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
Amazing how fast you can build stuff when there’s safety standards, no environmental regulations, no labour rights and the government can expropriate property without a time consuming legal process!
Though I think a prefer living in a country where I have rights even if it takes a bit longer to build stuff.
Gotta love how you jump to the whataboutism when it comes to good China news. “Yeah sure, they may be saving the environment by going solar, but what about… Uh… Environmental regulation?”
Like, mate, manufacturing 90% of the world’s photovoltaics is the best thing you can environmentally do.
To give China credit the solar push was very capitalistic and very well executed. There are so many solar salesmen that will bother you to no end with one offering better deals than another. They come install everything and set up for you and guarantee returns in like 5 years plus mountains of other bonuses (obviously based on location etc.). The environment kinda make you feel stupid for not taking the deal too so you’re really pressured which imo is a win. It’s basically a free market under a dictatorship for a product in high natural demand.
Though I can’t comment on industrial solar panel fields but the consumer part is very well executed and the rest of Asia is like 10 years behind.
Fully propagandized idiot who will follow you around commenting on all your posts if you say a single nice thing about China btw ^
Like america but more competent
We tried getting rid of environmental regulations, safety standards, labour rights, etc. in America and I’m still waiting for when stuff gets built faster… At least the government can’t expropriate property! oh wait… Well at least we still have our rights? oh wait…
I think you call it eminent domain in the US. But I think it can still be challenged in court, but wait a couple months.
Yes, the US is becoming China. You put a guy into power that admires Xi Jinping for the same reason China made Xi President for life: wanted a strongman to run the economy and protect you from evil foreigners. And now you’re getting corporate socialism, just like China has.
Yes, the US is becoming China
Where’s the High Speed Rail?
Nice I love seeing China Greenwashing get reposted. Remember that China is 3x the size of the EU so them having 3x the solar power is a stupid comparison. China also continues to increase coal generation by more than renewables. China is only %27 renewables while the EU is 47%. China is 17% of the world and almost 40% of the emissions.
OECD countries are actually working on emission reduction instead of china which continue to increase emissions with absolute no signs of stopping. They have missed every single renewable target and goal they’re set. But dont worry im sure they will stop building more coal plants in 2030, im sure it wont be to late by then.
China also continues to increase coal generation by more than renewables.
I don’t believe this:
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
In 2024, China approved 66.7GW of new coal-fired capacity, started construction on 94.5GW of coal power projects
Even if you add these 2 together and pretend they were finished the same year it’s not even close to:
China’s renewable energy sector made remarkable progress in 2024, adding 356 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity
They have missed every single renewable target and goal they’re set.
I don’t believe this is true either unless you are referring to some other targets?
In 2020, China set a goal to install at least 1,200 gigawatts (GW) of solar and wind power by 2030. By the end of 2024, China had already surpassed this target, reaching this milestone 6 years ahead of schedule. This was made possible by aggressive investments, government policies, and a surge in solar and wind installations.
China’s solar capacity grew by an incredible 45.2% in 2024, adding 277 GW. Wind capacity also saw a strong increase of 18%, with an additional 80 GW installed. Overall, total power generation capacity rose by 14.6% in 2024, driven mainly by renewables.
China is only %27 renewables while the EU is 47%.
Don’t worry, just like everything else I’m sure that will flip in the future
Europe has plenty of money apparently to suddenly:
NATO leaders on Wednesday confirmed their commitment to more than double defence spending by 2035 banding words like “crucial”, “momentous” and “quantum leap”
Just why does it take an emergency to make some proper progress:
Global energy storage owner-operator BW ESS and Spanish energy storage developer Ibersun say a new joint venture is intended to build eight four-hour battery projects across the country, with a combined capacity of 2.2 GW, 8.8 GWh.
Where will the batteries be made I wonder?
On top of this energy prices in the EU are ridiculous and for some reason they still can’t get off the gas, which leads to an unreal point of France giving more money to Russia for gas than in aid to Ukraine, so they have high energy prices and they’re funding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and their companies and manufacturing are leaving them… to go to China…
https://aussie.zone/comment/17361559
But I appreciate your scepticism, especially for China, they are the worlds top producer of CO2 by FAR but I do want to address
Greenwashing
This is something I’ve wanted for a while:
It requires EU importers to pay a levy corresponding to the embedded carbon emissions in 303 emission-intensive products
I’ve long disliked that places like the EU and the rest of the west can export their dirty manufacturing over to China where companies take advantage of lax or no environmental regulations, it’s a false economy and makes the west look a whole lot greener and cleaner than it would if we were manufacturing what we used back at home
‘China has Apple by the balls’: How the rising superpower captured the tech giant
edit: boy I sure do love to procrastinate and talk about energy and co2 instead of studying :|
Good for China on that!
To add some perspective, China is about 2 and a quarter times as large as the EU nations, and according to currentresults.com seems to get a bit more sunshine than the EU does. So the difference isn’t quite as stark as this post makes it seem.
But still, it’s good that China is taking solar power seriously. I didn’t realize they were doing that well.
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.
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.
This has been going on for years and will continue.
China really really really needs a robust and diverse energy infrastructure. Industry needs huge amounts of energy. AI needs huge amounts of energy. The military needs huge amounts of energy.
Coal is unreliable and dirty. Oil can be blocked at the Straight of Malacca and a few pipelines.
China is also the world’s factory. They own the entire logistics chain for producing renewable generators; from raw materials to final assembly. They have all the infrastructure to not only build solar panels and wind turbines at scale, they’ve scaled up building the machines that build them.
Coal is unreliable and dirty.
China use absurd amounts of coal and they’re not slowing down. They’re the worlds largest producer and consumer of coal. They’re increasing use of all power generation types - coal, solar, nuclear.
Coal is unreliable
How? I would’ve said coal is very reliable, it worked for over a hundred years.
People talk about China’s energy use like it’s not* their* energy use. They used that power to produce the stupid shit that you bought, dumbass. You’re responsible for that energy use, despite it being generated in China.
This is legit true IDK why you’re getting downvoted. Just because it doesn’t show on US energy usage, every time you buy stupid shit you don’t need like an automatic corn dog maker or a taco holder shaped like a sombrero that holds a shot glass in the middle, that has a real cost in terms of CO2 and that is done in China.
i think I need an automatic corn dog maker and a taco holder shaped like a sombrero that holds a shot glass in the middle
I immediately went looking on temu :)
I don’t the poster meant to happen!
Cool if true, but the source seemed to be bluesky soooo it’s a big gain of salt
Solar panels don’t work as well with greysky.
Yeah I think by “source” they just mean they’re just giving credit to the bsky post they got the graph from, the data seems to be from a green energy transition thinktank. No idea if you’d put more stock in ember-energy.org/, so make of that what you will 🤷♂️
From the website:
Data into action
Open data and intelligent policy analysis to unlock a clean, electrified energy future
Good on them. The earlier they can shut down those coal plants, the better.
Yep, solar is awesome when you have coal and gas power plants, not so much when you have nuclear ones.
How idiotic.
Do explain, I’m all ears.
I think they don’t get that your comment is fighting the same fight by being pro solar & anti coal/gas.
Unless you meant keeping the coal and gas plants, which really should be turned off and ended at this point. They’re just sources of lung cancer & emissions
Yes, of course I’ve meant it in a positive way - a way to replace coal and gas. But solar is not just positive, they are problematic when you couple them with nuclear for the simple reasons that solar is not reliable and you can’t throttle nuclear - they are like big ships, they require a lot of time to steer. Furthermore solar energy low price causes problems for nuclear higher prices. Which wouldn’t be a problem if solar was reliable and continuous (long winter nights much?). But it’s not, but you still need a reliable energy source. And so on. The pro solar panel crowd don’t understand many of these implications and go with simple “idiotic” and downvotes.
The idiot digs deeper, and shows his true colours. Asinine.
They also expanded coal power, roads, and removed their population limiting policies, though. They produce about 3 times as much CO2 per person as India, Indonesia, and many South American nations, likely many nations in Africa as well but theres a lot of missing data.
Pollution per GDP is a better measure. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity Pollution per GNP would be even better but I can’t find it.
Individuals don’t pollution much, it’s mostly industry. Really poor countries often don’t pollution much because they can’t afford to. Sometimes they pollute prodigiously because the only thing they can afford to do is destructive resource extraction. Rich countries can often outsource their pollution to poorer countries.
China has been making mind boggling investments in renewables. They have been expanding all their energy sources but their renewables have the lions share of the growth.
They’ve been building roads and all kinds of infrastructure. That’s what the BRI is all about, even if they’re being a bit quieter about saying the phrase. They like to build their long haul roads on elevated columns; not only because it’s less disruptive to wildlife but because it lets them use giant road laying robots to place prefab highway segments.
They dropped the one-child policy a while back but they’re having some trouble getting people to have more babies. That said, there’s some research that suggests that rural populations around the world are severely undercounted, so they may have a bunch more subsistence farmers than they, or anyone else, realizes.
Why is Polution per GDP a better measure? I don’t care how much they export when they’re killing the planet at a faster rate every year with no intentions to stop it. I will praise China and the rest of the world when they reimplement and follow through with plans to ethically lower the world population, such as investment in education especially for women and incentives or fines based on numbers of children.
Why is Polution per GDP a better measure?
They wanted a measure that makes China look better.
Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.
It’s trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don’t pollute much but we’re not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.
Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we’d have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.
I’m not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.
