Comment by hwillis
2 months ago
China has more distributed/rooftop solar than the US, percentage-wise. It's hardly like every big building in the US has rooftop solar, and Zhengzhou is more to the north of the country where there is less incident light.
That said a battery factory is a good place to put solar. The final stage of battery manufacturing is several priming charge/discharge cycles which build up resilient layers inside the battery. You can push power into/out of the grid (or use discharging batteries to charge other cells) but having a big DC source nearby is still going to be convenient.
China has extremely high installation rate for solar water heaters. Personally I have never observed any grid-tie solar electric installations on residential buildings. My travels are largely confined to Fujian province, so perhaps they have caught on in other regions.
I wonder if (partially) they use discharge current from one batch of batteries to charge the next?