas and how much energy you are getting as electrical power and then of Of course that goes to transmission lines and gets transmitted to a power station. So the main reason that US has done this is time to get more power and second is the fact that it can use freely available and liqufied natural gas for doing its process. Whereas in nuclear plants it takes 7 to 15 years. This one the LG is just 22 to 30 months 2 years maximum.

[00:06:08]And so then what happens is you have a short-term gain here. Faster construction will make financing costs lesser and it also gives you an edge because China will be catching up while US will be already producing gobs of electricity. So this is something that perhaps the AI companies like the Googles of the world, Amazon, Microsoft and also Nvidia, they've all come together plus the AI companies themselves, everybody has come to an agreement that okay this will give us the edge that we need to stay ahead of China. Of course China was trying to do the same thing LG based plans whereas now because of the problems with Qatar you see how the secondary effect is China's LG based plants are going to take a huge blow. So they are basically stuck with either nuclear power plants or the old coal fired plants that also they are building because they can't do this thing for a long time. China in the recent past has added close to 90 gawatt of coal capacity in a single year showing continued reliance on fossil fuels like because of the same thing that it takes a long time for the nuclear power plant to come up. So in the intim what do you do? Just keep building more coal based power plants and that creates a lot of pollution.

[00:07:23]Here is the most polluted city ranking of China.

[00:07:28]Kishinga Bana has 227 as the air quality index. Beijing itself is 169. Vishan Yunko you can just go down the line. All of them are within a few units of each other. So there is a huge pollution problem for China also to deal with. Now you have so many problems afflicting China. Pollution from coal fired plants. Time duration lag between when their nuclear power plants are going to be built and when they are going to be supplying power. So suddenly you find China in a bit of a bind. Plus their LG plants have taken a beating. I've done a monologue on the way China builds its power capacity generation. looking at solar, looking at uh LNG, looking at coal and of course now looking at nuclear power plant. Let's take a look at how many plants are being constructed by United States. They right now are not building any nuclear power plants. They are looking at small modular reactors and maybe they may restart some of the plants that have been shuttered. Now, if you look at the global nuclear reactors under construction, China leads the way with 39 and India is at 8 and then you have Russia at six and so on and so forth. You'll have to pinch your fingers to take a look at it to see if you can read it cleanly, but you get the idea.

[00:08:52]China is way ahead. It's building all these nuclear power plants, but will it be able to do that in time to compete with the United States in the artificial intelligence race? And this way, the way that United States is doing it is going to help United States respond to rising electricity demand because of AI, industry, and urbanization. China is building nuclear power plant for long-term planning. But the gap that it takes between now and then, will the industry be able to wait for that? That is a big question. Not only that, natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than coal, which means that this is going to be polluting less. You don't see much of a pollution being a problem in United States cities because United States has managed that part quite well.

[00:09:40]Now on the other hand, nuclear power offers zero emissions, but you have the time lag plus the dangers in case there's an earthquake, what happens? So the US model emphasizes cheap, fast, and flexible energy, whereas China's model focuses on large scale long-term infrastructure like nuclear and coal. So which one is going to win? We'll have to wait and see. But certainly in the context of AI, it would seem that the United States has an edge. Thanks for watching. Please like, share and subscribe to our channel. Don't forget to click on the bell button for notifications. Namaskar.