China has installed the equivalent of four times the UK’s entire solar power capacity in the first five months of the year.
Some 62.1GW of new solar was built in the country during the first five months of 2023, through investment worth US$13.6bn, according to a Global Energy Monitor report.
That’s equivalent to more than four times the UK’s estimated solar capacity of 14.6GW as of 2021, as per data from trade body Solar Energy UK and the government.
China’s solar capacity is now larger than the rest of the world combined, amounting to 228GW, setting it on course to exceed 2030 renewable energy targets by 2025, analysts said.
Despite China’s plans to install 1,200GW of clean power by 2030, coal power plants are still being set up at a high rate, with an average of two being built every week last year to ensure continuity of supply.
The UK plans to have installed 70GW of new solar by 2035 meanwhile, which would mark a five-fold increase in just over a decade, the government claimed in May.
"We believe that the surge in building renewables certainly provides a basis for peaking [Chinese] carbon emissions earlier than 2030," report author Martin Weil commented.
“The big issue going forward is how will […] coal plants actually be deployed,” he said, with the majority of China’s carbon emissions coming from coal power generation.
According to researchers from the World Resources Institute, China was the world’s largest emitter of CO2 to 2019, followed by the US, India, the European Union and Russia.
“China has become the global renewable energy leader,” analysts added, “hosting nearly half of the world’s total operating wind and solar capacity”.