Slashdot Mirror
China Is On an Epic Solar Power Binge (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader links to an article on MIT Technology Review: It's worth taking a minute to appreciate the sheer scale of what China is doing in solar right now. In 2015, the country added more than 15 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing Germany as the world's largest solar power market. China now has 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity, compared with38.4 gigawatts in Germany and 27.8 in the United States. According to new projections, it seems that trend is going to continue. Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country's installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last year and is expected to reach 321 gigawatts by the end of 2016.
What's that in percentage of total eletric power?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Solar panels are rated by how much power they produce under full sunlight, usually defined as 1000 w/sq meter. Hence the rating in GWs. The actual amount of power output (GWHrs) would depend on mounting location and how much sun they happen to see throughout the year.
There's not much that could stop China's massive rate of solar installs. This isn't like a dam, where you can save pretty much all of a project cost by not building it. Solar these days is a very capital cost-dominated industry, if you count all manufacturing stages together. The factories are already built. They're not going to just idle them. If their rate of power demand growth drops as a result of their economic situation, it's going to be power projects involving resources that could be directed elsewhere that will be cut.
Even in this economic situation, though, China still is going to have serious demand for capacity growth.
It's interesting to see how much solar now looks like wind a decade ago. But that's a good thing. Up to a certain level of penetration (which we're nowhere close to), solar usually makes it easier on the grid, not harder, by reducing midday peaking requirements, particularly on the hottest days (if it's spread out enough, that is)
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
It probably doesn't hurt that a lot of China's existing load is served by some really nasty coal plants; mostly burning fairly low-grade coal('ideal' coal still makes the global warming types nervous, since burning pure carbon in an oxygen atmosphere puts out more CO2 than does burning hydrocarbons, which put out a mixture of CO2 and water vapor; but real-world coal tends to come with goodies like sulfur and mercury; and unless you have suitable enforcement of scrubber user and the like, they show up quite merrily in the stack output). Even if the economics alone don't necessarily add up; the percentage of the Chinese population that is now wealthy enough for 'breathable air' to rise above 'adequate food' as a demand is much higher than it used to be; and the CCP can only afford so much discontent. Unless Chinese solar is abhorrently expensive compared to the estimates I've seen for US installs(which seems unlikely); there would be a strong case to be made for government subsidy/regulation aimed at, at least, shutting down some of the coal units upwind of major population centers.
Might sound like a lot of panels but it's not really. If you put panels on every roof in the US we'd be producing more than 10 times the total power we need and the peak production would be far beyond anything anyone could consume. We only need to cover something like half the roofs in the US to generate more power that we'd need for decades.
It's not very far from there to methods to use that power to store it so it can be used outside production hours and there are a LOT of ways to store energy. Power shifting becomes very cheap when the peak power rate is zero.