Corn, millet and … rooftop solar? Farm family’s newest crop shows China’s solar ascendancy

JINAN, China (news agencies) — Shi Mei and her husband earn a decent enough living by growing corn and millet on their small farm in eastern China’s Shandong province. In 2021, they diversified by investing in solar energy — signing a contract to mount some 40 panels on their roof to feed energy to the grid.

Now, the couple get paid for every watt of electricity they generate, harvesting the equivalent of $10,000 per year that Shi can track through an app on her phone.

“When the sun comes out, you make money,” Shi said.

The Shi family is on the leading edge of a solar boom in China, which has long dominated global solar manufacturing but didn’t always install a lot of it at home. That’s changing as the government focuses on the urgency of cutting its worst-in-the-world greenhouse gas emissions at the same time it grows its green economy. China wants one-fifth of its power to come from renewables by 2025, and it’s offered a wide range of subsidies to local governments and businesses.

The push — in both industrial solar and in rooftop installations like Shi’s — is working so well that the grid now has more power than it can handle. Shi was fortunate to get in early; some cities across Shandong province, including her village, are halting new rooftop solar installations.

Analysts and solar companies say the future remains bright if China can quickly adapt to the oversupply. Companies and utilities are scrambling to build battery capacity to store all the power being generated. They’d like to see more flexible energy pricing that could shape demand to better match supply. And they’d like technology that makes it easier to start and stop coal power so it’s not always the clean energy of solar power that gets “curtailed” — in industry jargon — when the grid can’t take any more supply.

“China has the great potential and opportunity to make its power sector achieve its carbon peak by 2025,” said Grace Gao, a Climate and Energy senior campaigner at Greenpeace in China. “I am looking forward to seeing Shandong truly become a leader in renewable energy and showcase its best practices to the rest of China.”