After years of ignoring the air quality crisis that has resulted from decades of breakneck industrialization, China’s leaders have finally begun trying to solve it. And because coal is the source of an estimated 40 percent of the most dangerous pollution particles in the country’s air , finding alternatives to it has become a crucial priority. China aims to get 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, and it recently announced it would spend $360 billion on the effort in just the next three years.
Three Reasons to Believe in China's Renewable Energy Boom
Chinese manufacturing has changed the economics of renewable power around the world, making solar generation cost-competitive with electricity from fossil fuels like natural gas and even coal. It has brought change closer to home too, as China rolls out the world’s biggest investment in clean energy—motivated in part by a desire to ease the atrocious air pollution that kills an estimated 1.1 million of its people every year. “The installation rates are absolutely mind-blowing,” says Lauri Myllyvirta, an energy and air pollution expert at Greenpeace in Beijing. China added 35 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2016 alone. “That’s almost equal to Germany’s total capacity, just in one year,” Myllyvirta says.