> a boom in solar that saw the country [China] add 92 gigawatts of capacity—that’s 92 billion watts—in a single month in May, compared to all-time U.S. installations of 134 GW.
That's an insane stat. China added 92GW of solar in May 2025 alone.
It is an insane number but May 2025 is a bit of an outlier. The entire first half of the year they installed 197.85 and in May they installed 92.92 of that.
Much of this solar was rushed construction to get them in before the new electricity pricing policy goes into effect. It isn't known yet how much the buildout will drop off for the remainder of the year but it is pretty conceivable that some fraction of the construction for the rest of the year was "pulled" forward and rushed to get it in before June. I'm hopeful China's insane buildout will continue but we probably won't see numbers like May 2025 for awhile at least.
The short summary: if a renewable project was built and finished before June, it gets the old, more profitable electricity rates, but if it is finished after June, it is less profitable.
Comparing to the UK probably isn't the best though since the UK latitude makes it not super favourable to Solar. It would be better to compare it to Southern Europe.
Spain has 40GW and GDP that's about 1/10th of China. Still, dividing China's capacity of 90GW by 10 still means they built a quarter of Spain's capacity in a month. Crazy.
you know what's really fun is that the value in US dollars of all that solar energy market in china was only about 2.5 times higher than the value of the solar market in the US in 2024 (despite total capacity and newly installed capacity in china both being about 7x)
1. it's not a representative month. Building a solar farm for two years and having it go online in one month, leads to big jumps. If you look at the previous year, in 2024 China added 277 GW, so 23 MW per month.
2. At the end of 2024 the US had 239 GW installed. So about the same order of magnitude as China added in 2024 (277 GW, or 15% more).
3. The fact China added in 2024 a similar amount of solar capacity as the US in its entire history, is partly a function of exponential growth in solar in general.
For example Spain doubled its capacity in 2019 versus 2018. Then doubled it again two years later in 2021. Then almost doubled it again two years later in 2022 etc.
In other words it's not so strange in solar actually to see you add in a single year, the same capacity as you've built in all the years prior, regardless of whether it is China. Spain doubled in 1-year period, and then doubled twice in a row in a 2-year period, in the most recent years.
Still it's an insane stat, just wanted to add some nuance. -- The fact we have a president who utters nonsense about wind and solar and is actively working against it, is insane and sad.
The US, like most democracies, is worse at long term planning. It needs robust incentives to counteract short term instincts.
A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.
Well, make life afordable then, a simple solution. After that is achieved, make
de-carbonated energy naturally cheaper than the carbon-based alternatives - there will be no need for carbon taxation and the right won't be able to mount a successful attack.
Certainly and that speaks to the problems of democracies. At least in theory if you ensure the tax is progressive as I suggested it shouldn't make the life of the majority unaffordable. However, monied interest would of course try, and maybe succeed, to convince voters of that anyway (thanks Citizens United).
I guess in democracies, because we have freedom, then you need to make change desirable.
In this case, you simply need to make renewable energy cheaper and the market will do the rest.
Governments can achieve this through R&D investment, tax incentives for such R&D, subsidies to enable scale if that’s where it’s heading, building infrastructure to reduce cost bases etc.
I guess this also requires _some_ medium term thinking. It also requires genuine desire from governments to improve the lives of their citizens and their countries, and I think that is severely lacking now that the west is in decline. Ruling parties are more likely to help themselves than to build a better future.
> A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.
Better is to distribute all of it back to the people with everyone getting the same amount regardless of income. People who are using less carbon than the per capita average end up getting more back than they spent and people using more than the average end up paying a net tax.
Speaking about long term planning and short term instincts it is obvious (for me personally) that any and all so called "carbon taxes" or "carbon credits" are simply a bullshit greenwashing schemes, doing more harm than good in the real long term. They are politically motivated and short term pseudo "solutions" doing nothing but shifting emissions to some "other" party or country or region. Dollars or euros or yuan paid as a fine or incentive for emissions doesn't combat those same emissions, not even a little bit.
I'm inclined to share your scepticism on carbon credits, but a carbon tax is very efficient. It simply prices in a negative externality and lets the market solve the problem. This is probably why it's one of the few taxes that has a broad level of support among economists[0].
Definitely. Fines do nothing to deter bad behaviors. We should also get rid of traffic tickets and penalties for business crimes. They're all "justice-washing".
People say that but the underlying assumption seems to be planning for the long-term at the nation state level is a good idea.
Given how chaotic the world is, I’m not sure that is true or if so just how true it is.
Democracies are inherently more chaotic than Communist dictatorships because of their very nature - democracies don’t tend to aim for stability, because stability brings about some good things but some bad things like lack of innovation and reduced competing, though I am not saying those are aspects of China per se, just speaking generally.
If we were to speak about China we could bring up a few long term planning failures. 3 stand out in my mind: the One Child Policy, the mass killing and starvation of Chinese people under Mao which set China back decades never mind the suffering, and more recently perhaps over-construction and the resulting ghost cities and unused infrastructure.
We could point to American short term thinking problems too but we are broadly familiar with those.
All that is to say, there’s a lot of either fear mongering or propaganda, not sure which. “China is long term oriented better watch out!” Is the current media phenomenon but nobody seems to really look at their long term planning failures or ask whether such long term planning is even good or successful.
Though one area China has been great at for long term planning is making sure their kids aren’t addicted to TikTok like ours.
China's CCP do party politics we'd have trouble to distinguish from failed democracies. They kinda fight with each other within the party, then the local CCP members vote on which delegates to send to the central committee equivalent (the NPC), and those 3000 delegates basically vote on country officials (which ultimately decides the political orientation). You also have weird political games between provincial politics and the pressure they put on delegates, and the pressure national officials put on provincial politics.
All in all, China can't be reduced to 'a dictatorship'. It's an oligarchy for sure (90 millions vote, less than 1% of the population) but it has too much political life to be reduced to that.
I didn't mean to imply communist dictatorships always get this right, of course even with central planning and, supposed, long term thinking it has gone horribly wrong before, as you point out.
It does make me think about the failure to react to changes or ideas that we ill-advised from the very start. I think, at least partially, this stems less from the long time horizon when planning and more from the lack of dissent in a dictatorship. The Chernobyl TV series's "The cost of lies" concept feels very poignant.
Back when I worked in EDF, biggest nuclear energy producer, I was astonished to see how fast China was developing its nuclear power.
it had to build nuclear reactor, solar panels and also diesel engines because they just need so much energy but the sheer amount of money spent on nuclear reactor is unthinkable.
That was 10 years ago already, I’m glad to see it’s having an impact. Soon enough, the picture of polluted air in China will be gone and we’ll see that instead in the USA.
China has significantly slowed their nuclear build out. They're still building them faster than anyone else, but the primary cause of the headline is solar.
China is doing this for energy independence. Their fossil fuel supply chain is critically vulnerable. They don't care about the climate, but will happily play the optics.
Fossil fuels aren't just bad for global climate, air pollution (which is mostly local) kills 7-8 million people per year.
There's an interesting study that arises from a natural experiment based on coal subsidies in China[0]. It found that life expectancy in otherwise similar locations is 3 years lower where the subsidy is paid, and thus more coal is burned.
They do care about reducing pollution, and have managed to do so quite significantly in many cities.
China also has quite a bit to lose: many large cities on the coasts, and worsening water shortage problems.
National security probably plays a large role, and I reckon they would prioritize economy over climate, but the evidence implies that they do also care.
Oversimplification to single causes is sign of poor thinking.
Solar is also economically better for China.
Secondly, I would strongly guess China ramped up production thinking that there would be more overseas demand. It isn't just low demand from the US; for example my "green" New Zealand is also not buying utility scale solar (oversimplified reason from horse's mouth: it is due to our major electricity generators colluding - the actual blocking reasons are more capitalistically complex).
There are very few situations in the world where cause and effect are clear: facile explanations of cause and effect are usually wrong in important ways.
China actually has quite a bit of public debate and discontent around air quality at a minimum. They definitely care in that they don’t want to piss off the populace.
I’m not sure it’s absolutely knowable. These are all just opinions. But I feel that China is far more likely to actually care about the climate than America is.
One of the benefits of being a pseudodemocratic centralized government is that you can kind of decide something is important without worrying how to get reelected in a few years. All it takes is a leadership that decides this is their vanity project to be remembered by, or perhaps to actually care about China in 100 years (the Americans obviously can’t think or see this far anymore). This is possibly helped by having a population with a culture of collectivism. For better or worse you don’t have to actually solve the “what’s in it for me?” question that seems to completely screw climate plans when the plan is, “it’ll suck for you but your grandkids will appreciate it.”
Like all the crypto climate deniers and True Bird Lovers* are fond of saying, the climate doesn't care about per capita emissions, only total emissions. And now China's total emissions have reduced.
Neither the US cares about the climate amd doesn't care about the optics either.
This is capitalism in action: solar is cheaper than anything else per kwh. The obsession with fossil in the West is due to the fossil fuel lobbies, not because of the rational market forces. China doesn't have that.
> They don't care about the climate, but will happily play the optics
It is not just optics or energy independence. There is a genuine effort to reduce pollution. People forget in 00s media used to bash the smog in China. It was an unlivable air. They truly wanted to transform it - it just so happens that renewables solve a lot of problems simultaneously.
The US also apparently seeks energy independence, but seems unwilling to give up "farmland" (or, you know, household roofs or awnings over parking lots) to do it.
The EU will introduce "sanctions" via a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) at the end of this year. Currently the US wouldn't be affected much by this -- it only affects cement, aluminium, fertilisers, iron and steel, hydrogen and electricity for now.
What sanctions are China going to leverage on USA? The Yuan is pegged to the USD at an artificially low exchange rate and America owns little of strategic value in China. Tariff wars are already ongoing as the economies go through a gradual divorce.
China's economy is export-based and U.S. is its largest buyer. If it refused to export to the U.S. its economy would go into a freefall and the Yuan would hyperinflate.
With that excuse specifically? Probably not. But we're 100% charging straight into a future where the US ends up being isolated and subject to punitive extortion of some form, yeah. Once we cross the threshold of being "more annoying to bend the knee toward than Beijing", our particular flavor of hegemony is over and the world enters its new era.
Is there a future where you want an authoritarian government on the other side of the planet to bully you into shutting down all your industry to reach some nebulous "carbon" goals? Cutting ties with China could have lots of benefits though.
US Noped out of Paris Accords and is on the path to unregulate greenhouse gas emissions while the article talks about the INCREASING US emissions while China's falls.
The US outsourced massive swaths of its manufacturing to China and with it, the emissions from those industries.
Talking in absolutes without context, nor the trajectories is rigorous at best and disingenuous or worse.
From the article
> International Energy Agency (IEA) figures show Chinese coal consumption falling 2.6% in the first half of the year, largely due to a boom in solar that saw the country add 92 gigawatts of capacity—that’s 92 billion watts—in a single month in May, compared to all-time U.S. installations of 134 GW.
So in one month, China added 68% of our total solar capacity to its grid.
U.S. already migrated massive amounts of its energy sector from coal to natural gas over the last couple of decades, which reduced emissions from that replaced capacity by 60% years ago. If and when solar truly makes economic sense to justify the switching costs, it will happen, period. A lot of it is. Solar is growing healthily in the U.S.
Problems with solar remain, however. It's neither practical nor safe to build 100% solar grid. You must overbuild capacity on solar, because weather happens. No energy is generated at night. Therefore you have to factory battery install cost as well. Finally there are black swan weather events that DO happen in nature that NO ONE can prevent:
> neither practical nor safe to build 100% solar grid
No one is suggesting a 100% solar grid. You combine solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear.
> battery
Battery prices have been in free-fall for a while, and there are a bunch of interesting tech for grid-scale energy storage. The vanadium redox battery is appealing for grid-scale energy because the energy capacity is determined by the amount of liquid you store in its tanks, so scaling that is trivial. Sodium ion batteries are appealing since they're made with abundant materials and their lower energy density compared to lithium ion isn't a concern for grid-scale storage.
> black swan weather events
Which is why no one is suggesting 100% solar. You do a mix like I described earlier.
Regular reminder that it is an ESTIMATE of emissions across an enormous variety of industries, businesses and individuals over the whole year. A real factual and measurable metric is not some calculated rate of change of a value, but a measure of a value itself - in this case an amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Go to https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/, open "Full record" and see an objective and factual data (and not some politically motivated estimates) - amount of actually emitted gas is increasing, and the rate of increase is accelerating both for lowest points and highest points.
Readit News
That's an insane stat. China added 92GW of solar in May 2025 alone.
Much of this solar was rushed construction to get them in before the new electricity pricing policy goes into effect. It isn't known yet how much the buildout will drop off for the remainder of the year but it is pretty conceivable that some fraction of the construction for the rest of the year was "pulled" forward and rushed to get it in before June. I'm hopeful China's insane buildout will continue but we probably won't see numbers like May 2025 for awhile at least.
The short summary: if a renewable project was built and finished before June, it gets the old, more profitable electricity rates, but if it is finished after June, it is less profitable.
More details on this here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-chinas-renewable-p...
So even if you divide China's solar by 5, they added in a month what we have built in >10 years
Spain has 40GW and GDP that's about 1/10th of China. Still, dividing China's capacity of 90GW by 10 still means they built a quarter of Spain's capacity in a month. Crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
1. it's not a representative month. Building a solar farm for two years and having it go online in one month, leads to big jumps. If you look at the previous year, in 2024 China added 277 GW, so 23 MW per month.
2. At the end of 2024 the US had 239 GW installed. So about the same order of magnitude as China added in 2024 (277 GW, or 15% more).
3. The fact China added in 2024 a similar amount of solar capacity as the US in its entire history, is partly a function of exponential growth in solar in general.
For example Spain doubled its capacity in 2019 versus 2018. Then doubled it again two years later in 2021. Then almost doubled it again two years later in 2022 etc.
In other words it's not so strange in solar actually to see you add in a single year, the same capacity as you've built in all the years prior, regardless of whether it is China. Spain doubled in 1-year period, and then doubled twice in a row in a 2-year period, in the most recent years.
Still it's an insane stat, just wanted to add some nuance. -- The fact we have a president who utters nonsense about wind and solar and is actively working against it, is insane and sad.
A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.
0: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
In this case, you simply need to make renewable energy cheaper and the market will do the rest.
Governments can achieve this through R&D investment, tax incentives for such R&D, subsidies to enable scale if that’s where it’s heading, building infrastructure to reduce cost bases etc.
I guess this also requires _some_ medium term thinking. It also requires genuine desire from governments to improve the lives of their citizens and their countries, and I think that is severely lacking now that the west is in decline. Ruling parties are more likely to help themselves than to build a better future.
Better is to distribute all of it back to the people with everyone getting the same amount regardless of income. People who are using less carbon than the per capita average end up getting more back than they spent and people using more than the average end up paying a net tax.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...
Deleted Comment
Given how chaotic the world is, I’m not sure that is true or if so just how true it is.
Democracies are inherently more chaotic than Communist dictatorships because of their very nature - democracies don’t tend to aim for stability, because stability brings about some good things but some bad things like lack of innovation and reduced competing, though I am not saying those are aspects of China per se, just speaking generally.
If we were to speak about China we could bring up a few long term planning failures. 3 stand out in my mind: the One Child Policy, the mass killing and starvation of Chinese people under Mao which set China back decades never mind the suffering, and more recently perhaps over-construction and the resulting ghost cities and unused infrastructure.
We could point to American short term thinking problems too but we are broadly familiar with those.
All that is to say, there’s a lot of either fear mongering or propaganda, not sure which. “China is long term oriented better watch out!” Is the current media phenomenon but nobody seems to really look at their long term planning failures or ask whether such long term planning is even good or successful.
Though one area China has been great at for long term planning is making sure their kids aren’t addicted to TikTok like ours.
All in all, China can't be reduced to 'a dictatorship'. It's an oligarchy for sure (90 millions vote, less than 1% of the population) but it has too much political life to be reduced to that.
It does make me think about the failure to react to changes or ideas that we ill-advised from the very start. I think, at least partially, this stems less from the long time horizon when planning and more from the lack of dissent in a dictatorship. The Chernobyl TV series's "The cost of lies" concept feels very poignant.
China’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987548 - August 2025
it had to build nuclear reactor, solar panels and also diesel engines because they just need so much energy but the sheer amount of money spent on nuclear reactor is unthinkable.
That was 10 years ago already, I’m glad to see it’s having an impact. Soon enough, the picture of polluted air in China will be gone and we’ll see that instead in the USA.
There's an interesting study that arises from a natural experiment based on coal subsidies in China[0]. It found that life expectancy in otherwise similar locations is 3 years lower where the subsidy is paid, and thus more coal is burned.
0: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1300018110
I don't think it's that simple.
China is a signatory to Kyoto and Paris.
They do care about reducing pollution, and have managed to do so quite significantly in many cities.
China also has quite a bit to lose: many large cities on the coasts, and worsening water shortage problems.
National security probably plays a large role, and I reckon they would prioritize economy over climate, but the evidence implies that they do also care.
Solar is also economically better for China.
Secondly, I would strongly guess China ramped up production thinking that there would be more overseas demand. It isn't just low demand from the US; for example my "green" New Zealand is also not buying utility scale solar (oversimplified reason from horse's mouth: it is due to our major electricity generators colluding - the actual blocking reasons are more capitalistically complex).
There are very few situations in the world where cause and effect are clear: facile explanations of cause and effect are usually wrong in important ways.
One of the benefits of being a pseudodemocratic centralized government is that you can kind of decide something is important without worrying how to get reelected in a few years. All it takes is a leadership that decides this is their vanity project to be remembered by, or perhaps to actually care about China in 100 years (the Americans obviously can’t think or see this far anymore). This is possibly helped by having a population with a culture of collectivism. For better or worse you don’t have to actually solve the “what’s in it for me?” question that seems to completely screw climate plans when the plan is, “it’ll suck for you but your grandkids will appreciate it.”
Like all the crypto climate deniers and True Bird Lovers* are fond of saying, the climate doesn't care about per capita emissions, only total emissions. And now China's total emissions have reduced.
* they oppose wind power
This is capitalism in action: solar is cheaper than anything else per kwh. The obsession with fossil in the West is due to the fossil fuel lobbies, not because of the rational market forces. China doesn't have that.
It is not just optics or energy independence. There is a genuine effort to reduce pollution. People forget in 00s media used to bash the smog in China. It was an unlivable air. They truly wanted to transform it - it just so happens that renewables solve a lot of problems simultaneously.
It might be extended in the future, though.
China's economy is export-based and U.S. is its largest buyer. If it refused to export to the U.S. its economy would go into a freefall and the Yuan would hyperinflate.
The US outsourced massive swaths of its manufacturing to China and with it, the emissions from those industries.
Talking in absolutes without context, nor the trajectories is rigorous at best and disingenuous or worse.
From the article
> International Energy Agency (IEA) figures show Chinese coal consumption falling 2.6% in the first half of the year, largely due to a boom in solar that saw the country add 92 gigawatts of capacity—that’s 92 billion watts—in a single month in May, compared to all-time U.S. installations of 134 GW.
So in one month, China added 68% of our total solar capacity to its grid.
Scroll to the bottom, China fell from 30.98 in 2024 to 29.75 MtCO2. The US rose from 13.55 to 14.92 MtCO2.
Problems with solar remain, however. It's neither practical nor safe to build 100% solar grid. You must overbuild capacity on solar, because weather happens. No energy is generated at night. Therefore you have to factory battery install cost as well. Finally there are black swan weather events that DO happen in nature that NO ONE can prevent:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Whereupon solar would be rendered useless precisely when humanity would need power the most.
Already does. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/20201019...
> neither practical nor safe to build 100% solar grid
No one is suggesting a 100% solar grid. You combine solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear.
> battery
Battery prices have been in free-fall for a while, and there are a bunch of interesting tech for grid-scale energy storage. The vanadium redox battery is appealing for grid-scale energy because the energy capacity is determined by the amount of liquid you store in its tanks, so scaling that is trivial. Sodium ion batteries are appealing since they're made with abundant materials and their lower energy density compared to lithium ion isn't a concern for grid-scale storage.
> black swan weather events
Which is why no one is suggesting 100% solar. You do a mix like I described earlier.
Deleted Comment
Go to https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/, open "Full record" and see an objective and factual data (and not some politically motivated estimates) - amount of actually emitted gas is increasing, and the rate of increase is accelerating both for lowest points and highest points.