China Will Have 1 Trillion Watts of Solar by the end of 2025
By Brian Wang with CREEI and NEA data sources
The China Renewable Energy Engineering Institute (CREEI) reports that by the end of 2024, China is set to add 190GW of solar capacity and 70GW of wind. The NEA reports China added added 217GW of solar power and 76GW of wind power in 2023 – to reach a total capacity of 1,050GW.
China needs 15 Tesla Megapack factories (150,000 per year) worth of fixed storage every year for the additional wind and solar. This will increase as China accelerates solar and wind installation to meet AI data center demand.
By the end of 2024, China’s installed solar and wind capacity will be 1,310GW.
In 2023, China's solar power generation reached 584 terawatt hours (TWh). China had 392 GW of installed solar at the end of 2022. In 2022, the US had 110 Gigawatts of installed solar and it generated 204 TWh. In 2023, China contributed almost 60% of additional global energy capacity (an added 301GW), making it both the largest greenhouse gas emitter and green energy producer.
By May 2024, China had installed 690GW of solar capacity and 460GW of wind, which made up 38% of its power generation capacity.
China is averaging about 1 MWh/year (2.8kWh/day) per kilowatt of installed solar. The US is getting 1.85 MWh/year (4.8 kWh/day) per kilowatt of installed solar.
It is a common mistake for people to assume that the kilowatts of installed energy are all equal. US nuclear power can get 8 MWh/year (22 kWh/day) per installed kilowatt. Other countries get 6-7 MWh/year per installed kilowatt of nuclear. Coal power can get about 4 MWh/year per kilowatt of installed power. Hydro can get about 3 MWh/year per kilowatt of installed power. There is also a lot of variability by country, locations and projects even for the same energy type. At the end of 2023, China had 53 Gigawatts of nuclear power installed and this generated 440 TWh. 600 GW of solar generated 584 TWH of power which was 33% more than 53 gigawatts of nuclear making 440 TWh.
The fast build out of solar power in China could take time to fully connect to the grid. China had much more installed solar power in 2017 at 130 GW than the US in 2022 but it took until 2019 for China to generate more electricity than the US using 110 GW.
Mongolia is a good location for solar power generation, with 270–300 sunny days per year. This is equivalent to 2,250–3,300 hours of sunshine. Mongolia has cold winters with snow and ice. The number of sunny days should not be the problem. Too much heat can also be bad for solar panels, reducing their efficiency by 10%-25%. China's solar power only generates about 55-65% of the electricity for the same installed capacity as the USA. The fast buildout could have a lag factor before everything is connected. The China solar locations are probably 20-40% worse than the best places in the USA. China has dust and air pollution that is reducing the effectiveness of the solar power. China is choosing to mass install in north and northwest where the Gobi desert is located. China is also building solar in many other locations by the super-scale projects are in the Gobi desert.
China had 3.56x as much installed solar capacity but just over 2X in electrical generation.
The Kubuqi Base Project is a 16-gigawat (GW) solar, wind, and coal project in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. It's the world's largest wind and photovoltaic power project developed and built in a desert. The Kubuqi base project is roughly the size of 20 Central Parks. China will build 450 Gigawatts of solar and wind power in the desert.
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