China Installs Nearly 10 Gigawatts of Solar in First Quarter

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/04/24/china-installs-nearly-10-gigawatts-of-solar-in-first-quarter-up-22/

by jdc • 8 years ago

191 84 8 years ago

Interestingly, today's NASA Earth Observatory image of the day is "Smog Smothers Solar Energy in China" https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=92054

A quote from the article: "The researchers found that in the most polluted areas, available solar energy decreased as much as 35 percent, or 1.5 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day. That is enough energy to power a vacuum cleaner for one hour, wash twelve pounds of laundry, or run a laptop for five to 10 hours."

seanmcdirmid6• 8 years ago

Eastern China is not that great for solar anyways even without the smog: it would at least be foggy and cloudy even if the air was clean. Looking at the picture and reading the article, that capacity is mostly being installed out in western China where pollution (and densities) are much less of a problem. On the other hand, without super grid support, it isn’t going to help much in solving the east’s problems.

gascan• 8 years ago

In some sense, it's enviable to be in a position where bringing more solar power online will increase the production of your existing solar! (by eventually reducing coal emissions and thus pollution)

agumonkey• 8 years ago

Good point. Betting against your own failures is worth doing when you're fixing them.

volgo• 8 years ago

Love the salty comments on HN everytime China does something great.

"Well actualllllly"

carbonneutered• 8 years ago

Will China be the first regime to have carbon neutral high-tech mass surveillance?

With their newfound riches, imagine what futuristic, renewables-powered dystopia will flourish there.

Johnny555• 8 years ago

As opposed to the USA's coal driven mass-surveillance? All developed countries are performing mass surveilance of their citizens, some are more visible (and restrictive) than others.

blacksmith_tb• 8 years ago

Disapprove of their government by all means, and even apply diplomatic pressure to encourage them to change it, but I can hardly see why anyone would want to mock their development of renewable energy. If they don't, the whole world suffers.

konschubert• 8 years ago

I don't know if he's mocking China. He is is expressing the ambivalent feeling that many have about China, and he's doing so in a bit of a comedic way.

clarkmoody• 8 years ago

Do the ends justify the means?

justicezyx2• 8 years ago

futuristic, renewables-powered dystopia

Why is it a dystopia?

Assuming one day China goes to space, achieved nuclear fusion. Would human being be more freed in that way than stuck in the freedom in a tiny ball of mud in the universe?

AnimalMuppet2• 8 years ago

Free to go to space, but not free to criticize your government. Nope, that's not real freedom.

stuffedBelly3• 8 years ago

This is a bit far-fetched. Not everything China does is for mass surveillance...this could simply be the Chinese government had a taste of how bad Beijing's air quality is and decided to push harder towards renewable energy.

awakeasleep• 8 years ago

I was trying to get context on this number- 10 Gigawatts of power is enough to power 7,000,000 western homes!

China is supposed to have 455 million homes, and there is no way the average chinese household uses as much electricity as a western one, but I don't know how to make a reasonable comparison.

Also in the US, commercial and residential use accounts for 40% of energy use, so this should be a pretty substantial amount of clean energy, even for a country as big as china.

Aardwolf• 8 years ago

It is also enough to power 8 DeLoreans!

yazr• 8 years ago

This should be the new official measuring units for all green, fusion and time-travel related articles

djrogers3• 8 years ago

That 10 Gigawatt number is the 'nameplate' number, not it's actual production capacity. The nameplate number assumes the panels are in 100% perfect sunlight 24/7 - typical production numbrees range from 10-20% depending on location, weather, air pollution, and time of year.

pjc50• 8 years ago

The UK's largest power station Drax had a 4GW capacity at its peak, and the current UK demand is in the region of 40GW.

clomond• 8 years ago

Was curious too so did some Napkin math with some numbers I found.

10GW Solar Nameplate capacity added in Q1Y2018

17% Capacity factor (Average for solar in China) [1]

1135 kWh (1.12 Mwh) avg annual household electricity use [2]

Makes it: 10GW nameplate capacity * hours in Year (24 h * 365 days) = 87600 GwH (theoretical maximum generation)

Expected actual generation = Capacity factor (17%) * Theoretical maximum generation 87600 GwH

= 14600 GwH annually

14600 GwH( 14,600,000 MwH ) expected generation in a year / 1.12 MwH consumed per average Chinese household means

= ~ 13 Million Chinese households powered per year due to the solar installed in these 3 months

[1] capacity factor from Wikipedia (1st paragraph) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

[2] average household electricity usage by country 2010 data http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity...

castratikron• 8 years ago

The US used about 2 million GWh of electricity in 2015[1]. There are 8760 hours in a year. So the power usage averaged over the entire year is 243GW. The amount of solar the article is talking about could supply about 5% of that average usage. And that's just what was installed in three months.

If the rate of installation stayed the same then it would take five years for all US electricity needs to be met by solar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Co...

shoguning• 8 years ago

Perhaps I'm missing something but the capacity factor for solar tends to be around 20%, meaning that 10GW of nameplate capacity generates an average of closer to 2GW in practice. I didn't see it addressed in the article, so I'm assuming the number is nameplate capacity.

toomuchtodo4• 8 years ago

It's true solar capacity factor is between 10-25%, so nameplate isn't terribly useful. With that said, the rate of solar being installed isn't slowing down, and more fabs are coming online each year.

I would be shocked if there's any fossil fuel generation online in 10 years, 15 tops.

https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/global-solar-pv-manufac...

https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/planned-solar-manufactu...

https://www.power-technology.com/comment/global-pv-capacity-...

asdsa5325• 8 years ago

That's assuming that all panels are outputting their max all day every day. Obviously not the case, since night and clouds exist.

seanmcdirmid6• 8 years ago

Those seem like they are out west, so besides night, they should get fairly good utilization (western China is very much like inner western USA).

chapium• 8 years ago

Is there a better way to communicate this news?

cryptoz5• 8 years ago

China has rightly realized that poisoning the population and polluting the world will not make its wealthy people any wealthier, nor will it help the country grow economically.

The USA, on the other hand, still firmly believes that coal, oil, and other poisonous, polluting substances that harm citizens and life across the whole world, is worth it because the owners can still make money doing it. Rather than tell them it is illegal and to stop harming us, we give them subsidies and tell them to speed up (drill baby, drill! [1] coal jobs! [2] removing subsidies for renewables [3]! bomb them and take their oil! [4] etc).

This won't make the rich any richer, not in the long term. It will destroy the livelihoods and bank accounts of the people who would have otherwise spent all their money on products and services that help the rich get richer.

If America really cared about capitalism, it would work quickly to shut down the polluting industries by force and replace them with reusable energy. By definition, American capitalism has a near-term local maximum, defined by its choice to intentionally not be a sustainable, growing, economically viable civilization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drill,_baby,_drill

[2] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer...

[3] http://www.newsweek.com/trump-set-slash-energy-subsidies-han...

[4] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-take-the-oil-madness

seanmcdirmid6• 8 years ago

I live in a state that gets most of its electricity from hydro. I’m enjoying air that is much cleaner than when I lived in Beijing (we left because of the pollution).

You are comparing third world problems to first world ones, China has a massive problem today, the USA has mostly solved those. E.g. PM2.5 rarely goes above 100 in most USA cities, that AQI was considered normal in China until very recently, which definitely wasn’t sustainable. It’s great that China is solving its pollution problem; but this doesn’t have much to do with the USA unless you want to talk about carbon instead.

ctdonath2• 8 years ago

My rule of thumb: solar power generates 10 watts per square meter.

There's a fixed maximum of 1300 watts per square meter of sunlight. For large scale technology, assume 10% efficiency. Another 10% from that survives air occlusion, clouds, night, angles, dust/snow cover, buffer battery efficiency, maintenance, breakage, etc. Round down, and we see 10W/m^2 practical output.

Professional quantification of this back-of-the-napkin calculation welcome.

Jedd2• 8 years ago

My rule of thumb: solar power generates 10 watts per square meter.
There's a fixed maximum of 1300 watts per square meter of sunlight.

I'd suggest you qualify your numbers by noting that you're talking specifically about Solar PV.

Solar Thermal appears to offer 3x the kWh/m2 over Solar PV -- and mitigates at least one of your concerns ('night'). That ratio will doubtless change as PVC efficiency improves, but if that 3x factor is accurate now, it'll be a long time before PVCs match or exceed on square metre ratings alone.

ctdonath2• 8 years ago

Solar Thermal appears to offer 3x the kWh/m2 over Solar PV

I'm wondering at the difference between your measuring "kWh/m2" vs mine of "W/m2". Upshot: averaged over a year, what's the power output? are you including all "off" hours?

philipkglass2• 8 years ago

Your rule of thumb is fine. That's roughly how much large-scale solar farms built a few years ago are producing over the course of a year in the California desert. As module efficiency goes up the number will trend up a bit over time in desert locations, but as costs fall more farms will be installed in less-sunny locations as well.

Unlike my sibling poster, I don't expect solar thermal to do significantly better on areal efficiency. The captured-sun-to-electricity efficiency can be higher, but the mirrors need to be spread out more than PV modules need to be separated. Ivanpah covers 14.2 km^2 and generated 719398 MWh in 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

Annualized, that's

(719398 / (24 * 365)) / (14.2 * 1000 * 1000) * 1000000 = 5.8 watts/m^2. Solar PV farms in a similar climate are doing significantly better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm

Desert Sunlight's annualized generation was, using the wiki data again,

(1346282 / (24 * 365)) / (16.0 * 1000 * 1000) * 1000000 = 9.6 watts/m^2.

I know that Ivanpah has been troubled. I'd welcome annualized areal power figures from a better-performing solar thermal generating project if anyone has them.

propman• 8 years ago

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/71465

I couldn't find it for solar but it should be similar if I remember correctly. China has created almost TWICE the number of GW of capacity for wind than the United States but USA still gets almost the same renewable energy from wind as china because US is 93% more efficient at generating wind due to a whole lot of reasons, but primarily because of capitalism and market economy driving decisions rather than the State.

guiomie• 8 years ago

Someone wrote this in the comment section of the article: "One of the most inspiring factoids for me is that a mere 10 years ago, 10 GW was the total accumulated installed capacity for the entire planet. And here we are with 1 single country installing that in 3 months."

If true, this is amazing !

sqldba• 8 years ago

Is this going to be a massive maintenance problem in ten years time? I thought that’s the lifespan of panels.

Usually the problem with building lots of infrastructure is it gets expensive to maintain. It happens with roads and buildings. Will it happen with solar?

(I’m hoping not because efficiency is still improving and prices are still going down whereas for roads I think it went up - but I don’t know why).

dgacmu• 8 years ago

25-30 years. 80% efficiency after 20 years.

FooHentai2• 8 years ago

80% of power at 20 years is fairly standard for solar panels. It's a slow taper too, you just lose around 1% of output each year you sweat them.

There'll be other losses due to failures, damage etc. but it's not a situation where you should factor in a strict capital replacement cycle.

ianai• 8 years ago

You should always factor in a capital cost (replacement, repair, etc).

philipkglass2• 8 years ago

Actual usable lifetime is significantly longer. There's a good compendium of information here:

https://www.nrel.gov/pv/lifetime.html

If you want to do a deep dive, the open preprint of "Photovoltaic Degradation Rates: an Analytical Review" is a good start:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf

It's from 2011 so is a little dated, but later studies have found about the same degradation rates. It's good because it uses data from large numbers of real-world solar installations. Most degradation studies are reporting on only a small number of modules and/or use artificial accelerated aging conditions.

The median degradation rate for crystalline silicon PV modules was found to be 0.5% per year. This would imply more than 40 years for the median module performance to decline to 80% of original rated output. I personally use 30 years as a more conservative rule of thumb, especially since modules appear to follow a degradation "bathtub curve." But it is clear from field data that the median solar module produces useful power levels far longer than 10 years. I suspect that modules designed for durability can achieve median lifetimes over 50 years.

arnoooooo• 8 years ago

This is incredible. If only they also stopped investments in fossil fuels... Chinese banks are by far the largest investors in fossil fuel projects today.

China Installs Nearly 10 Gigawatts of Solar in First Quarter

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