The Amount of New Solar Power Production Capacity China Is Manufacturing Is Legitimately Mind-Blowing

[highplainsdem]

https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-production

Last year, a viral drone video from China’s Guizhou province revealed an entire mountain range blanketed in solar panels stretching to the horizon. It’s a stunning visual, but it doesn’t even begin to capture the staggering amount of solar power being produced by the People’s Republic.

As of 2024, China was responsible for 64 percent of the world’s utility-scale solar and wind construction, with 339 gigawatt hours of renewable energy infrastructure in the works, even though it only has around 17 percent of the planet’s population.

To put that in perspective, at that point the total electricity capacity of the planet— not just solar, but nuclear, coal, gas, and renewable energy, all added together — was about 10 terawatts. Now, as a Wired deep dive explains, China can pump out a full terawatt worth of solar panels each year. According to China Daily, the country’s solar capacity grew at a compound rate of 11.7 percent annually from 2020 to 2024. That’s nearly triple the global average of 4.24 percent over the same four-year period, a gap that points to something more like an industrial revolution than mere competitive advantage.

That production capacity isn’t just helping China, where consumer rooftop photovoltaic (PV) cells accounted for 60 percent of new solar infrastructure in the first quarter of 2025. It’s also helping the rest of the world; per Wired, Chinese-made PV panels are so cheap even in the notoriously pricey European market that they cost less than fencing.

-snip-

[NNadir]

1. Despite the "percent talk" China is the world's largest emitter of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide.

They have also built more than 50 nuclear plants in the last 20 years, and still they are the world's largest emitter of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide.

No matter how much solar junk they are produce, the solar industry, at a cost of trillions of dollars has demonstrated conclusively that it is useless to address the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

The sun is widely reported to be unreliable as a result of disappearing from the sky, on average, 12 hours a day.

It is, I note, also too late for nuclear energy to do what it might have done; but as a manufacturing and engineering powerhouse, a scientific powerhouse, China has the best shot and doing what can be done.

It would be useful if they stopped squandering resources and land and money on solar junk though. They know how to build nuclear reactors. Solar energy is not sustainable, not clean, and is wholly dependent on access to dangerous fossil fuels.

[biophile]

2. And I'm sure that covering an entire mountain range is not great for

The native plants and animal in the region. I support solar use in cities, on buildings, over road ways and other manmade deserts. But to cover up nature en masse with solar panels? No

[NNadir]

3. We recently had a fossil fuel sales guy around here rebranding them as "hydrogen" who liked to post obscene pictures...

...of solar facilities in China, including floating facilities on bodies of water. (This was part of the bait and switch scheme taking advantage of the fact that people actually still believe solar energy is "green" despite lots of evidence to the contrary.)

The fact is that solar cells are mass and area intensive and relatively short lived. I regard them largely as consumer junk. The subsidies supporting them are subsidiaries to wealthy people, people who can afford to own homes, as opposed to people who cannot afford homes. They have a waste problem on a scale of millions upon millions of metric tons.

They may be of limited utility in certain cases, I agree, but they are not now, never have been, and never will be as sustainable and as clean as nuclear energy.

[thought crime]

4. In China, Solar and Wind have achieved industrial scale.

Innovation and flexibility in solar and wind industries is making them the cheapest sources of energy, not only in China and Europe, but also in developing countries, island countries, etc. As these industries continue to grow and achieve greater economies of scale, there will be more opportunities for optimization. For example, in Scotland sheep grazing is integrating with solar farms. Climate deniers are spreading misinformation based on the flimsy and false notion that renewable energy "must" always and forever be combined with fossil fuel back up systems for reliability, and yet the expansion continues, because it reduces energy cost and reduces carbon emissions. Systems are already going into production with hydrogen fuel generation as part of the design and eventually the fossil fuel systems can be entirely replaced by hydrogen based systems.