[mlmonkey]

Those windmills in the East Bay are decades old.

And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.

The article here starts with: Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.

Is the US anywhere in this ballpark?

[OkayPhysicist]

The concentrated solar plant is getting shut down because it's failing to compete with the massive rollout of photovoltaic panels. We've made solar so cheap that the old ways of gathering it are becoming redundant, which, no matter how incredibly cool it was to see a second sun rise over the horizon on the way to Vegas, is a good sign.

[bruckie]

The California Public Utilities Commission moved last month to prevent the shutdown of the Ivanpah solar concentrator. They cite data centers, grid reliability, and the state's clean energy goals as reasons to keep it online.

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M586/K...

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2026-01-11/trump-b...

[socalgal2]

My point was the photos. They aren't convincing to someone who's seen US installations. If that was the goal then the article failed.

A graph comparing China to the US would have been better.

[albumen]

The pics show renewable energy integrated with other activity (e.g. sheep grazing among solar panels); integrated into urban environments (on every rooftop and streets) and contrasted against ancient Chinese culture (e.g. temples). I think this makes the imagery substantially different from the alternative-offered US RE installations.

[mattmaroon]

We’re doing better than they are. Our new power generation is about 90% renewable, theirs is 70.

The difference is just scale, China has 3x our population but very many of them had little or even no electricity available so they’re playing catch up. Americans are functionally all served by the power grid already. So of course they’re building more of it as an absolute number.

But I’d also bet they built more coal plants last year than the entire world built in a decade.

[maxglute]

Last year, PRC new generation is functionally >100% renewable (as in over 100%), new advanced coal plants serve as cleaner coal peakers not base load. New renewables now displaces existing coal (new trend last year) - nameplate coal is up due to new plants, but actual utilization of coal down in absolute terms.

Meanwhile what doesn't get captured in accounting is US increasing fossil exports (crude, lng etc), and PRC exporting renewables. Assuming 25 year lifecycle, PRC exports solar last year displaces ~5 years worth of US fossil exports in barrels of crude equivalent (400 GW of solar = 14000TWh electricity, or 8B barrels of oil, i.e. 22m barrels per day). TLDR PRC is reducing absolute fossil use, MASSIVELY increasing global renewable use. US is simply increasing net fossil use, much of it hidden from domestic balance sheets because it's exported globally.