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Global growth in solar "the largest ever observed for any source"

104 points by tambourine_man

by tristanj

2 subcomments

I've always found it amusing that the primary driver for solar innovation stems from China's goal ending its civil war with Taiwan. Any conflict with Taiwan would involve the US, which would blockade the Straits of Malacca and halt Chinese oil imports, putting on enough economic pressure to drive the war to a halt after several months. Any attempt to reclaim Taiwan would end in failure.
This was a P0 national security issue, So China hyper-invested into alternative energy technologies, subsidizing and overproducing solar technologies at a loss, while investing in electric transportation and moving away from fossil fuels. It's paying off. Over the past 25 years, this strategy is proving to be very successful and by the end of this decade, the Malacca weakness will be overcome.
As a result, the rest of the world gets to enjoy cheap solar energy and cheap EVs.

by latentframe

1 subcomments

Solar scaling this fast looks to be less about the green against fossile but to be more about changing the cost structure of energy => fossil fuels are strongly marginal-cost, solar is capex heavy with almost zero marginal cost so that change alone has big impacts for how energy comes into the inflation

by Animats

1 subcomments

Big pie chart is labelled "The share of each source that was used to meet changes in energy demand vs. 2024". What does that mean?

by perilunar

0 subcomment

> Overall, solar generated over 2,700 terawatt-hours last year,
Terawatt-hours per year is a ridiculous unit — it contains three different units of time embedded in it (seconds, hours, and years)
2700 TWh/yr = 309 GW
(Which happens to be about 37 W per person, or less than the average output of a 1 m² solar panel)

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

by takihito

2 subcomments