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Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people)

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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

The US may have effectively banned it, but everybody else is buying loads of it.

As far as I can tell it’s operating at capacity. China’s installing it for the same reason everyone else is. It’s cheap as chips. Power stations take a lot of planning and management, while you can take a few acres of fields and effectively turn it into a money generator with no moving parts.

I’d have got some myself, but my house faced the wrong way to get in on the free solar panels boom, and the up front costs mean it won’t pay itself back for like 20 years. I was tempted once the prices went through the roof when Russia invaded Ukraine, but I moved to a tariff priced every 30 minutes or so and the benefits vanished. I might as well let a local farmer build it all instead.

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nednobbins@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
China effectively seems to be playing Factorio. They have a solar/wind production rate of X/day and X keeps going up faster and faster.

They’ll sell those panels and turbines to whoever will take them. They’re cheap but the sheer volume means that you need a huge economy to take any significant share of that inventory. With the US effectively out of the picture the biggest remaining economy is China. On top of that the EU does have some tariffs on Chinese renewables and that skews the deployments even more towards China.

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