Green Energy

3530 readers

2 users here now

Everything about energy production and storage.

Related communities:

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

poVoq@slrpnk.net

SteveKLord@slrpnk.net

100

H1 2025: China installs more solar than rest of the world combined (electrek.co)

submitted 3 months ago by schizoidman@lemmy.zip to c/energy@slrpnk.net

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In H1 2025, the world added 380 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity – a staggering 64% jump compared to the same period in 2024, when 232 GW came online. China was responsible for installing a massive 256 GW of that solar capacity

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

According to globalsolaratlas, solar output is among the highest in Tibet.
China is also known for high voltage DC power transmission over very long distances.
Are you claiming they're building solar power stations and not plugging them to the grid? That doesn't make much sense.

[–] Five@slrpnk.net 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Are you claiming they’re building solar power stations and not plugging them to the grid?

That's a reasonable assumption based on data from the Chinese Communist Party-controlled National Bureau of Statistics.

That doesn’t make much sense.

It doesn't make much sense to overbuild housing capacity, only to demolish empty or nearly finished buildings either, but that's also something that China is famous for.

Some possible explanations for a metropolis sized garden of dark solar panels are:

Tibet is the dumping ground for panels that don't meet export quality controls
Panels are cheap enough that using them as shade for desert agriculture makes fiscal sense
A make-work project to justify the migration of ethnic Chinese laborers to colonized Tibet
A scheme to artificially inflate GDP
An authoritarian green-washing propaganda project

These explanations are not mutually exclusive.