China is building a solar future because they have a vested self interest in building it. It is great that a major economic power has a reason to build this, but China’s reasonings for going solar is more of a collection of local decisions.
While that’s all true, if the US built the solar future then it would also be true of the US. Altruism unfettered by vested self-interest doesn’t really exist at a strategic level, and at the end of the day the reasons why we avert planet-scale mass suicide are kind of irrelevant, as long as we get it done.
8% of US generation (which is more total output than most countries) is solar with the rate increasing. Last year was a 30% increase. What a headline 🤣.
A lot of those projects are rushing to get ahead of tariffs and to maintain the Biden subsidies that the GOP repealed. Those numbers will be artificially high for this year and likely into the next, but then drop. They wont stop, as solar is still much cheaper than any other power source, but with the GOP trying to kill it, they will slow.
China is just accelerating. They already have more solar than the rest of the world combined, and the lead is extending. Even with countries like Pakistan going parabolically solar, mainly from buying 10% off all Chinese solar exports, China continues to deploy just insane amount of panels.
China has 5 times the capacity of the US in solar power.