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Information Is Beautiful

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

@infobeautiful

@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 ...

@infobeautiful

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.