You also have to consider energy consumption per capita here which is far higher in US. And of course, solar isn’t the only alternative energy used in China. Overall, fossil fuel use was already less than half of power capacity back in 2023.
iirc their new installations in 2023 exceeded the rest of the world’s installed capacity. They’ve gotten that much solar only in the last few years whereas all other countries lag very far behind in new projects
Makes sense, but also lowcarbonpower . org places yearly electric energy per person at 7 MWh in China vs 12.8 MWh in the US. The percentage of solar in the electricity mix works out to 8.3% in China and 6.9% in the US. YoY growth relative to overall electricity consumption in China is definitely higher as well, but I haven’t checked in detail. What really sucks in China is the high dependence on coal which results in way worse CO2 than the US. Similar problem to Germany but even more so, since theres almost no gas power in China.
A while ago I was surprised to learn China only really started installing solar panels around the year 2012, while in germany the trend started in around 2005. US in 2010. (I chose the year where solar passed a threshold of 0.1% of overall electricity according to my source.
China has 4x the population as the U.S. and this graphic says they have 3.69 as much solar power so that’s slightly less per capita?
You also have to consider energy consumption per capita here which is far higher in US. And of course, solar isn’t the only alternative energy used in China. Overall, fossil fuel use was already less than half of power capacity back in 2023.
iirc their new installations in 2023 exceeded the rest of the world’s installed capacity. They’ve gotten that much solar only in the last few years whereas all other countries lag very far behind in new projects
Yup https://reglobal.org/snapshot-of-global-pv-markets-2024/
Makes sense, but also lowcarbonpower . org places yearly electric energy per person at 7 MWh in China vs 12.8 MWh in the US. The percentage of solar in the electricity mix works out to 8.3% in China and 6.9% in the US. YoY growth relative to overall electricity consumption in China is definitely higher as well, but I haven’t checked in detail. What really sucks in China is the high dependence on coal which results in way worse CO2 than the US. Similar problem to Germany but even more so, since theres almost no gas power in China.
A while ago I was surprised to learn China only really started installing solar panels around the year 2012, while in germany the trend started in around 2005. US in 2010. (I chose the year where solar passed a threshold of 0.1% of overall electricity according to my source.