The world’s solar capacity reached 1,419 gigawatts in 2023, way beyond any predictions. 1 gigawatt = power for a medium sized city
@infobeautiful the big milestone was obviously hitting one point twenty-one jigawatts!
@infobeautiful I'd be curious to know how that "capacity" is calculated. I feel pretty certain it's theoretical maximum power under ideal conditions, not actual delivered power, or even actually *useful* or *used* power.
@gcvsa @infobeautiful I'm used to seeing it expressed as Watts peak, meaning the maximum power that can be produced during times with the best conditions (noon).
@gcvsa @infobeautiful This is true. That is called the capacity factor, typically 15-25 percent.
@infobeautiful this is great news but collectively the entire globe is using just as much fossil fuel as ever...
@infobeautiful I wish Australia had better infrastructure, they're now charging people to feed back into the grid from their solar because the grid is 20 years behind and we're led by a bunch of coal and gas monkeys
@infobeautiful Chinese Communist Party Georg who builds 1000000 solar power plants each day is an outlier and should not have been counterd
@infobeautiful This is excellent news. Here, however, is my depressing prediction for the US: We will begin to truly ramp down coal and other non-renewable energy only once the current coal/oil giants have bought enough of the renewable energy infrastructure that their profits will be unaffected.
@guyjantic
I've read here a graph showing how independently of the leading "colour" of a State (Dem or GOP) the adoption rate of renewable technologies in the US was quite consistent through the past decades, from a state to another
@kiudecan @infobeautiful This is very nice to hear. I don't like to be cynical, and I try to find every realistic opportunity for hope.
@infobeautiful and the sun still doesn’t shine at night.
@infobeautiful But are these mostly people that got ripped off by installation scams?
@abosio @infobeautiful
What globally? And "mostly"? Seems unlikely ...
Could easily be ten times this, or more.
Should easily be, actually.
Germany lead the way. The rest of the planet is still lagging far behind.