China is huge, and it does have huge solar farms, but the trouble is now you need a huge power transport infrastructure. Australia can move enough power from a desert where nobody lives to a small city 100 kilometres away on a few ordinary hundred kV pylons and be happy. China has huge cities, 2-3 thousand kilometres from those solar farms so it is building long chains of 1MV pylons which is the same idea but at this incredible scale.
China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China.
And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the huge solar industry that exists today and supplies vast quantities of cheap solar panels to the world.
Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.
Today, PERC technology is the cheapest way to generate electricity using solar cells and is utilised in over 90% of solar panels manufactured globally. https://theconversation.com/how-an-aussie-invention-could-so...
The solar research group at UNSW trained over 120 PhD students who went on to establish solar manufacturing, particularly in China.
This is a remarkable stat that's the opposite of what I expected, but I suppose China is (a) starting from a lower base and (b) much, much larger in absolute population. Australia's population would fit in Chongqing.
Where people get misled on China’s rollout is total generation (since it’s a huge fraction of the worlds population) and the fact that they do large centralised rollouts rather than enabling rooftop solar. So they have some of the biggest solar farms. Rooftop solar is the way the countries that have shot past china have mostly achieved results - remove barriers to installation and grid connection and suddenly every citizen is invested in it since it saves them money. It’s the classic efficiency win from a massively motivated population vs a central bureaucracy. China’s showing everyone how NOT to enable solar.
When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water. Well, I could tell when they turned on the central heating plants for the winter because I finally had hot water showers again.
I reckon more Australians live in SFHs than apartment blocks (so have roofs where personal solar makes sense), and the major cities get more son than eastern Chinese cities do.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...
So countries are only behind Australia because of corruption? And the US is only behind because of Trump, specifically?
Man, must be nice to have such a basic view of the world; everything so sinpmy explained.
It's not all Trump, of course. It's also the people who put him in office twice, the folks who block upgrading the grid, etc. etc.
So yeah, Trump doesn't help, but in respect specifically of Solar you'd likely see pretty similar policies from many US regimes, including mainstream Democrats.
The generate more grid solar, more wind, more gas and more coal than other states.
They're still #2 to California when you include distributed solar though.
It is only attractive in California due to a combination absurd electricity prices from State sanctioned monopolies and red tape preventing grid development.
I remember when the first ones started appearing in the UK over 30 years ago and people were quick to complain about how ugly they looked. But actually, over time I think most people accept them now, and personally I think they're pretty cool. Most of the UK ones are actually off shore now - you can just about see them from the coast, but they're just small specks on the horizon at that distance. I think the biggest concern people have with them now is the belief that lots of birds get killed by them, but the reality is that actually many more birds die every year from flying into windows than get hit by turbine blades.