There's something odd about where China is building solar power

[NickB79]

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/theres-something-odd-about-where-china-is-building-solar-power/

While China’s deployment of solar panels is highly impressive, its actual generation from these assets is much less so. China is apparently deploying scarce solar assets irrationally, installing substantial numbers of solar panels in several renewables-poor provinces while largely ignoring sun-soaked regions. Even worse, more than half of China’s new solar installations are dedicated to “distributed” rooftop generation sites, which suffer from poor utilization factors compared with utility-scale solar from power plants.

While China’s solar deployment has been extremely wasteful from an economic or environmental perspective, the shape of Beijing’s solar build may be influenced in part by security considerations. While rooftop solar increases an electricity grid’s “attack surface” and potential exposure to cyberattacks, it also disperses generation and generally increases system resilience, especially if microgrids are employed. Beijing’s solar strategy has evidently prioritized deployment of rooftop solar for government buildings and in provinces that hold key naval bases. If tensions over Taiwan, for example, increase or even break into open conflict, mainland China’s distributed deployment of rooftop solar could reduce its overall vulnerability to cyberattacks or other disruptions, granting Beijing’s leadership greater flexibility.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Reminds of Mao's Little Steel ("Backyard Furnaces") during the Great Leap Forward

It was a wasteful way of small scale steel production in communes and other small entities, but mostly it produced merely pig iron and some of the steel was smelted steel from other sources (hence cannabilistic of real production).

I suspect there is a lot of patronage and rewarding with fat contracts and "enhanced" production/installation figures, etc.

(In addition to excerpt's interesting reasoning)

[Shermann]

2. The larger the "attack surface", the better

The article first says the exposure to cyberattacks is increased, then claims it is decreased.

It is decreased. Rooftop solar decentralizes the power plants.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Decentralized distributed production increases resilience. . . nt