“Just staggering:” China installs 100 solar panels a second as total PV capacity tops 1 terawatt

China’s cumulative solar capacity has surpassed one terawatt (1TW), after the addition of a 198 gigawatts (GW) of new PV capacity so far this year, including a “staggering” 93 GW in May alone.

The new milestone was published by China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) in an update on the country’s power industry statistics for the first five months of the year.

The NEA confirmed that installed solar capacity at the end of May stood at 1.08 TW, with growth driven in part by a rush to connect projects to the grid before new energy market rules come into play, as well as China’s general “bigger is better” approach to everything.

The terawatt milestone for solar will have been broken some time in May, a month which saw over 92GW worth of new solar capacity come online.

To put that into perspective, Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, explained on his LinkedIn account that the solar capacity installed in May worked out to around 230 million solar panels – “almost 100 solar panels every second.”

The first five months of 2025 have also been a strong one for China’s wind industry, with 46 GW worth of new wind generation capacity coming online, including 26 GW in May, bringing the country’s cumulative total of wind capacity to just under 570 GW.

Compared to 2024, new solar and wind capacity added over the first five months of 2025 was up by 56.9 per cent and 23.1 per cent, respectively.

With the policy-driven rush coming to an end, however, many analysts expect the pace of new capacity being brought online to slow.

“Just staggering,” wrote Tim Buckley, head of Climate and Energy Finance. “China installed 92.9GW of solar and 26.3GW of wind in just the month on May 2025!
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Before we get too excited, there is a pull-forward on installs with a national strategic policy change on renewables that took effect from June 2025 – so we see a real risk of a significant slowdown for the rest of 2025.

“Against that, energy security has never been more important, and China has world-leading RE install capacities supported by world-leading manufacturing capacity, and a need to stimulate their domestic economy in the fact of Trump’s trade wars. So this might be less of a slowdown that the market expects for 2HCY2025.”

Lauri Myllyverta, from the Centre for Research on on Energy and Clean Air, said the solar panels and wind turbines China installed in May alone, in a single month, will generarate as much electricity as Poland, Sweden, Norway, the UAE, the North Carolina and Maryland, or Washington and Wyoming

The 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of wind added in the first five months of the year will generate as much electricity as Indonesia, Turkey, and much more than the UK

“These wild installation numbers are made possible by rapid growth of the sector in the past few years and by strong profitability, compounded by a rush to install before a June deadline when the tariffs paid to new renewable power plants change.

T”his massive wave of capacity additions will inevitably be followed by a lull, but it still shows what is possible with the dramatically reduced costs and increased supply capacity of the solar industry in particular.