U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%

> a boom in solar that saw the country [China] add 92 gigawatts of capacity—that’s 92 billion watts—in a single month in May, compared to all-time U.S. installations of 134 GW.

That's an insane stat. China added 92GW of solar in May 2025 alone.

Chinese solar farms are massive: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%B0%E7%96%86%E5%A4%AA%... / https://www.ts.cn/xwzx/jjxw/202505/t20250522_28681100.shtml

That stat is bonkers. China's GDP is only 5x that of UK. Total UK solar is about 19GW.

So even if you divide China's solar by 5, they added in a month what we have built in >10 years

They make it and not enough people buying so may as well use it themselves. They acquire at cost. If only the West could build things

Comparing to the UK probably isn't the best though since the UK latitude makes it not super favourable to Solar. It would be better to compare it to Southern Europe.

Spain has 40GW and GDP that's about 1/10th of China. Still, dividing China's capacity of 90GW by 10 still means they built a quarter of Spain's capacity in a month. Crazy.

They make it, because they have huge internal goals for energy generation.

I don't think it's going to look much better if you add in wind capacity :(

Looking it up... 16 GW onshore and 15 GW offshore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd... This graph looks like it started in earnest in like 2005, so 1.6GW/year on- and offshore combined, peaking in 2017 with 3.5GW in one year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...

It is an insane number but May 2025 is a bit of an outlier. The entire first half of the year they installed 197.85 and in May they installed 92.92 of that.

Much of this solar was rushed construction to get them in before the new electricity pricing policy goes into effect. It isn't known yet how much the buildout will drop off for the remainder of the year but it is pretty conceivable that some fraction of the construction for the rest of the year was "pulled" forward and rushed to get it in before June. I'm hopeful China's insane buildout will continue but we probably won't see numbers like May 2025 for awhile at least.

The short summary: if a renewable project was built and finished before June, it gets the old, more profitable electricity rates, but if it is finished after June, it is less profitable.

More details on this here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-chinas-renewable-p...

There's a few points of nuance though.

1. it's not a representative month. Building a solar farm for two years and having it go online in one month, leads to big jumps. If you look at the previous year, in 2024 China added 277 GW, so 23 MW per month.

2. At the end of 2024 the US had 239 GW installed. So about the same order of magnitude as China added in 2024 (277 GW, or 15% more).

3. The fact China added in 2024 a similar amount of solar capacity as the US in its entire history, is partly a function of exponential growth in solar in general.

For example Spain doubled its capacity in 2019 versus 2018. Then doubled it again two years later in 2021. Then almost doubled it again two years later in 2022 etc.

In other words it's not so strange in solar actually to see you add in a single year, the same capacity as you've built in all the years prior, regardless of whether it is China. Spain doubled in 1-year period, and then doubled twice in a row in a 2-year period, in the most recent years.

Still it's an insane stat, just wanted to add some nuance. -- The fact we have a president who utters nonsense about wind and solar and is actively working against it, is insane and sad.

It is more likely that UK policy is bad, and they are not installing much solar.

8X by nominal GDP, 9X by PPP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

We should have an actual GDP measure where bloat like finance and real estate are removed. Would really like to see a comparison using that measure.

My comment went into details why this month was an outlier by the way.

we have one, it's called MPS and it was used by the soviets and most of the communist countries including china until the 1990s. china has still not fully transitioned away from MPS and into SNA which is one reason their service sector share of GDP seems so impossibly low

you know what's really fun is that the value in US dollars of all that solar energy market in china was only about 2.5 times higher than the value of the solar market in the US in 2024 (despite total capacity and newly installed capacity in china both being about 7x)

Sounds like that could give useful insights. I couldn’t find MPS - do you have a link please?

I mean, it's a difference of policy; spend on solar rollout isn't a significant part of either country's GDP.

GDP PPP is probably the more appropriate comparison here, by the way (a big part of the cost of solar isn't buying the actual panels), and China's GDP PPP is 10x the UK's.

GDP PPP certainly doesn't get all the way, but it probably is more appropriate for this sort of comparison.