By the end of May 2025, solar capacity had reached 1.08 TW (1,080 GW), up 56.9% year on year.
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I’m not surprised! PV cells are cheaper than plywood these days.
They need it to run those garish lights all over every building in the cities.
Ah but at least those garish lights are all LEDs these days with energy usage a fraction of what it would’ve been in times gone by
Fair point, but there’s so many more of them.
Engineer: wow, these new led lights will use a tenth of the electricity our old lights used!
Boss: So you’re saying we can use ten times as many lights then?
Solaris 🎉🎉
The most interesting thing is the growth
China reached its first 1 GW of installed solar in 2010
10 GW by mid-2013.
By June 2017, total installed capacity exceeded 100 GW
China has reached 1 TW of installed solar mid 2025
Got chatgpt to plot and to extrapolate
Why wouldn’t it just stay a linear graph?
Look at the left side of the first graph. It’s set on an exponential scale.
Oops, I missed that! Thanks.
I don’t understand. What do you mean?
It’s a vibe seeing solar panels cover those iconic Southern China valleys
The hill in the photo looks ugly, tbh. Still, much better (and livelier) than the landscape after oilsands or brown coal extraction.
Preferably, most grid-connected solar panels would be on buildings, deserts, and postindustrial land. But in the face of the climate catastrophe, the South China hills are also fine.
I don’t think it looks ugly at all…
I was just thinking about how much of a nightmare it would be to keep them all clean.
I mean - one thing ugly, and the other thing is that this land could be arable or a nature reserve.
The same is true of oil fields but they won’t even let you see pictures of that.
Seriously. Is that a real photo? I’ve never seen a solar farm covering hills like that.
When I look closely it seems real, there’s all the construction tracks, but the solar panels themselves look fake in this resolution. It would help if they had added a few close-ups in the article.
Still building new coal plants at an increasing rate. Still increasing co2 emissions year on year. Still not commiting to reduced emissions. Nice green washing though.
Thats just co2 emissions, their other environmental damage stats are as bad if not worse.
Being the country with the most solar power generation by far is not “green washing”. For being the world’s factory, they’re doing quite well and it’s obvious from trajectory that they’re going to be among the greenest countries overall, including those countries that have externalized their pollution to China by using them as their factory.
Why do they get to continue to pollute while everyone else has to ramp down? Everyone elses economy should slow down and manufacturing costs go up except China for some reason. I guess they’re just a small developing nation despite having the largest gdp.
Also I don’t care if they have the most solar generation, they also burn the most coal and the most pollution more than the next 6 biggest polluters combined.
Its not “pretty good considering they are the worlds factory” Any country can throw down some solar panels with the money earned from removing all environmental regulations and raping the earth.
Could china be doing more? Yes. Are they doing considerably better than everyone else? Also yes.
Currently china is leading the charge on renewable energy. They are installing more than any developed country, by most measures. They are also flooding the market with solar panels etc. The mass solar adoption happening worldwide is powered by China.
It’s also worth noting they are leading the way in fusion research. I believe they have started/about to start construction of the first viable fusion reactor.
China has a lot of problems, but complaining they should be doing even more on renewables is hypocritical from almost all other countries.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Dam the bar is so low that increasing emissions puts and installing a few solar panels puts you above people who installed renewables and reduced emissions. Its wild how low your standards are for the largest polluter.
Maybe other countries should stop reducing emissions and go back to growing their economy and install some solar panels.
They are the largest polluter primarily because we outsourced our polluting manufacturing to them. The politics of that part are a separate issue, but the results need to be factored in. A lot of Chinese pollution is western pollution, outsourced.
They also appear to actually have a coherent plan that seems on track. Could it be a lot better? Of course! It’s still a lot better than a lot of the world is doing.
Please show me somewhere making large scale improvements that aren’t built upon China’s right now.
Edit to add.
Unfortunately, my standards really are that low. The fact that China is still the only large country/group hitting them says more about the rest of the world.
“We” outsourced manufacturing? No independent private companies moved manufacturing to China because their lab or was cheap and they had no environmental regulations.
They are exploiting this right now by scaling up production to take advantage of the countries that are trying to combat climate change.
They dont have a coherent plan, if you’ve followed chinas climate change journey youd know theyve missed every single milestone and target.
China hit peak coal already.
I don’t know where you heard that but its wrong.
Lmgtfy
