Climate Change and Renewable Energy News and Discussion

doggydogdo said:

Looks like a bunch of western countries cares more about the number of patents rather than how good they are. China produces way more renewables than all these countries combined yet it has less patents

Click to expand...

• The growth in clean power generation, some 270 terawatt hours (TWh) excluding hydro, significantly outpaced demand growth of 170TWh in the first half of the year.
• Solar capacity additions set new records due to a rush before a June
  Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
  , with 212 gigawatts (GW) added in the first half of the year.
• This rush means solar is likely to set an annual record for growth in 2025, becoming China’s single-largest source of clean power generation in the process.
• Coal-power capacity could surge by as much as 80-100GW this year, potentially setting a new annual record, even as coal-fired electricity generation declines.
• The use of coal to make synthetic fuels and and chemicals is growing rapidly, climbing 20% in the first half of the year and helping add 3% to China’s CO2 since 2020.
• The coal-chemical industry is planning further expansion, which could add another 2% to China’s CO2 by 2029, making the 2030 deadline for peaking harder to meet.

Click to expand...

In May 2025, African countries imported a combined 1.57 Gigawatts of solar panels from China, an all time high.

Jones tracks the value of Chinese solar panels exported to different countries using Chinese customs data. In the first five months of 2025, he found at least 22 African countries imported more solar panels than they did during the same period last year, with most of them doubling the amount. One of the most striking examples is Algeria, which imported 0.76 GW of solar panels in the first half of 2025, a 6,300 percent increase from the year before. Less developed countries, such as Chad, have imported enough solar panels to replace their country’s entire current power generation capacity. “The magnitude of these numbers is just huge in context of what the current electricity grid demand is,” Jones tells WIRED.

While overall sales to African countries are still small compared to these traditional export markets, the Global South appears to be at a turning point in how it thinks about energy. For decades, energy-starved countries largely had one default option when they wanted to add new power supply: import coal and gas. Now, for the first time, solar energy is emerging as the cheaper and greener way forward, so there’s no need to sacrifice the environment for development.

Click to expand...

There are two types of demand driving the solar boom in African countries, Echard says. In North Africa, countries like Algeria and Egypt are building massive utility-scale solar power plants that require large numbers of panels. But in Sub-Sahara Africa, the panels are being imported by more rural communities in places that traditionally haven’t been connected to the grid at all. Just like in Pakistan, this network of distributed rooftop solar panels is transforming the energy landscape. People are getting access to energy, and that access isn’t dependent on government spending or foreign loans. Instead, it spreads organically, household by household, as long as the panels are cheap enough.

Click to expand...

Coal power’s share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025.

Click to expand...

Planting trees in some parts of the world could cause droughts, according to a Chinese-led study that suggested greening efforts should take regional conditions into account to be effective. Through a complex multi-decade study of vegetation and soil moisture patterns combining several databases and models, the researchers found that nearly half of the world had experienced a pattern of “greening-drying.”

This included parts of the United States, Central Asia, Central Africa, inland Europe, southern Australia and South America, where increasing vegetation cover resulted in a drop in soil moisture levels. But in other parts of the world – including the central parts of North America, northeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent and parts of the Sahara –

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. Other places, including China, saw a mixture of both patterns.

Click to expand...

Black gold meets green ambition in Saudi Arabia’s energy shift to China​

Riyadh’s strategic alliance with Beijing is accelerating its energy transformation, undermining western hegemony and anchoring the kingdom in Asia’s multipolar future.

Click to expand...

The Trump administration on Friday ordered Denmark's Orsted to stop far-advanced construction on an offshore wind project near Rhode Island, in a move that threatens to exacerbate the company's financial troubles.

With construction now frozen at 80% completion, Orsted has no immediate path to revenue generation, heightening pressure on the company as it seeks to shore up finances through a $9.4 billion emergency rights issue.

Click to expand...