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
3 times as much solar as the EU.
Has 3 times the population.
🤷
They are using 50% of the world’s coal though, so maybe let’s not start tugging each other off just yet.
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.
I’m guessing a lot of that coal is being used to feed westerners urge to buy more crap we don’t need.
You sound like all the right-wing politicians the world over who don’t want to implement zero carbon solutions because “China still burn coal”.
We’re on a sinking ship and you’re complaining that you don’t like the colour of the life raft.
If China was the only country in the world that burned coal, but they exclusively burned coal, and everybody else was on solar panels the world would still be an infinitely better place and it is right now. Not doing something just because other people also aren’t doing it just ensures that nobody does anything.
I think that you misunderstood his comment. He’s not criticizing solar energy, he’s calling out China’s green washing as they have the same solar production per Capita than Europe but they have way more coal production per Capita than Europe.
A right wing politician would throw a fit about how solar energy is dangerous and make kids trans.
how is that greenwashing?
Then buying woodpellets from canada, shipping them to EU to fuel an ‘eco’ biomass installation is definitely greenwashing.
But you’re right, Sinophobia is also a pseudo-democrat, lib trait.
That’s what you’re doing.
They burn more coal than Europe because there’s more energy demand in Europe and solar alone can’t fulfil it. Which is also the same in Europe.
But in Europe they also burn coal, no? Or burning gasoline, natural gas, trash, anything.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?time=2000..latest&country=CHN~OECD+(Ember)
(chosen OECD because it makes the numbers easier to compare, and doesn’t cherry pick EU countries which are actually better than places like the US)
A lot less coal, which is about twice as bad as gas for CO2 emissions per kWh.
Places like the UK have got rid of coal completely. The last remaining coal power station shut down last year. When you look at the graphs for the UK, we’ve actually reduced electricity consumption as a whole, despite a growing population and the growth of electric vehicles.
Still plenty to be done about gas. I can see why China still uses enormous amounts of coal. They don’t really have any oil, so it’s the cheapest fossil fuel they have access to. In fact, cost is mostly why solar is getting popular, because it’s become extremely cheap. You can’t rely on it completely though, unless we all agree to turn off our power at night. Power storage is not a solved issue by any means.
China also never embraced nuclear power. They really got big on the world stage right around the time Chernobyl happened, and it was already getting too expensive even then.
Yes, their energy requirements have also skyrocketed in the last 20 years. However if you look at their energy mix, in 2010 their energy mix was around 70% from coal, and today it’s around 50% of their totally energy mix.