On a sweat-inducing, sweltering day last summer I landed in Shanghai. It had been a long time coming. Since high school, I had wanted to visit China, drawn by a desire to understand its inner workings and politics. I felt ready, with a solid knowledge of history under my belt and what I believed to be a mastery of the Alipay app. The reality of the world's biggest metro network in Shanghai at rush hour, eating duck neck jerky on high-speed trains, or pushing through crowds in order to see a 32 meter Mao bust in Changsha would catch up with me soon. However, a bigger surprise was waiting in a much more unexpected spot.
Guizhou is a province in the south of China, far away from big industrial cities like Beijing or Shenzhen. Uniquely dotted with small karst peaks and lush valleys, its isolation kept minority cultures alive while also keeping it underdeveloped compared to the rest of the country. Among other places in Guizhou, I wanted to visit Wangfenglin, a natural park in a rural corner of the province. With a journey consisting of 2 hours on a slow train from the provincial capital and 5 hours on a regional bus, it was a long way. But, on the way, emerging from a tunnel, the bus suddenly entered a valley of blue, not green. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The valley had been completely covered in solar panels, all of them glittering in the sunlight. Riding in the bus was akin to being a piece of driftwood, floating among the waves of an ocean.
The old Chinese locals in the bus were unimpressed. This scale of development and rapid change is the norm for most pensioners, who have lived through the biggest societal shifts in recent history. But, when prodded with some more questions, they did express their pride in the shift towards renewable energy sources. China is full of solar fields, they told me. They aren’t wrong, since as of 2024, China has the world’s biggest solar power capacity at 886 gigawatts (GW), compared to the EU’s 338 GW. Looked at per capita, the EU is still in the lead, but China is adding new solar panels at a rate 130% that of the EU. The biggest solar farm in the world is located in Xinjiang, China, with a 3.5 GW capacity covering a surface area of 133 km2. That’s about twice the size of the municipality of Maastricht, and could provide all the energy Luxembourg needs in a year. Another solar field opened in Datong is shaped like the national animal, the panda. According to the company who built it, this is meant to inspire the nation’s youth and convince them of the benefits of solar energy.
Planning Ahead 5 Years at a Time
To explain why the solar industry has seen such rapid growth, one has to look at the Chinese Communist Party’s 5 year plans. China’s centralized economy means almost all major economic decisions are made by Beijing, and implemented by the regions. The topics covered by these plans range from the wine industry to space exploration and everything in between. Planning ahead, massive public investment and private-public partnerships are core tenets in these plans. That was also the case in the expansion of the solar capacity of the nation.
The contemporary rapid expansion of solar capacity was already in the works in the early 2000s. The 12th 5 year plan mentions regions such as Qinghai, Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang as future hotspots for solar energy, which are now booming. Those Western regions are mostly sparsely populated but receive many hours of sun, making them perfect for solar farms. That same plan set the goal of achieving 10 GW of capacity by 2015. As it turns out, 10 years is a lot of time for a country like China, since with today’s rate 10 GW are placed almost every 15 days. This rapid increase in production as well as capacity is only possible in a nation like China, where the government invests billions and can make any industry attractive.
The worldwide solar energy hype started around 15 years ago, and China led the charge. Over the period of 2011-2020, almost 50 billion US Dollars were invested in the Chinese solar industry. These financial benefits backed by the government made it very appealing for new or existing companies to start manufacturing and selling solar panels, as well as installing them. The costs would be low due to the government’s aid, while profits could be high. As a result, Chinese solar companies had much higher debt when compared to companies based in the EU or the US. They are able to run with such high debt due to continued government help. This level of government subsidy is frowned upon in other nations, since it doesn’t allow the free market to run its course.
As a result of this early, largely top-down driven investment approach, China currently holds a 75% share of all stages of solar panel manufacturing. That percentage has gone down from 80% in 2021, mostly due to Indian and American efforts to concentrate solar panel manufacturing within their own borders. This has also been achieved through government benefits, stimulating the solar economies in the respective nations. This growth is expected to continue at an even higher rate, if the 14th 5 year plan on solar energy is properly implemented. This looks good compared to the EU, which faces its problems regarding growth. Solar Power Europe, an entity that lobbies the European institutions for solar energy companies, forecasts solar capacity growth rates of 3-7% per year, with a possibility of missing the EU’s 2030 goal of 750 GW.
A New Lasting Industry?
While the data paints a positive picture, China’s massive solar capacity and industry have not yet made it a green utopia. As of today, coal power still makes up the vast majority of China’s energy usage, and only 35% is based on renewable sources. As a matter of fact, new coal energy plants are still being opened on a yearly basis in order to meet the ever-growing electricity demand of China. Furthermore, some deem the solar boom an environmental disaster waiting to happen, due to the lack of plans to dispose of used panels. Solar panels stop functioning properly after 30 years, and become waste. This waste, if exposed to the environment, can poison the earth due to the chemicals used in the production process. Unsurprisingly, these facts make many question whether or not China is actually willing to make the sacrifices necessary for the green transition, or aims to greenwash its image on a global scale. Others point to reports regarding potential forced labour in Xinjiang in the solar panel production chain as a point of concern.
Practical concerns also play a role. For one, curtailment rates in China are quite high. Simply put, this means that in some cases supply is much higher than demand, meaning energy is wasted. This comes as a result of the location of the solar energy hubs in remote parts of China, where conditions might be good for generating large amounts of electricity but there are simply not enough people living there to consume it. Another issue is that the electricity generated can’t be transmitted with enough ease to areas where there is high demand, such as the industrial provinces of Henan or Guangdong. There is either not enough infrastructure in place to facilitate transmission, or the distances are too large leading to loss of energy en route. To deal with this, there is investment in new technologies and infrastructure projects, as well as the opening of solar farms in areas with higher population and demand. In my view, it’s comparable to the distinctly Chinese phenomenon of ‘ghost cities’, where cities are built and left empty for years, only to be used when the demand arises. The solar farms fulfill a similar function, built in preparation for future demand and technology enabling their full potential.
Driverless But Not Yet Emissionless
It’s easy to be impressed by the seemingly breakneck-speed of renewable and sustainable development in China, if you see the videos of the self-driving electric buses, witness the vastness of their solar fields or realize that every taxi you took was electric (true in my case, at least!). The statistics on their growth are indeed impressive, but the underlying costs mustn’t be forgotten. Human rights nor the natural environment should be impacted by the goal of a renewable energy network, but in China they are afterthoughts. This doesn’t mean the EU, the US or any other nation become complacent. While the EU currently receives more energy from renewable sources, if Chinese growth keeps up, they will surpass us. Let the EU take inspiration from what is possible if enough resources and time is put into a project, and keep the lead it has. Instead of only working towards a goal and then slowing down, keeping growth at a steady pace until a level of renewable energy is reached that is satisfactory. And finally, I do recommend everyone to one day see the blue lakes of solar fields for themselves, since they are truly otherworldly.
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