alt Hacker NewsThose 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?
Replies
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...
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.
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.
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.