Exponentials are always hard to grasp.

> It took the solar PV industry 68 years to reach 1 TW of installed capacity - from 1954-2022.

> It has taken only 2 years to reach the next TW (2022-2024), with the 2 TW milestone reached in recent weeks according to estimates calculated by the Global Solar Council and SolarPower Europe.

In 2023 we built 450 GW, we will be interesting to see where we land in 2024.

Either way we are looking at a complete reshaping of the global energy system before 2030.

It's fun to go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta... and look at the map view of these solar plants. The first link is roughly 10x20km in size, next to a big dam to hold pumped hydro.

The peak generating capacity is off the charts and most of the largest plants are situated next to pumped hydro to give storage.

You've probably heard that solar installation is exponential and that it's now cheaper than nuclear even with storage and transmissions costs factored in and this is a great way to see it and understand it. https://reneweconomy.com.au/csiro-says-wind-and-solar-much-c...

Thank you for calling it a "milestone". I try not to have language peeves, but "barrier" is not a substitute for "milestone". There has to be at least some tenuous reason to think that the limitation might be difficult to exceed, to merit the term "barrier".

As useful context, world marketed energy consumption is about 20 terawatts, of which about 5 terawatts is China. Ground-level terrestrial insolation is about 128000 terawatts.

In this press release, the Global Solar Council is estimating an average 20% capacity factor, which means 2 terawatts of installed capacity amounts to 0.4 terawatts of average power. 20% seems like a broadly reasonable capacity factor; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto... shows that from 02013 to 02018 the PV capacity factor in the US varied between 25.1% and 26.1%.

However, yesterday I was looking at CREA's statistics on China https://energyandcleanair.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/.... Their plot seems to show 40 TWh generated from solar in June. 40 TWh per month works out to 55 GW. If we assume 670 GW of solar generation capacity was installed as of June (of the current 790 GW in https://www.nea.gov.cn/2024-11/22/c_1310787342.htm, which has grown 48% over the last 12 months) that's an 8% capacity factor, which is implausibly low—when I've done the stats for previous years in China, the capacity factor was about 10%, which was already very low.

Am I calculating this wrong? Are there better numbers on China's solar capacity factor? Why would it be so low? Will it improve if, e.g., more HVDC transmission lines or battery storage are built?

I note that some recent Chinese-built solar farms abroad like the Gobustan farm in Azerbaijan (60km from CoP29) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJA5hHHawA are using single-axis sun trackers, which you'd expect to raise the capacity factor significantly over the 29% achieved by utility-scale solar in California, which is almost entirely fixed in place and thus unable to track the sun. [Edit: pfdietz says this isn't true! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42266903 https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/Utility%20Sc...]

Module prices have dropped about 70% (more than a factor of 3) in the last two years, to €0.10 per peak watt https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... since the apparent failure of the price-fixing cartel announced at Davos five years ago https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i...

It's understandable that financing is tricky in the face of such rapid change. It seems likely that most solar farms built two years ago will owe too much money to ever be profitable due to competition from much cheaper PV modules—either in newly-built solar farms or in difficult-to-stop distributed generation. As toomuchtodo points out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42267156, this is already a significant factor in Pakistan.