China's renewable energy push update

[mr friendly guy]

In 2010 China surpassed the United states in wind capacity (44.7 GW vs 40.2 GW), to become the number one wind producer, although it still had problems connecting all of the new installations to the grid. However it didn't stop there. The only other political entity greater than China's wind capacity was the European Union, and China surpassed them in 2015 (145 GW vs 141.5 GW) and continues to expand the lead in 2016 (168.69 GW vs 153.7 GW).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country

Now in terms of solar China has now surpass the EU in the middle of 2017. We know in 2016 the EU had around 100 GW of solar to China's 78 GW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country (please note this contains the top 37 solar producers and includes 16 EU countries, with number 37 being Finland at 15 MW). I am going to hazard the other 12 EU countries not on the list ain't producing much to change the figures.

If we look at the top 3 EU producers, Germany increased from 40.85 GW to 41.75 GW and Italy plans to increase 2.3 GW by 2020. The UK's installations has plummeted by 80%, but as we can see in the first wiki link in 2016 they only increased by around 2 GW in 2016 anyway.

Now lets give Italy 2.3 GW because I am too time poor to find the exact figures, and give germany its 0.9 GW and lets just give the UK 1 GW even though installations plummeted 80%. The rest of the EU most probably won't change as much, but if we add these numbers it will be less than 110 GW.

Well China just kind of beat that with 112 GW by the end of the July (the source is Greenpeace as distasteful as it is). China does plan to slow down onwards to 2020, but its likely to continue to expand its PV capacity faster than the EU can.

China has now surpass the entire EU in 2017 in terms of solar. BTW the other big challenger is the US, and in 2016 the US had less capacity than Germany in solar, but will likely beat it in 2017.

So anyone else objects to China taking a leadership role in renewables? Anyone besides Chris Uhlmann that is.

[aerius]

The interesting part for me is capacity factor, or how much of the installed capacity is being used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_powe ... generation

I haven't gone digging for more recent data yet, but from what's on that page it looks like China isn't making good use of the wind power it has installed. The US and EU are averaging around 20% whereas China seems stuck at around 12%, which is really quite bad. Either their wind turbines are stuck in bad locations or they haven't properly hooked them up to the grid. In terms of actual energy generation from wind, China would still be a fair bit behind the EU if historical trends in capacity factor still hold. Which of course is a big assumption, and I'll have to do some digging to see what the numbers are these days.

[mr friendly guy]

From memory the people who manufacture the turbines and panels are doing it faster than the people who connect to the grid. So its mainly a grid connection problem, especially when the areas which produce the energy aren't necessarily close to the areas which need it the most.

Another interesting fact is, according to Scientific American between 2008 and 2013, China's solar-electric panel industry dropped world prices by 80 percent. I got my panels in 2010, so I guess I only benefited partially from that. On the other hand, I wouldn't get such generous rebates for my solar if I had purchased the panels in 2013, so I guess it balances out.