The amount of wind and solar power under construction in China is now nearly twice as much as the rest of the world combined.
Research published this week by Global Energy Monitor, an NGO, found that China's total utility-scale solar power and wind power under construction is 339GW, which is over eight times the amount under construction in the US.
The researchers only looked at solar farms with a capacity of 20MW or more, which feed directly into the grid. That means that the total volume of solar power in China could be much higher, as small scale solar farms account for about 40 percent of China’s solar capacity.
China is on track to hit 1,200GW of installed wind and solar capacity by end of 2024 - six years ahead of Beijing’s target. Research by Carbon Brief suggests that China will need to install between 1,600GW and 1,800GW of wind and solar energy by 2030 to meet its target of producing 25 percent of all energy from non-fossil sources.
Between March 2023 and March 2024, China installed more solar than it had in the previous three years combined, and more than the rest of the world combined for 2023, the GEM analysts found.
“China’s renewable energy pipeline is two times larger than the rest of the world,” said Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Policy Institute in Washington DC. “But the question we should increasingly ask ourselves is, how come the rest of the world is so slow?”