Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – According to Asia Society Policy Institute Senior Fellow Lauri Myllyvirta, China installed 93 gigawatts of solar in May, along with 27 gigawatts of wind. She points out that this is equivalent to 100 solar panels being put in every second.
China has passed the 1 terrawatt milestone for installed solar capacity, says Vincent Shaw at PV Magazine. The US only had a fourth or so of that by the end of last year. Shaw writes that “From January to May, new solar installations totaled 197.85 GW, up 388.03% from the same period last year.” He explains this incredible ramping up of solar power as being the result of government policies. Green energy has grown so fast that China’s emissions are falling for the first time in the industrial era.
The US installed an average of 4 gigawatts of solar per month in 2024. But that fell to about 3.6 gigs per month the first quarter of this year. Falling is going backward. This decline will steepen dramatically with the passage of Trump’s obese hideous tax bill Saturday night.
Let’s just put it out there in black and white. China was already kicking our asses before we chose to commit national energy suicide.
China is already installing 25 times as much solar as America each month. We will now certainly fall farther and farther behind Beijing.
Back when I was a kid, the US was perceived to have a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union, which put a scare into the Washington elite. Friends, there is a solar gap.
A solar gap is much more dangerous than a missile gap — which wasn’t real anyway, just more Washington paranoia. The country that makes the world’s solar panels is going to be the powerhouse of the twenty-first century, since the whole world will electrify in the coming three decades. It will do so ever more urgently as Nature brings down the hammer with ever greater brutality as a result of our burning coal, fossil gas and petroleum, causing climate breakdown. Solar energy will be increasingly popular, as in Pakistan, because it is cheap. But it will also be actively promoted in much of the world because the alternative is dangerous carbon dioxide emissions, which cost the world some $417 billion in climate-related disasters last year, and cost the US alone $182 billion. Since our property is more highly valued than that in much of the rest of the world, hurricanes, floods, storm surges, erosion and wildfires do more dollar damage here.
Who is going to supply Asia’s 4.8 billion people with solar energy? On present evidence it will be China. Who is going to supply Africa’s 1.5 billion people (who will grow to 3.8 billion by 2100) with solar panels? China. Who is going to supply the nearly 700 million people of Latin America and the Caribbean? China. Europe is the only economy that now has the scientific, technological and industrial capacity to compete in this industry, and signs aren’t good there, either. China is deigning to open some solar panel factories in places like France, and while that will help the French economy, China will repatriate the profits to Beijing.
Photo of solar panels on roofs, Wuxi Shi, Jiangsu Sheng, China, by Ming Z: https://www.pexels.com/photo/solar-panels-on-roofs-9731105/
The estimates for the value of the global solar energy market are all over the place, but something on the order of $200 billion is plausible today. It is projected to reach $600 billion by 2030, in only 5 years. The Chinese have 80% of the industry now, and they may well still have that five years from now. Certainly, Trump’s America won’t be competing seriously in that space.
China is emerging as the world’s first electrostate, the advanced superpower of this century, which could well be the Chinese century. Trump’s doddering old tattered America, blighted with toxic fracking pools and oil spills, crowned with opulence for the carbon-farting millionaires in their gated communities and with penury for harried workers in the minimum-wage strip malls selling poisonous micro-plastics as their wares, is staggering into the new century on arthritic knees, packing useless high-tech side-arms for a contest it has already lost.
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