Last year, China generated 834 terawatt-hours of solar power.
Which is more than the G7 countries generated, and more than the US and EU combined. In fact the only country group that generates more solar power than China is the OECD, all 38 countries of it.
Data: @ember-energy.org
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lsbbsg6ohk2j
Last year China installed more solar than the rest of the world combined, but they have less than 1/5th of the worldpopulation 🤷
There are lot’s of things you can criticize China about, their commitment to renewable energy isn’t one of them.
They were also responsible for 95% of the world’s new coal construction (2023). With just 1/5th of the world population.
I’ll give them props for solar. They build a lot of it, and thanks to us outsourcing practically everything to China over the last few decades, they build most of our solar as well.
China had the largest new coal construction in 2023 but it was far below 95%. I didn’t do all the math but it drops below 50% when you compare it to just the growth of the next three biggest coal producers.
They build most of our solar but we’ve effectively banned it now. They’re not only growing capacity to produce renewables, they’re taking the outputs that were planned for sale here and installing them locally.
The US may have effectively banned it, but everybody else is buying loads of it.
As far as I can tell it’s operating at capacity. China’s installing it for the same reason everyone else is. It’s cheap as chips. Power stations take a lot of planning and management, while you can take a few acres of fields and effectively turn it into a money generator with no moving parts.
I’d have got some myself, but my house faced the wrong way to get in on the free solar panels boom, and the up front costs mean it won’t pay itself back for like 20 years. I was tempted once the prices went through the roof when Russia invaded Ukraine, but I moved to a tariff priced every 30 minutes or so and the benefits vanished. I might as well let a local farmer build it all instead.
China effectively seems to be playing Factorio. They have a solar/wind production rate of X/day and X keeps going up faster and faster.
They’ll sell those panels and turbines to whoever will take them. They’re cheap but the sheer volume means that you need a huge economy to take any significant share of that inventory. With the US effectively out of the picture the biggest remaining economy is China. On top of that the EU does have some tariffs on Chinese renewables and that skews the deployments even more towards China.