Comments by "" (@jasonreed7522) on "How do you plan for 46 million people?" video.

Another factor is coal fired power. Brown coal is ultra dirty and ultra cheap. Obviously cars don't help but it really takes coal to reach such insane levels. (China also has this problem, coal is too cheep and available to not be used to support electrification in these countries while everyone else if freaking out over climate issues(justifiably)). To me 1960's American traffic planning means terrible congestion and urban highway obsession at the cost of any decent mass transit which would have been far more efficient by basically all metrics.
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One of the most surreal of these old/new adjacencies is how the pyramids of gaza egypt are normally photographed with just desert in the background but they are actually at the edge of a city with perfectly "normal" modern architecture.
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@Rahul_G.G. thats just supply and demand, the demand is sky high and they are building more as fast as possible. Fuel cost is just one aspect of what determines the minimum profitable price a plant can operate at. The business side of the operation determines a cost as function of generation rate for the plant and then every plant submits this to the Independent System Operator who habe the job of telling everyone how much to generate to meet demand. The ISO always picks the next cheapest generator who sets the new "wholesale price" for the grid. If transmission lines into a region are at capacity then only local generation can meet new local demand and the price decouples from the rest of the grid. (Very common in cities on particularly high demand days) Wholesale price isn't what you pay as a customer, its what your distribution company/utility pays and then they normally offer a fixed rate to the customer. (You can get an unbuffered rate which can save you lots of money but in the case of exeptional circumstances can be very expensive) For a full explanation the channel Practical Engineering has 2 videos that are very helpful, one on the texas blackout in the icestorm and one on the 2003 blackout of the American northeast caused by Cleveland.
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@francisdayon green energy is not too expensive, it can be the cheapest option, especially economic "externalities" are considered. (It cost a factory nothing to polute a river with industrial waste, but that has massive social costs that the government will pay. This is why china stopped importing a bunch of recyclables from the US, the companies profited having sweatshops sort plastic by hand but the health effects were costing China's government big time) And who says the "developing" world has to climb the tech tree and make all the same mistakes as the developed world. They don't have to use coal and steam engines for hundreds of years, they can import specialty goods like windmills and solar panels. Hell india could start will concentrated solar in the south or the deserts near Pakistan, all that takes is mirrors and molten salt as the heat exchanger with a conventional thermal plant system. They have enough Brain power to have both nukes (weapons) and a space program, they could build nuclear power as an alternative to coal and build hydro in the Himalayas to serve as the battery for they concentrated solar. Upgrade transmission lines enough and they can make different regions capable of supporting eachother fully so you don't need to burn coal locally. (Also natural gas killed coal in the states thanks to fracking so I'm sure india could import nat gas or extract its own to avoid using brown coal, the dirtiest of the coals) Coal is simply cheap and dirty, unimaginably dirty with long term consequences. (Litterally creating the poor districts in western cities like London because were the smoke from the factories fell only the poor couldn't escape)
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