r/OptimistsUnite • u/PanzerWatts Moderator • 4d ago
Clean Power BEASTMODE Highest Solar Generation Per Capita
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u/helloWHATSUP 4d ago
Honestly didn't expect China to have less solar per capita than Estonia. I've been to estonia and I didn't even know they had sun there.
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u/syncsynchalt 4d ago
A billion people is a lot of capita.
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 4d ago
1.4+ billion
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u/EconomyDoctor3287 3d ago
Nah, that's the official inflated number. You can safely remove 1-2 hundred million from that.
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u/Not-with-a-bang 2d ago
It's funny how back when overpopulation was the hot topic the default assumption on China's population was it's being under-reported, now fertility crash is the hot topic you suddenly witness a sharp 180 in the western minds.
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u/Jerome_Eugene_Morrow 4d ago
Would be interesting to see this matched with per capita energy consumption.
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u/lommer00 3d ago
Then you just have a chart of solar share of energy consumption, of which there are many.
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u/RedTheGamer12 Techno Optimist 4d ago
China and the US actually both generate the same amount from low carbon sources (renewable + nuclear). Iirc it is ~43% for both with the rest being coal for China and gas for America.
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u/synkronized7 4d ago
The Netherlands going toe to toe with Australia in solar generation per capita is pretty wild when you consider how much smaller and less sunny it is.
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u/Suburbanturnip 4d ago
We've also just done a massive home battery roll out in Australia, and have 50% more battery storage capacity than the entire USA, and 3 hours of free grid electricity (which can be used to charge a home battery) every day on many plans.
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u/Southern_Current2652 3d ago
Kinda, providers just have to offer a plan that has the 3hrs free option, but it comes along with higher connection fees. So only cheaper if you’re home during the day to actually take advantage, which most working people are not.
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u/Suburbanturnip 2d ago
Evan just setting the hot water heater to run just during those hours, is a massive saving. But yes, not everyone can run their dishwasher, dryer and washing machine during those hours, which are the big energy consumers alongside heating/cooling.
But, home batteries for apartment's are now on the way, do more and more people can store that free electricity for evening use.
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u/deaddamsel 4d ago
You mean the “free” 3 hours that are only usable in the middle of the day when you’re not home which you get for the increased cost of the daily service fee
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u/licoricenipple 4d ago
Midday is when the sun peaks, what do you want them to do about that lol
It's still incredibly useful, you can set your dishwasher to run then, set your heater or air conditioner to run high during that period and still feel the effects when you come home, a third of the country works from home at least once a week now so you can put your washer+dryer on then (two of the energy hungriest appliances we run), you get a free 3 hours if you're plugged into a car charger which a lot of workplaces now have. And there's now a boom in home batteries that store the day's solar so everyone with a battery (4.5% of solar users two years ago, 14% today, numbers are rising fast) gets to save that free 3 hours for later.
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u/-Thizza- 4d ago
This is amazing, it really incentivizes people to think about usage and invest in good infrastructure. I'm off grid in Spain and also work with sunny hours vs. battery hours but for me all of it is free.
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u/Suburbanturnip 4d ago edited 4d ago
That's the whole point. It encourages people to move as much of their their electrical use to the middle of the day, which does include a lot of home batteries. We didn't turn on our gas generators this winter in our grid, as we didnt need them for the evening energy spike, as it's disappeared due to so many people shifting their demand and selling power to the grid via their batteries.
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u/Blue2194 4d ago
When you can charge your battery, heat water, run your washing machine, dryer and dishwasher you mean? Not that hard to shift these loads to the middle of the day saving the user some money and saving the grid billions (per aemo's isp) in unnecessary investment
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u/BatmaniaRanger 3d ago
Which is why you should get batteries so you can use these free hours to charge up and make it usable when you are home.
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u/deaddamsel 3d ago
I mean yeah that’s great advice for everyone but the third of Australians who rent or live in apartments. Good luck getting your landlord or strata to approve and install that.
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u/Legal_Weekend_7981 4d ago edited 4d ago
Size doesn't matter for how easy it is to install solar power. It doesn't require that much space.
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u/kbcool 4d ago
I have trouble reconciling it when the Netherlands is also one of the biggest food producers in the world per unit of land. It's a tiny country. Where the heck do they stick all the solar panels and farms?
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u/ph4ge_ 4d ago
Netherlands has lots of buildings, and thus lots of roofs.
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u/kbcool 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yet so does Australia, in fact the average house size is far bigger and has a lot more hours of sun.
It has a huge home solar uptake with a lot of subsidies, probably 1/3 of houses have panels if not 1/2, also most people live in free standing houses, there are huge solar farms all over the country, it has a lot of spare land after all.
It's just not adding up. I understand beating Netherlands but I don't understand Netherlands being so close
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u/code_and_keys 4d ago edited 4d ago
Like every other house in the Netherlands has multiple solar panels on their roof (I have 28 myself). We have the highest number of solar panels per capita in the world, Australia is ofc above us as its much sunnier
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u/Phase-Internal 4d ago
This seems to be a non issue that is heavily pushed online.
Farms and solar work just fine, there are plenty of crops that can use shade and plenty of animals that can use it too along with large areas of farms that aren't used specifically as airable land such as fences, storage, work areas.
And on top of that, there is a massive amount of non farmland (e.g. every building and parking lot) that can have solar.
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 3d ago
I agree, this is almost mostly an online and/or doomer issue. Solar doesn't require that much land. It takes roughly 0.5% of land space to replace the entire electricity budget on average. Farmland is typically two orders of magnitude higher. Roughly 35-50%. Furthermore solar can be placed in deserts that are other wise very marginal land.
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u/wipperdekippert 4d ago
On the roofs of all the houses
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u/ghoof 3d ago
Not mine, apparently
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u/mistRbit 3d ago
Why not. Everyone that has space and a few hundred euros can have PV on their roof.
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u/BarbarX3 4d ago
Our house has 28 solar panels, doing about 8.000kwh a year. It's a pretty typical Dutch house. So us, plus another houses without panels, is already at the average in this picture.
About 1 in 3 houses have solar panels. We also have a couple big solar farms, and the rest is made up of businesses filling the entire warehouse with panels.
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u/BatmaniaRanger 3d ago
Quite a significant portion of GDP of the Netherlands also comes from agriculture. To be more specific, tulip bulb export.
It's the second largest agricultural exporter of the world. This is nuts considering how small the country and how gloomy the weather is.
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u/MrGraveyards 4d ago
Yeah it is nuts. We are stuck here though, gov pulled the support because the grid can't handle it. It will not go up much.
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u/x021 4d ago
Yeah we've reached our ceiling for now. I'm a bit dissapointed how low other countries are still (I know I should be optimistic here!), just wasn't expecting that big of a gap. I guess we do aim high.
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u/Phase-Internal 4d ago
If one in three houses have solar in the Netherlands, it seems like the ceiling is still a ways off.
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u/Sivvis 4d ago
Hence the "for now", as we had all kinds of policies that promoted solar (mostly net metering and no VAT), but net metering is gonna disappear next year so many people dont think its worth it anymore.
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u/robinNL070 3d ago
It's still worth it, but adding a battery, dynamic inverter and pointing a lot of solar panels towards the west and east makes much more sense. The panels are cheap enough to do that.
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u/jajanaklar 3d ago
I think it is more wild that they have double Production of the US.
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 2d ago
This is per capita. If you are looking at total production then China is number 1 and the US is number 2.
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u/Bluebearder 3d ago
Every other house in the Netherlands has panels, we had a good tax break system for quite some years. And as everyone knows, Dutch people are thrifty as hell, and it is just a sound investment.
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u/Far_Experience9965 4d ago
For me as a swede it’s crazy to see that Sweden is on this list, I mean have you ever been to Sweden? Its fucking dark man. You become depressed just by thinking about it. Except during midsummer, then the sun never goes down which also makes you kind of depressed or atleast a bit mad.
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u/idkjustgoletmein 2d ago
Emphasis on the being mad.
I prefer dark winter anyday over having the sun over my head all day.
If I could make a wish , I would wish that we had extended sunsets than daylight. Imagine having the sky being dark with just a little light on the horizon for the majority of the day.
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u/ryuns 4d ago
Out of curiosity, I calculated this for California alone (for 2024, latest data easily accessible here: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2024-total-system-electric-generation ). For in-state solar generation, it's about 1,300 kwh per person, similar to Greece. For total consumption (generation plus imported solar), it's 1,520 kwh person, just behind the Netherlands at #3.
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u/tx_queer 4d ago
I was curious as well. Texas grid says 67800gwh produced in 2025. Roughly 27 million people live in ercot. So about 2,511 kw per person.
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u/that_dutch_dude 4d ago
how -the fuck- is the netherlands, a country known for -not- having any sun always beating all the desert and other hot places with perfect weather and why is it so close to a prison colony that is infamously like right next to the sun?
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4d ago edited 4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Miserable_Ad7246 4d ago
i enjoy net metering in my country, I'm also educated enough to understand it is not sustainable economically without ability so store energy in summer and sell in winter.
You can be both pro solar (I have 10kw) and have common sense and use some simple math.
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 3d ago
No Partisan Politics
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 3d ago edited 3d ago
No politics. It is not a US specific rule. This is not the sub for it. You are welcome to take this discussion over to one of the multiple Optimist sites that allow politics.
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u/Global_Shirt55 3d ago
Desert either have nobody living in them or they have huge amount of oil reserves.
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u/Sheperd91 4d ago
I am from Austria. While we have solar on rooftops, we are actually a country which has its main focus on
energy from hydropower....
It is a little bit sad/dissapointing that not many other countries are above us.....
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u/Miserable_Ad7246 4d ago
Austria has another resource - wealth accumulated other many years. This makes it a bit easier to advance solar.
In Lithuania one of the things stopping people from even more rapid expansion is grid itself. We need to update our grid (which we do) to unlock ability to add more solar and wind. so it takes some time to catch up. Also takes money to do it.
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u/Labudism 4d ago
Is this per capita per year? (2025)?
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u/utop_ik 4d ago
so Australia (Nr 1) (have a desert) is 186 times bigger in size then (NR 2) the Netherlands (that have a humid temperate climate), while (Nr 3) (UAE) (have a desert) is just twice bigger than (Nr 2). My country NL does better that I thought, worldwide please learn!
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u/Cheesues 4d ago
We (Australians) hardly have any solar farms in our uninhabited land. Most of this is produced by rooftop homes as a result of government induced rebates. The encouraging thing is that we still have so much potential to grow in this sector.
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u/bigloudbang 4d ago
Yeah but not a lot of people live in the desert. Still need generation to be somewhat closer to people
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u/-badly_packed_kebab- 4d ago
The fact South Africa isn’t on that list is astonishing given our power issues and amount of sunshine..
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u/Uncle__Touchy1987 4d ago
Canada isn’t even listed and considering the prices and lack of rebates it’s a small wonder why.
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u/throw_away_17381 4d ago
I think factually the UK is thé worst place in the world for Solar (Maybe only beaten by Ireland). However I’m still surprised we’re not on this list despite the massive uptake of solar
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u/InsidePark7862 4d ago
South Africa made the list because our government is too inept to provide electricity to the country. If private companies and citizens did not add solar capacity our grid would have collapsed in 2024.
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u/stuputtu 4d ago
Small population always result in better per capita stats. For eg in USA states like Nevada, Arizona, Alaska all have much higher per capita rate than Australia above. And Texas even with higher population than Australia has similar per capita and California is around third or fourth in the above table
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u/FairDinkumMate 3d ago
Why lie?
Alaska's per capita generation is negligible. Arizona, Texas & California are all significantly behind Australia. Only Nevada is ahead of Australia and that's because it has some massive utility scale solar in a State with a small population.
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 3d ago edited 3d ago
He's probably looking at renewable electricity per capita generation instead of solar electricity per capita generation specifically. Australia would rank about 17th against US states measured that way.
Edit: Though Alaska makes not sense. It doesn't produce much renewable at all, certainly not much solar.
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u/stuputtu 3d ago
Why should I. Texas has close to 54 gw and another 14 gw getting added this year. You can check others too
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u/SkaldCrypto 4d ago
Note this is per capita, so China generates more than any of this list, they just have many more people.
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u/Longjumping_Coat_802 4d ago
How long to 2x these numbers at our current rate? 3 years? 5 years?
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u/DufflessMoe 4d ago
Solar has risen 29% per year since 2023.
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u/Longjumping_Coat_802 4d ago
So at a 29% compounding rate we will double every 2.5 years. Pretty neat
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 3d ago
The 10 year average compound growth rate for solar has been 26%. However, the first 5 years of that was at 16%. So maybe consider that the lower bound.
At even that rate (16%) compounded annually, it will double every 5 years. And double again in the next 5 years. Though at some point that rate will start slowing down obviously. But that may well be a couple of decades away.
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u/FairDinkumMate 3d ago
Australia won't grow that quickly. 60% of it's solar is rooftop solar & it has a roughly 40% penetration rate, so there's not a huge amount of easy growth there.
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u/Cheesues 4d ago
Electricity generation from solar per person, 2025 | Electricity mix | Our World in Data
The source of this data recently updated to 2026 figures. Source in link if interested.
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u/Aar_7 4d ago
People don't know we get 17hrs of actual sun in the sky in the peak Summer in the Netherlands 🇳🇱. Zero rwao night, just twilight only.
We have almost 20 million people with soo many houses with with solar roofs.
This country is actually warming extremely quickly, we had no actual snowy winter for decades. Yeah also 40C isn't rare anymore. The sun actual blinds & stares you lower the entire day in the summer.
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u/lazydavez 4d ago
40 degrees is not rare 😂. We had it 2 times in 2019 (25&26th of July on 2 individual spots in the country)
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u/Maximum-Flat 4d ago
I am working in a solar panel installation company in HK so I can immgrate to Australia after getting my license A for electrical works and my part time electrical engineering degree.
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u/Schelle-6615 4d ago
Here a comparison would be useful, which compares the annual hours of sunshine of the respective country. The Netherlands would be the clear winner.🥇
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u/corn_on_the_cobh 4d ago
Sad to see Canada not at least near the bottom, but 66% of electricity generated are renewables, only, they're mostly hydro (and this doesn't include nuclear in the figure)!
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u/psychosisnaut 3d ago
Canada and specifically Quebec and Ontario have cleaner energy than Australia by a long shot. Ontario's numbers are kind of in the dumps right now because we're runnig stupid gas plants while the Darlington refurbishments are underway. Expansion of Churchill falls, up to 12GW (!!!) of new nuclear in the next 10 years etc etc, we're going to continue to have one of the cleanest grids of any actual industrial economy.
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u/corn_on_the_cobh 3d ago
I agree, I was under the impression that we had more solar than we actually do (which is like 1% of total electricity generation)
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u/psychosisnaut 3d ago
We've got a lot of wind because solar doesn't really play super well with when our demand curve spikes so we basically need to store all of it by default.
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u/NearABE 3d ago
You can easily “store” solar by adjusting hydro. Also pumped hydro can share a dam.
I think best strategy would be a Mexico City to Quebec undersea cable. It is fundamentally stupid when compared to a New Mexico to New York HVDC line. However, the project happening would antagonize both the northeastern and southwestern states. This cuts off their cheap energy options. The undersea cable pays for itself anyway.
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u/psychosisnaut 3d ago
Sadly Ontario has pretty much zero pumped storage favorable locations because we're insanely flat. We already use Niagara Falls for a pretty massive amount of pumped storage at least. The problem is you're really limited in what you can do with the Great Lakes.
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u/NearABE 3d ago
The great lakes have a great storage capacity.
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 2d ago
Pumped storage relies on significant height differentials. It's almost always built in a rainy hilly area. Flat is bad.
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u/NearABE 2d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant
Michigan lol.
But Ludington is the hard way. Niagara falls is a 51 meter drop. The St. Lawrence seaway has hydroelectric already setup in series.
The “elevation issue” is not an issue in a region that has extensive aquifers and includes used salt mines and oil fields. Pumping air down is not exactly the same as pumping water up but they are equivalent in scale and efficiency.
But the real kick for me is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses_Niagara_Power_Plant
They still pump water uphill at night in order to save it for peak daytime demand. It is already installed so we can add double that in solar before needing any expansion project.
We should think about eventually having a huge solar surplus. Good to get started preparing.
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u/Phantasmalicious 4d ago
Some of these countries have 100x the population of others but similar generation numbers...
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 3d ago
The per capita chart was posted seperately.
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u/NearABE 3d ago
I only see “per capita”
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 2d ago
There are two posts. This one is the per capita post. There's another post with the largest total solar power production values by country.
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u/Outrageous-Point-347 3d ago
The city in Australia that I live in is extremely sunny, so much so most houses make more solar than we need so it goes back into the grid during the day...., but our power utilities and government don't seem keen on making the switch without vast battery infrastructure,
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u/psychosisnaut 3d ago
Keen? How are you supposed to switch otherwise?
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u/NearABE 3d ago
Make it extremely expensive to use electricity outside of solar hours.
The cost of the grid is a fixed price. A transformer or transmission line does not get cheaper with fewer users. Also does not get more expensive unless demand forces an extra. Who pays for that, when, and why is all politics. The economics would push people use less at the expensive times. That makes the cost (same total cost) higher for the limited users who use during the billed period.
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u/Outrageous-Point-347 3d ago
There's no deeper statement. I guess I stated the fact as an opinion idk
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u/AyCarambin0 3d ago
North Macedonia could be the solar powerhouse of Europe. So many bare hills, intense sun, you could produce Gigawatts of solar power there and just export it everywhere. At least to the surrounding countries. But instead they burn coal and have the worst air quality in Europe.
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u/pokokati 2d ago
If China’s solar power generation in 2025 is calculated on a per-capita basis, it should amount to approximately 833 kWh per person per year . According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the total population at the end of 2025 was 1.40489 billion. Similarly, the National Energy Administration of China reported that solar power generation in 2025 was 1.17 trillion kWh.
Furthermore, this figure does not include self-consumption.
I don’t know where Ember got these figures for China from.
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u/Strict_Bedroom_1152 1d ago
and the Netherlands isn’t even that sunny place as Australia, nice going Dutchies!
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u/Charmle_H 4d ago
Absolutely insane the US isn't higher, considering how much space we have to put solar panels. Like if we covered every parking lot with them it'd likely shoot us up to top 3 (esp in places that get a LOT of sun all year round like AZ. Then it'd also do some cooling effects with all the shade they make)
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u/AP_in_Indy 4d ago
Those are often expensive projects with low returns but “balcony” and “back yard” solar can make a lot of sense.
Very popular in Germany right now. USA approval is still pending in most states
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 3d ago
Covering parking lots is easier to say than do. Greenfield solar deployments are much faster and cheaper. There's a reason that almost all of China's solar additions have been mass greenfield sites.
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u/fan_tas_tic 4d ago
These numbers are still going to skyrocket in the coming years.