Chinese Solar PV Market More Than 3 Times Bigger Than US & EU Markets Combined

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I was scrolling through the latest Snapshot of Global PV Markets report from the International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Program (IEA PVPS) and I noticed the following chart.

China has been the largest solar PV market far and away for several years now (I’ll come back to that later in a minute), but it’s stunning to see that the solar market there is now more than three times bigger than the US and EU solar PV markets combined. That doesn’t mean it’s the best solar market in the world (I’ll com back to that in a coming article), but it does dominate the global solar PV market. Let’s look at some more charts on this topic.

As the graph just above shows, China surpassed other major regions (regions, not just countries) in 2016, only trailing Europe at that point. Then, in 2017, it surpassed Europe — and it never looked back. For several years, its share of the global solar PV market was stable between 30% and 40%, well above the rest of the world, but in the past few years, its share of the market has been climbing strongly again. In 2024, it got close to 50% global market share!

Looking at compound annual growth rates, China had a huge surge in 2022–2023 (+163%), but it was actually India that had the biggest surge last year (+145%). China had +50% last year, in third was France with +49%, and the USA took 4th place with +39% growth (among major markets).

Looking at new annual capacity in another way, we see a huge red block. The next two charts show new annual PV installations by country (and EU all together) for 2024 — ignore the previous years except to see the global totals for those years (I’m not sure who decided to come up with the odd color scheme here) — and cumulative PV installations.

And we can end with a table on these same things for 2024.

China is just so far off on its own.

But, like I said, let’s come back to the matter of the best solar PV countries in another article in a moment….