Although China may currently be the world’s factory for solar, having overtaken Germany as the world’s largest producer of solar cells—last year it produced 1,200 megawatts’ worth of solar cells, as opposed to Germany’s 875—it has started to take on the mantle of polysilicon production as well.
In its quest to achieve rock-bottom prices of solar-energy [...]

Having just returned from watching several events at the Beijing Olympics, I feel that this is a good a time as ever to post some pictures of the Olympic venues I’ve visited. As 80 to 90 percent of the streetlights around the Olympic venues are solar, and solar power provides around 8 million kilowatt-hours of [...]

Since I’m always going on about solar thermal in China, it’s about time I sound off on the experience of using the technology. This is hardly a difficult task, as both my host family in Beijing and my uncle in Fuzhou, a massive seaside city in China’s southern Fujian province, are staunch supporters of solar [...]

Just in time for the Olympics, a report from an international non-profit group has crowned China the world’s current leader in terms of installed renewable capacity. The report, “China’s Clean Revolution,” was released August 1—the final version will come out on August 8—by the Climate Group, an organization based in the USA, Australia, the UK, [...]

Lately, the air quality in Beijing has been astonishingly pleasant. For the past three weeks, when the skies haven’t been a sunny cerulean, they’ve been a rainy shade of gray, more cool than the usual muggy. Even when I was in the neighboring countryside two weekends ago, the difference between the rural and urban air [...]

Having just returned from the countryside, I already miss its bitingly cold, naturally clean water, its lush vegetation, its air free from the brown dust that characterizes Beijing. To be fair, Beijing hasn’t been so terrible lately—the past several days have been a striking blue—although every time a car passes by me on the street [...]

Living in Beijing right now has made me rather ambivalent toward China’s environmental policies. It doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the PRC isn’t the poster country for eco-consciousness. Almost everybody drinks their water either boiled or from a bottle, and a blue sky day in Shanghai or Beijing is a rare day [...]

China may not have as advanced a solar program as Germany (although, as Eric’s noted, Germany’s solar subsidies recently underwent a drastic slash) or Spain do, but a few pockets of land both to the north and to the south have become shining beacons of light for the rest of the country.
Take Jiangsu province, for [...]

Last week, I had the fortune to tour a production site of Beijing Tsinghua Solar Co., Ltd., one of China’s biggest manufacturers of solar hot water systems. While the facility itself lies in the brownish, dusty outskirts of Beijing, where the grass grows sparsely and the sky remains a stubborn gray from sunup until sundown, [...]