Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: August 14, 2024
China's ultra-mega-gigantic renewables buildout continues to accelerate!
China is building clean energy at an extraordinarily gigantic and completely unprecedented speed and scale.
You can help encourage the U.S. to speed up our own cleantech work by telling American newspapers to report more on China’s deployment boom!
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Reasons For Hope
It’s barely getting coverage in U.S. media, but China is in the middle of an unprecedentedly massive clean energy buildout. Chinese solar and wind deployment has been breaking all records for years in a row, and it’s still accelerating.
“In the first five months of 2024, China has added some 79GW of solar and 20GW of wind. These additions are up 29% and 21% respectively from last year’s numbers, which were already record-breaking.”
-CarbonBrief
It is almost incomprehensible how ridiculously vast an amount of electricity-generating capacity we’re talking about, and how ridiculously fast it got built.
As one headline put it, “China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week.”
A recent report indicates that China may meet its renewables installation target for 2030 by the end of July 2024, six and a half years early.
For context, the U.S. EIA reports that at the end of 2022, the entire United States had about 1,200 GW of total electricity generating capacity, every solar farm and coal plant and hydroelectric dam and everything added together. China just added nearly 100 GW of wind and solar alone in five months.
The impacts of this unprecedented shift to running on clean electrons are being seen across the Chinese economy.
All this clean energy growth has pushed coal down to providing a record-low 53% of China’s electricity in May 2024, down from 60% in May 2023.
Solar and wind together provided a record-high 23% of China’s electricity in May 2024, up from 7% in May 2016.
Electric vehicles accounted for about 40% of all cars sold in China in May 2024 as well, as China continues to produce lots of cheap, efficient EVs.
And in the first half of 2024, zero new coal-based steelmaking projects were permitted in China, with all 7.1 million tons of new steelmaking capacity added in China from January through June 2024 using electric arc furnaces heated by electricity instead of by burning coal.
As renewables continue to grow rapidly, it’s looking more and more likely that China’s carbon emissions may have peaked in 2023! This is truly extraordinary news for the future of the entire planet.
Furthermore, China’s rapid progress is a powerful reason for other countries, especially America, to speed up their own cleantech manufacturing and deployment. The great Inflation Reduction Act was in part passed due to the need to stay in the race on cleantech, and keeping in place is critical for America’s future economy and society. Making rapid progress on U.S. clean energy isn’t just for the sake of the planet now, it’s to ensure that an authoritarian state like China isn’t the only one innovating and mass-producing the clean electron-powered technologies of the future1.
The USA might just be entering a “Cleantech Race” with China to match the 1960s “Space Race” with the USSR. As with the Space Race, we could be starting from behind. But as with the Space Race, this competition may result in truly incredible accomplishments benefiting all of humanity!
Tell American newspapers to report more on China’s gigantic cleantech boom!
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Keep in mind that while it’s critical to stand up a domestic U.S. clean manufacturing industry, renewable energy is still inherently less vulnerable to geopolitical threats than fossil fuels. If you buy oil from an unfriendly country, you burn it and you have to keep buying more oil to keep your stuff working, but if you buy a solar panel, it just keeps working for decades without being affected by any trade cutoff - photons are a free fuel!
Wow. Impressive work!! Thank you.