Last year, a viral drone video from China’s Guizhou province revealed an entire mountain range blanketed in solar panels stretching to the horizon. It’s a stunning visual, but it doesn’t even begin to capture the staggering amount of solar power being produced by the People’s Republic.
As of 2024, China was responsible for 64 percent of the world’s utility-scale solar and wind construction, with 339 gigawatt hours of renewable energy infrastructure in the works, even though it only has around 17 percent of the planet’s population.
To put that in perspective, at that point the total electricity capacity of the planet— not just solar, but nuclear, coal, gas, and renewable energy, all added together — was about 10 terawatts. Now, as a Wired deep dive explains, China can pump out a full terawatt worth of solar panels each year. According to China Daily, the country’s solar capacity grew at a compound rate of 11.7 percent annually from 2020 to 2024. That’s nearly triple the global average of 4.24 percent over the same four-year period, a gap that points to something more like an industrial revolution than mere competitive advantage.
That production capacity isn’t just helping China, where consumer rooftop photovoltaic (PV) cells accounted for 60 percent of new solar infrastructure in the first quarter of 2025. It’s also helping the rest of the world; per Wired, Chinese-made PV panels are so cheap even in the notoriously pricey European market that they cost less than fencing.
On a global scale, the glut of Chinese solar panels has dropped the average cost of electricity to 4 cents a kilowatt hour, in what Wired suggests may be the cheapest form of energy we’ve ever seen. And keep an eye on that figure: it could easily keep coming down.
The implications of all of this are quite literally world-changing. With solar panels cheaper than ever, the global fossil fuel industry may soon face an existential threat to its bottom line. Though it’d comes with unique economic challenges, it also represents one of the most profound industrial transformations of our time.
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