The scale of Chinese production since 2010 has driven the price of these technologies down by 60 to 90 percent, the researchers found. And last year, more than 90 percent of wind and solar projects commissioned worldwide produced power more cheaply than the cheapest available fossil-fuel alternative, they said. That cost advantage might have seemed laughable before China began pumping billions of dollars of subsidies into the sector.
you talk about the innovations a lot, but that’s not everything there is to it.
China massively subsidized its solar panel production for 20 years, at a loss. The reason they did that is because they ideologically believed that it would eventually pay off. Without these massive investments, solar might not have grown so much and might still be more expensive than fossil fuels due to a lack of economies of scale.
If you take china out of the game, you end up with solar panels that are not the cheapest source of energy, and that massively changes the outcome. It is only because solar panels are so cheap today that we see so many of them being installed. China was simply brave enough to invest billions and billions of dollars into them, instead of leaving it to the free market. That is what china did well.