China’s cumulative solar capacity has surpassed one terawatt (1TW), after the addition of a 198 gigawatts (GW) of new PV capacity so far this year, including a “staggering” 93 GW in May alone.
The new milestone was published by China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) in an update on the country’s power industry statistics for the first five months of the year.
The NEA confirmed that installed solar capacity at the end of May stood at 1.08 TW, with growth driven in part by a rush to connect projects to the grid before new energy market rules come into play, as well as China’s general “bigger is better” approach to everything.
The terawatt milestone for solar will have been broken some time in May, a month which saw over 92GW worth of new solar capacity come online.
To put that into perspective, Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, explained on his LinkedIn account that the solar capacity installed in May worked out to around 230 million solar panels – “almost 100 solar panels every second.”
