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Comment by e4e5 | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious how that compares to other countries?

https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1698496805162353029?ref_...

> Solar deployment is now happening at a roughly $500B annualized rate.

Which technology deployments were larger than this? The US's aircraft production during WWII seems to have peaked at maybe $400B (inflation-adjusted). Global datacenter construction appears to be maybe $200B/year.

More here: https://about.bnef.com/blog/renewable-energy-investment-hits...

If you can, you should:

https://nitter.net/patrickc/status/1698496805162353029

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

China leads in steepest trend, but US is second (though much lower down)

Here's a chart per capita, which is often more interesting:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...

bit misleading not to add the top two (Australia and Netherlands)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...

That's generation per capita, not installed capacity per capita.

And India at #4 is one to watch. There are a lot of people there who will benefit from cheap energy.

It is a bit funny how Germany seems to be floundering thanks to the Energiewende. In hindsight it looks like a clear mistake to have gone in so hard without waiting until it made economic sense.

Take a look at a map, India is far, far more to the south than Germany. I have the feeling that some Germans would see solar power as a panacea even if they lived on the north pole.

China did 86GW last year and now stands at a cumulated 393GW: https://www.statista.com/statistics/279504/cumulative-instal...

Worth noting half the world’s polysilicon is produced in Xinjiang, possibly using thousands of Uyghur slaves: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ILAB/images/storyboar...

Germany will have around 12 GW new solar power installed in 2023 (with about 1/4th of the US population), so a little bit more per capita than the US. It is important to know that almost all of Germany is more to the north than the most northern parts of the US (except Alaska), so solar power in Germany is much less efficient and in winter almost completely useless.

Fortunately wind power is almost exactly anticyclic to solar in Germany, so cumulated they produce a nearly flat curve over the seasons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Wind-pow...

Do you have more information about that? If you average the power over a month, then yes it might be true in the plot, but I suspect it's less smooth in real-time.

Here's a great graph with finer than hourly data: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electric...

It doesn't average out on an intraday basis, but neither does consumption, which has its peaks during the day.

I know someone working at an energy provider heavy on renewables, there they use gas turbines (=biomass) for compensating heavy fluctuations, because those are online in a few minutes.

> solar power in Germany is much less efficient and in winter almost completely useless.

Good thing they were thinking ahead and shut down all nuclear plants they had. Fricking unbelievable

The shutdown had nothing to do with renewables. It was done by conservatives who, in the same year they took this step, proudly proclaimed that they stopped the buildout of PV in Germany.

What difference it makes who did it? It's utterly stupid given circumstances

Yeah, shortening energy supply when you already have a supply crunch is very good way to kill the economy. The only question is if this was done by stupidity or malice.

I'd like to see articles start inserting a "per capita" figure.

And also a 'percentage of GDP'

UK Peak yesterday was 7GW

China is number one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-solar-power-by-count...

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