Comment by yogthos
9 hours ago
To put this in perspective, China installs around 3x that every single day https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
9 hours ago
To put this in perspective, China installs around 3x that every single day https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
It's not a comprehensive dataset. The US installed 43 GW_peak in 2025, which should be around 80M new panels.
Still, an order of magnitude less new capacity than China - but not two orders.
There are also 4X as many people in China, little domestically available oil, and their government supports domestic manufacturing. This is an expected result.
It’s OK to celebrate small wins. The US doesn’t have to be #1 in everything. We also seem to have a curious diseconomy of scale on mega infrastructure projects for complex reasons, so maybe slow growth is the right approach.
People aren't sad about the US not winning the race, they are despairing about the US actively trying to lose.
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With how backwards US policy is - this will be the major factor in the future.
Energy heavy use cases with little to no energy costs will lap western industries.
Indeed, data centres for AI is a prime example of this where American grid is already starting to hit capacity.
True, though I think it's a little more nuanced. There's still capacity, but the AI boom is unearthing all the "cheap" power places in the grid and buying them up.
In order to keep growing, the US power grid is going to need big, coordinated projects. Solar, wind, transmission lines, and batteries.
I think with political interest from Dems who like renewables, and big business who need energy, there's will in the US to do it, but of course it's the US, so we'll do the right thing after every possible alternative has been exhausted.
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America basically did not add any net generating capacity in the first two decades of this century, instead treading water with repowering and efficiency. This was a mistake and now that we could use the energy everyone is acting like it's impossible to expand the grid at the same rate we expanded it in the 1980s.
In many ways this mirrors the way America walked into the housing crisis with its eyes closed.
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