On the rooftop of his home beside green onion and wheat fields in China’s Shaanxi province, Li Lifeng has installed dozens of solar panels that glisten in the winter sun. For the past five years, he’s been among more than 2.4 million Chinese homeowners each doing their own small part to clean up the world’s biggest source of planet-warming carbon emissions.
Most of that rooftop solar has been added in the past two years, as China offered support for local governments to boost installations, and raised power rates to businesses, making generating their own electricity more attractive. The resulting renewables boom saw China build more small-scale solar last year than the total new clean power capacity in any other country. Roughly one of every five panels installed worldwide in 2022 was fixed atop a Chinese home or business.
For Li, the decision was financial. The 52-year-old owns a noodle shop and two rowhouses about an hour outside of Xi’an in central China. With one son about to get married and another preparing for college, he and his wife wanted to secure another income source before they retired.
